‘The Good Place’ Creator Michael Schur Defends A Controversial 2001 ‘SNL’ Sketch About The Afghanistan War

An unearthed Saturday Night Live sketch has been stirring up controversy following the recent events in Afghanistan. In the 2001 sketch filmed shortly after the U.S. invasion following the September 11th attacks, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, and others play a bunch of partygoers who break into song and dance after Seth Meyers enters the room to announce the U.S. has captured Kandahar. After a video of the 20-year-old sketch was shown on Twitter, it led to a round of sharp criticism as people accused SNL of normalizing “imperialism” and not being “funny back then either,” according to the New York Post.

However, The Good Place creator and former SNL writer Michael Schur came to the sketch’s defense by noting that it’s clearly satire, and the purpose was to mock America’s flippant attitude towards invading a country that we ended up occupying for two decades. Via Twitter:

Not my sketch, but I was there. This is satire. It starts at a well-heeled cocktail party with everyone being ridiculous, and then they break into song when they hear we’ve reached Kandahar. The point was to make fun of how cavalier and ignorant we were being about the invasion.

Schur was joined by others on Twitter who also noted that the sketch was obviously not celebrating the Afghanistan war.

“Yeah this is mocking people who casually celebrated the invasion of Afghanistan which by the way was a super unpopular thing to criticize at the time,” wrote user mightywelsh. “This sketch is actually based.”

(Via Ken Tremendous on Twitter, New York Post)