Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update mocked Kanye West’s pro-Hitler implosion with a short barrage of jokes that included a sharp jab at former President Donald Trump.
Nope star Keke Palmer was the guest host on this week’s edition of Saturday Night Live — her first stint hosting the show — and SZA was the musical guest.
But many fans of the sketch show wait around just to see the musical guest, then catch the weekly nightly news parody anchored by Colin Jost and Michael Che.
Weekend Update became a mainstay of SNL from the very first episode — on October 11, 1975 — of what was then called simply NBC’s Saturday Night. Chevy Chase anchored solo, and opened the sketch with a gag about disappeared Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. In the early days, Weekend Update was also peppered with commercial parodies and other conventions of TV broadcasts.
The news parody has become a tentpole of the show. In a recent interview from Chris Wallace’s series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace on HBO Max, onetime producer Dick Ebersol told Wallace that Weekend Update was key to keeping viewers tuned in late into the show.
One feature that has come to comprise half of the Update show-within-the-show — or more — are character pieces that feature guest commentators that you really don’t see on the news these days, but used to punctuate local broadcasts in the days of Gilda Radner‘s legendary bits.
The show also often welcomes a cast member to deliver a comic bit as themselves to deliver a comedy bit. But the roots of the segment — and the favorite part for many fans — are the rapid-fire gag news items delivered by the anchors.
This week, Che and Jost took on West’s interview with Alex Jones, and joked that “I like Hitler” was also Kanye’s password to get into Mar-a-Lago. There were also the usual humorous takes on local-style news stories and other odd news items.
Watch just the jokes above via NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
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