Tina Fey returned to Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update desk on Thursday during the show’s latest primetime episode, this time ditching her classic anchor blazer for a University of Virginia sweatshirt to honor her alma mater and talk about how watching “evil forces” descend upon Charlottesville last weekend “broke [her] heart.”
Tina Fey’s cake-eating SNL bit means well, but her advice to ignore white supremacy is bad
Fey crashed Weekend Update to eat cake, spit fire, and pitch a confusing way to combat racism.
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
Also, she stress-ate a whole lot of cake.
“I would urge people this Saturday, instead of participating in these screaming matches and potential violence, find a local business that you support, maybe a Jewish-run bakery, or an African-American-run bakery,” Fey said. “Order a cake with the American flag on it like this one, and just eat it.”
And lo, Fey spent the rest of the segment shoveling cake into and around her mouth as she furiously tore apart the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville and the president for being so reluctant to condemn them.
“The next time when you see a bunch of white boys in polo shirts screaming about taking their country back, and you want to scream, ‘It’s not our country, you stole it from Native Americans, and when they had a peaceful protest at Standing Rock we shot at them with rubber bullets, but we let you chinless turds march through the streets with semi-automatic weapons’ ... don’t yell it at the Klan,” Fey added, frosting smeared across her face. “Yell it into the cake.”
It’s always fun to watch Fey take down worthy targets, but this segment was about as scattered as the cake splattered across the Weekend Update desk. Half of it was aimed squarely at the white supremacists and politicians who indulge or ignore them; the other half was an earnest plea for “good, sane Americans” to leave the marching neo-Nazis alone in the hopes they’ll just “scream into the empty air.”
Even though Fey at one point said she almost wished white supremacists would try to march in New York City so they can “get the ham salad kicked out of them by a bunch of drag queens,” she ended her bit by earnestly instructing people to “treat these rallies this weekend like the opening of a movie with two thoughtful female leads: Don’t show up.”
On the one hand, of course Fey and Weekend Update don’t want more people to get hurt. But on the other, ignoring white supremacists isn’t going to make them fade away. Plenty of people have already tried that tactic, and look where we are now.
