Since the election, it’s seemed like everything anyone wrote, said, or did, was in some way a response to our new orange overlord. It’s impossible not to think about it: The nature of horror clowns is that they pop up where you least expect them. So in case you need it, here’s a sketch from this weekend’s Saturday Night Live that isn’t about the new reality at all.
Instead, it pits Cecily Strong—the show’s current reigning queen of crazy—against Kristen Wiig, the all-time champion. It’s a hell of a matchup, and the two women’s dueling QVC audition tapes unlock a Peyton Place labyrinth of buried resentments and secret passions. The accents are, let’s stipulate, terrible, but the crazy? The crazy is good. (And the passive-aggressive niceness that the jokes hang on only really works in a Southern accent.)
This is the kind of escalating two-handed sketch structure that Mr. Show always excelled at, so as long as we’re all here, enjoy “The Fairsley Difference,” a slow burn that’s lacks the direct confrontation of Strong vs. Wiig but also has nothing to do with Donald Trump:
On closer examination, a sketch about a bullying capitalist who ruins other people in his quest to get ahead may not be entirely free of Donald Trump. Slate regrets the error.
