Melissa McCarthy is due to host Saturday Night Live in under a month, but that was too long a wait for her Sean Spicer to return to the show. In fact, McCarthy filmed her third appearance as Spicer in this week’s sketch not from SNL’s Studio H in New York City, but from a set all the way in Los Angeles (where, for the first time ever, SNL was airing live simultaneously with its East Coast airing).
To be fair, having a press secretary repeatedly mischaracterize how Hitler carried out the Holocaust by saying he never used chemical weapons is news SNL probably couldn’t avoid, even during a presidency that’s producing jaw-dropping news roughly every other minute.
So this time, SNL’s Spicer was particularly surly while crashing the press room to issue an apology — or something like it, anyway. Dressed in traditional White House Easter Bunny garb — a familiar look for Spicer, who really is a former White House Easter Bunny — McCarthy hunched over the podium and scowled with rage.
“You all got your wish this week,” McCarthy as Spicer snarled. “Spicey finally made a mistake.”
Her irate press secretary went on to insist that he didn’t mean to say “Holocaust centers,” but rather “concentration clubs,” and that the press really shouldn’t make such a big fuss over “every little slur and lie that I say.”
From there, the sketch basically became a Spicer monologue of half-assed excuses for botching Holocaust history during the same week as Passover (a.k.a. “Jewish Easter,” according to McCarthy’s Spicer), accusatory dismissals of the press, and a joke about Hitler’s gas-distributing airplanes that prompted an immediate apology. (“At least they didn’t have to fly United, am I right? Ugh, that one just jumped right out of my mouth.”)
Eventually, SNL had Spicer put on the world’s least helpful retelling of why Jewish people celebrate Passover (including the phrase “crouching tiger, hidden dreidel”), but at least it involved the visual aid of a baby doll dressed up as a pharaoh — or in Spicer’s words via his boss, “a bad, bad hombre.”
McCarthy’s monologue — the only real one in this week’s show, since host Jimmy Fallon instead opted to open the episode with a sing-along flash mob — had a little trouble trying to outdo the bizarro energy of the actual moment. But if Spicer keeps confusing grave issues like the Holocaust and generally conducting press briefings like a high school gym teacher trying to bark an unruly team into order, it’s probably a safe bet to say SNL won’t be releasing McCarthy anytime soon.
