While Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump impression anchored late night TV for years, Saturday Night Live has shuffled through a number of Joe Biden impressions in recent memory. And Jason Sudeikis’ return to the show on Saturday night offered up a chance to poke fun at the many faces of Biden in the cold open of the show’s Halloween episode.
Billed as visits from the ghosts of Biden past, the sketch mostly offered a chance to show the new Biden next to a very familiar one played by Sudeikis. James Austin Johnson’s Biden starts things off by talking with Chloe Fineman’s press secretary Jen Psaki, and both admit things aren’t going very well for his presidency.
Enter 2013 Biden, looking lively and much more enthusiastic than Johnson’s more beaten-down modern Biden. Even Alex Moffat’s Biden showed up, with the other two a bit hazy on which version of Biden he even was. That’s because his turn as the president was brief, of course, and “March 2021” Biden didn’t have much help to offer anyway.
The sketch was a bit of a meta commentary on the show, as for decades Saturday Night Live has impacted the way politicians are viewed by millions of Americans. The perception of Biden as a “care free” uncle certainly stuck because of Sudeikis amplifying those aspects of his personality on screen for years. But as the sketch makes clear, we now live in very different times.
