Weekend Update Summer Edition: Jimmy Fallon plays George Washington

The second edition of Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update Summer Edition came your way Thursday night, and of course, there was some discussion of Charlottesville and the aftermath of it.

Hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost went through many of the headlines, whether it be the response from Donald Trump to some of the recent statues being removed. This went into a discussion of George Washington … and this led to an appearance from George Washington. Who played him? It was known other than The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon!

This was the second straight week in which we’ve seen a former cast member come on board to play a famous person. Last week, we had Bill Hader as Anthony Scaramucci, and to go along with Fallon, we also had an appearance from Seth Meyers as Thomas Jefferson. The message here was basically this: Yeah, both Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, and were afraid to admit and kept dancing around it. When they did admit it, they tried to proclaim that they did a lot of other great things.

One of the funnier things about the Washington/Jefferson hybrid tonight was how neither Fallon nor Meyers did much of an impression — they just played this straight, and talked almost as though Washington and Jefferson were still alive today. It was cheesy, but there was still humor here.

What’s also interesting about this segment is that there really haven’t been all that many returns from Meyers to SNL ever since he left to do Late Night, and it’s especially fun to see him come back as a character to Weekend Update, which he was famous for hosting for so many years on his own.

Will we get a chance to see these characters again down the road? Well, let’s just say that we’re not all that optimistic given that there aren’t too many times that you can include Presidents from more than 200 years ago on the show and have it be remotely relevant at the same time.

In other news tonight…

Tina Fey returned! The moment that we saw her, it was pretty clear that this edition of the show is largely just a highlight reel to demonstrate some of the best of the show’s former cast members. Given that the current cast is off working on other projects, it may make them harder to for them to appear on any sort of a regular basis. (Kate McKinnon, for example, is working on a movie.)

Do we think that the Weekend Update Summer Edition is anywhere near as fun as the main series? No, but it’s still a nice little summer diversion — especially in this age of great chaos.

What did you think about Weekend Update Summer Edition this time around? Share in the comments!

Meanwhile, head over to the link here to get some other news when it comes to Saturday Night Live and the Weekend Update Summer Edition spin-off. (Photo: NBC.)