Saturday Night Live tested the limits of how many jokes about genitalia it could stuff inside a six and a half minute cold open while digging into the most salacious bits of Jeff Bezos’ recent extortion claims.
Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the richest man in the world, came forward this week in a stunningly detailed blogpost claiming The National Enquirer’s parent company was trying to blackmail him. Yes, there were nude pics, Bezos admitted, while saying executives from American Media Inc. threatened to release the intimate selfies and lurid details of his extramarital affair in exchange for what he called politically motivated favors.
Indeed, the detailed descriptions of his sexts were particularly salacious, but as Vox’s Anna North put plainly, they were “the least scandalous part of the blog post. Because in 2019, if someone is sending nudes to a partner, who really cares?”
Well, apparently it’s the media elite that can’t get enough.
In its cold open, SNL imagines a world where even the most straight-laced journalists and political commentators are obsessed with a story involving a billionaire’s nether regions. NBC host Chuck Todd (played by Kyle Mooney) welcomes a panel of Meet the Press regulars to discuss the week’s events, and though it’d been a jam-packed last few days with President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and Virginia politics imploding, the panelists can focus on just one thing: Bezos, below the belt.
“What do you think it’s going to look like?” Mooney’s Todd asks.
The fictional panelists, including The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, are game for the discussion, openly speculating what America would see should the nudes actually go public. And even acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker (played by Aidy Bryant) and Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross (played by Kate McKinnon) are roped into the measuring contest.
Matt Whitaker and Wilbur Ross stopped by “Meet the Press.” #SNL pic.twitter.com/30kcutiGuR
— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) February 10, 2019
The only straight character in the sketch is a shocked and disgusted former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile, who can’t believe that her fellow panelists would stoop to such lows as creating their own penis puns in fake versions of the New York Post.
“What is happening right now?!” an exasperated Brazile, played by Leslie Jones, says.
Honestly, we’re asking the same question.
