Welcome to the “I would’ve voted for Obama a third time” of Saturday Night Live cold opens.
The sketch show’s latest episode kicked of with a newscast send-up featuring two Black hosts and two white hosts in Minnesota discussing the trial of Derek Chauvin. It doesn’t go well. While everyone at the table is friendly and seems to mean while, the white hosts (Kate McKinnon and Alex Moffat) repeatedly turn to trite, saccharine expressions of hope and positivity for the U.S. justice system while the Black hosts (Ego Nwodim and Kenan Thompson, with occasional assists from the weatherman played by Chris Redd) are more realistic about the history and systemic injustice that make a “Guilty” outcome for Chauvin anything but a certainty.
The five SNL veterans play their parts perfectly, delivering a cuttingly funny send-up of conversations that still unfold in real life in 2021. It’s hard to ever find humor in the United States’ long history of systemic racism and racial injustice, but time and popular entertainment has long since proven that poking fun at well meaning white people who repeatedly say the wrong thing works. Maybe because there’s a lesson to be learned there.