In its December 5 cold open, Saturday Night Live parodied the testimony of Rudy Giuliani’s roster of witnesses at a widely panned hearing before Michigan lawmakers last week, in which President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer tried to convince legislators to overturn the state’s election results.
SNL’s cold open spoofs Rudy Giuliani’s absurd Michigan hearing
Kate McKinnon plays Giuliani overseeing a ridiculous roster of witnesses alleging fraud in the election.
The sketch sought to mock the way in which many of the witnesses, in real life, rehashed baseless claims of voter fraud and misconduct, and on one particularly notable occasion, became adversarial toward the Michigan lawmakers overseeing the hearing while floating conspiracy theories.
Kate McKinnon, playing a theatrical and bumbling Giuliani, opened the hearing by declaring, “This election was stolen from the American people with a level of trickery not seen since Houdini.”
When asked for evidence of his claims, McKinnon’s Giuliani went on: “I have brought before you a dozen highly intelligent, barely intoxicated individuals who are all eyewitnesses, and after hearing their testimony you’re going to say, ‘Wow, Rudy was right, and he’s getting smarter and more respected every day.’”
The first witness to offer their testimony was Cecily Strong playing Mellissa Carone — a contract information technology worker for a voting systems company — who, in real life, made sweeping, evidence-free allegations about fraud at the hearing.
“I personally saw hundreds, if not thousands, of dead people vote for Democrats,” Strong’s Carone stated. “Did you check every poll? Did you talk to all the dead people?”
Heidi Gardner played another eyewitness, who claimed she saw Democrats serving ballots from food trucks. “The Democrats said, ‘It’s lunchtime’ and then they opened the food truck and it was full — full of ballot sandwiches, ballot pizzas, ballot steaks, and ballot spaghetti,” she said.
Gardner’s testimony seems to be an allusion to the real-life Carone’s insinuations in an interview with Fox News’s Lou Dobbs that vendors providing food to poll workers were carrying fraudulent votes.
Beck Bennett played My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has made numerous implausible claims about voter fraud in recent weeks, and who, in SNL’s version of events, used his testimony as a thinly veiled advertisement for his company. Alex Moffat played a witness who described an alien abduction story and then clarified that he saw the aliens “clearly filling out absentee ballots, all of them for Biden.” Asked when it happened, he said it was “seven years ago.”
There was also an appearance by Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney playing two of the 14 men accused of a militia plot which included kidnapping Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, saying that they needed a chance “to do the whole thing over again.”
“If we have one more shot, we can get her in my basement for sure!” Davidson shouted.
McKinnon’s Giuliani wrapped up the hearing with a nod to the personal interests of those involved with keeping up Trump’s quixotic legal efforts to contest the election results: “The defense rests, but we will never rest, not until this election is overturned, or unless I get a full pardon or $10 million in cash.”
