With the NFL playoffs in full swing, everyone’s talking football the past few weeks – including Saturday Night Live.
In this week’s episode, the show opened with a satirical broadcast recapping this weekend’s Division Round playoff game between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles with members of the SNL cast each portraying a different member of the Fox NFL Sunday team.
The SNL cast was committed to the bit with Molly Kearney putting on a skull cap to become Terry Bradshaw – who they hilariously referred to as “the white Charles Barkley” – and Devon Walker even blacking out a portion of his front teeth to mimic the iconic tooth gap of Michael Strahan.
SNL even satirized Fox’s iconic Cleatus the Football Robot mascot, making him speak with “AI technology” to question the sport’s safety.
“Why do humans make other humans play football? Does it not seem barbaric?” Cleatus said.
“We all know that football is a dangerous game. But in this country, we were founded on Judeo-Football values,” Walker responded, as Strahan. “And sometimes the only way to make the game safer is to hit even harder.”
The team also used the occasion to make fun of George Santos, the Republican congressman who has lied about large portions of his résumé.
Played by Bowen Yang, Santos was introduced as a new sideline reporter with an impressive résumé so impressive that they “had to give him a shot” – Heisman winner, more championships than Tom Brady, the former No. 1 overall pick, and “the first African American quarterback to ever dunk a football.”
The Saturday Night Live team then returned to the studio to revisit their “pregame predictions” that went hilariously awry.
All in all, it was an excellent satirization of a program and characters football fans know all too well.
[SNL]
