The return of Amy Poehler to Saturday Night Live saw her open the show as an obstinate, name-calling parody of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The premise of the Cold Open was that Poehler’s Bondi — having not actually answered any questions during her Senate hearing — has been called back in to once again face questioning.
“Furious to be here,” Poehler’s Bondi says to kick off her testimony. When asked if she will tell the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” she glibly responds: “No.”
Senators then lob questions at Poehler and she snarks at each. When asked to spell her name, she says Bondi is spelled with an “i” because “I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions.”
After another inquiry, Poehler responds “before I don’t answer, I’d like to insult you personally.”
She then dodges another with the line “I’m not gonna dignify that question with a lie.”
At one point Poehler’s Bondi is asked if President Donald Trump directed her to indict former FBI Director James Comey.
“I’m not going to discuss my private conversations with the president,” Poehler as Bondi said. “I’m not telling you who fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, or who kept calling me Ivanka while patting his lap.”
The sketch is parodying Bondi’s recent tense Senate testimony, during which she often lashed out at senators asking her questions.
During the hearing, Bondi responded to many of the questions by either refusing to answer or by attacking the person asking.
Later in the SNL opener, Poehler’s Bondi is asked why ICE agents are being sent to American cities. The question serves as a segue to introduce a special appearance by SNL legend Tina Fey playing Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem.
Fey and Poehler are good friends, longtime collaborators and are both SNL stalwarts. The crowd erupted in applause at the sight of the two together again on the show.
Fey’s Noem walked into the sketch with an assault rifle, a baseball cap, and blinding lip gloss, living up to her recently-acquired ‘Ice Barbie’ moniker.
“That’s right, it’s me, Kristi,” Fey’s Noem says. “I spelled my name with an ‘i’ because that’s how I thought it was spelled.”
Arguably the biggest laugh of the opening sketch is when a senator stand-in insists to Fey’s Noem that Democrats want to end the government shutdown more than Republicans do, to which she replied “ha — that makes me laugh more than the ending to Old Yeller.”
Both Noem and Fred Gipson, the author of Old Yeller, have written books that involve dogs being shot by their owners, with the key difference being that Gipson’s book was fiction and Noem’s was a memoir.
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