Saturday Night Live cold open: Scarlett Johansson is Katie Britt

Saturday Night Live
Photo: NBC

Following the events of the last few days, it was easy to make a Saturday Night Live cold open prediction. Were we going to see some sort of send-up of the State of the Union? There was certainly a good chance of it, and of seeing some sort of spoof of Katie Britt.

The show wasted no time tonight, bringing on Mikey Day as Joe Biden to give us a good sense of what the year’s speech was all about. Honestly, this sketch was not altogether different from what we saw during the actual State of the Union itself.

We wondered who was going to be playing Britt tonight, and we thought Chloe Fineman was going to be high on the list. Then, we learned that it was none other than Scarlett Johansson playing the part! We figured that the former multi-time host would come back eventually, especially given that she has an obvious in courtesy of being married to Colin Jost … and this was pretty fantastic. Scarlett played Britt as a woman who was desperate to be famous while acting like she didn’t want it. Also, the writing about her doing the speech in the kitchen was pretty spectacular. Everyone seemed to relish having this new character, even though the irony here is that we may never see this Katie character on the show again.

Also, there was a pretty fantastic turn at the end of the sketch where Britt more or less became a classic horror movie villain, threatening to be there watching and haunting people while they sleep. Pretty creepy … but also pretty accurate.

Given that SNL has thrown out the same retired political cold opens time and time again, we gotta applaud them for this. It was new and with that, we had a chance for new laughs. Good on them for not just making this all about Biden.

On a separate note, was everyone surprised there was no Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris?

Related Be sure to get some more news on Saturday Night Live right now, including what Oscar nominee wants to host

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