Saturday Night Live cold open: Zelenskyy at the White House

Given that tonight marked the first Saturday Night Live after the 50th anniversary special, we were of course curious how it would start!

With that very thing in mind, let’s just go ahead and state that the cold open here was pretty obvious, mostly because Volodymyr Zelenskyy drew a lot of headlines for his appearance at the White House over the past few days. This meant that there was a chance to bring out James Austin Johnson as Donald Trump and then Bowen Yang at JD Vance, which of course the show wanted to do. After the special did not utilize much in the way of politics, this was their bread and butter and they wanted to get back to it.

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Here is the problem with spoofing the Ukrainian President’s recent visit to the White House — the truth was in that way stranger than fiction. That entire sequence was so big and so crazy that you could not really do much of anything to top it.

Or, was there?

The irony here is that the cold open did not really take off until SNL started to freelance and brought Mike Myers out to play Elon Musk. It is a reminder in a way that in this particular climate, you really cannot do a lot of straight-up parity and you have to go somewhat off the beaten path.

If there was a loser in the midst of the cold open, it is someone who did not even appear in it: Host Shane Gillis. After all, his entire opening monologue is going to be overshadowed by the previous sketch and also the cameo from the man behind Austin Powers. (Also, he spent at least two or three minutes making jokes about historical documentaries … seriously?)

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What did you think about the start of Saturday Night Live tonight

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