It wasn’t hard to predict which of this week’s earth-quaking events Saturday Night Live would lampoon in their cold open. Of course it was the ludicrous spectacle of Kanye West ranting for 10 uninterrupted minutes to the President of the United States of America. Truth really is stranger than fiction, but SNL was able to get in some decent jokes anyway. Among them is this: Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump realized that Kanye West was the black version of him: A raging egomaniac and talkaholic who never listens to anyone but himself.
Making his maiden voyage as Trump for the show’s 44th season, Baldwin played Trump as the less crazy of the two. Chris Redd’s Kanye sat with the 45th president — plus Kenan Thompson’s Jim Brown, the sane one in the room — and very quickly launched into a wide-ranging rant that made no sense.
“Let me begin with the idea that time is a myth,” Redd’s West began, and was very soon confessing that he’s a prisoner in another dimension. “Have I lost anyone yet?”
SNL writers knew they couldn’t top the real thing, so the sketch wisely dipped into Trump’s head. It’s here we heard Trump realizing the two share big connection. “He doesn’t listen to anybody but himself. Who does he remind me of?” Once West said, “I’ve got a big brain and I used the best words,” it hit him: “Oh my god, he’s the black me!”
We also learned Trump’s password is “boobs” upside down, that West has an invisible plane, and that Jim Brown realized “mental health is an even bigger problem in the black community that I realized.”
But there was one more similarity between West and Trump SNL writers teased out. As Baldwin said right before the sketch’s end, “We’ve definitely both been recorded saying the n-word.”
