Saturday Night Live: Aziz Ansari plays Kash Patel

Given that tonight’s Saturday Night Live episode was the first one in weeks, that meant more time to create a good cold open.

So what exactly did the writers come up with? At first, it was really more of the same, and an opportunity to cart out Colin Jost once more as Pete Hegseth. He clearly has this character down pat, and was used this time around in order to talk about matters in the Middle East. There were some good one-liners in here as things shifted to a press-conference format with reporters.

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The question that came into our head here was when we were going to be seeing some sort of cameo … and we got it courtesy of Aziz Ansari coming out to play FBI Director Kash Patel. This take on a character was great and beyond that, the jokes were legitimately funny. The Parks and Recreation alum has not appeared on the show in a really long time — but then again, Aziz himself has been out of the public eye for stretches of the past several years.

Is this a role he could play again? Well, a lot of that is going to be dependent on just how many opportunities the writers have to spoof Patel again. (We do have to say that his extended run of continuous line-reading near the end of the opening was especially notable — how did he get through all of that without taking a breath?)

Ultimately, we do appreciate that at this point, the show is at least trying to bring in new impressions here and there if they are going to be doing these political cold opens. Otherwise, they get stale — and we have certainly seen that over time.

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What did you think about this weekend’s Saturday Night Live cold open?

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