Saturday Night Live cold open: Dr. Anthony Fauci, masks, and theater

Over the past few months, Saturday Night Live has absolutely changed a lot of stuff around when it comes to their cold opens. Back during the previous administration, the vast majority of these were predictable and easy to call. Now, however, we’re in a spot of greater uncertainty. It’s hard to know exactly what sort of feather the show is going to pull out of its cap on any given week.

So what did the writers decide to do for this go-around? Think in terms of Kate McKinnon as Dr. Anthony Fauci. We’ve seen her open the show before as Fauci — heck, we also saw Brad Pitt as him last year! What he was present to do on SNL this time around was introduce the CDC players — doctors who are also theater performers. The purpose here was to have these performers show what is right and wrong when it comes to mask-wearing. Fauci was almost the narrator for all of the random stuff we saw after the fact.

Let’s just say that as a cold open, this was surprisingly weird and surprising edgy. Every single “example” from the CDC performers went completely off the rails — this was almost like when Michael Scott was in improv class during an episode of The Office. There was no reason that this should have been anywhere near as funny as it was.

If the rest of tonight’s SNL is somewhat like what we saw here, we’re going to be in for a pretty good show. What’s amazing is that Keegan-Michael Key would’ve been perfect in this sketch and yet, the cast didn’t need him. Instead, almost everyone else in the cast got an opportunity to showcase what was probably a part of their sketch-troupe roots.

Oh, and at the end, the performers tried to talk about Israel. That was the end of that…

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What did you think about the latest Saturday Night Live cold open?

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