Last week Joe Biden delivered an unexpectedly fiery State of the Union. Long depicted by the right (and the left) as a sleepy gramps, the president was instead sharp and shouty, aggressively pushing back against an increasingly hostile Republican party and their magnets understanding wannabe dictator of a leader. He even clapped back at Marjorie Taylor Greene. How did the GOP follow that up? By trying to make a star out of Alabama senator Katie Britt, who came off as at once hammy and creepy. For its most recent episode, you better believe SNL gave Britt prime real estate in the Cold Open. They even nabbed a very special guest to play her.
No less than Scarlett Johansson appeared in the back end of the night’s maiden sketch, putting on considerable airs and striking bizarre seductress facial expressions as she stood in an eerily bare kitchen to deliver the Republican response. It wasn’t that hard to get Johansson for the job; she’s married to one-half of the Weekend Update hosts. But she delivered and then some.
“I’ll be performing an original monologue called ‘This country is hell,’” Johansson’s Britt told the crowd. “You see, I’m not just a senator. I’m a wife, a mother, and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.”
The sketch sent up Britt’s over-the-top performative stylings, but it also made sure to point out that one of her claims was a straight-up lie. At one point during her SOTU response, Britt told a story about a woman she met in Texas who had been sex trafficked by cartels. The implication was that it was Biden’s fault, due to his border policies (which Republicans won’t let him change). As it turns out, the incident happened all the way back during the George W. Bush administration. SNL didn’t let that one slip by.
“First and foremost, I’m a mom, and like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking,” Johansson said. “Rest assured, every detail about it is real except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened.”
The sketch also dragged Britt’s choice of setting. “You know, my husband Wesley and I spend a lot of time in this kitchen — worrying,” she said. “Kitchens are where families have the hard conversations like the one we’ll have now about how mommy freaked out the entire country.”
The first half of the sketch depicted Biden’s amped-up State of the Union address, with Mikey Day, who tends to play him as aloof, changing gears. At one point he even mocked Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Michael Longfellow) for spending most of the speech clenching his jaws and shaking his head.
You can watch the sketch in the video above.