Melding reality with parody, Saturday Night Live continued its weekend tradition of political cold opens featuring top officials from the Donald Trump administration. From James Austin Johnson mastering the Republican US president’s scowl to Colin Jost seamlessly embodying Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “frat-boy,” macho-man mannerisms, the long-running sketch comedy show ended up bringing on an additional guest to SNL’s White House lineup.
On May 2 (US time), Indian-origin actor Aziz Ansari of Parks and Recreation fame joined forces with the lot to play controversy-ridden FBI Director Kash Patel. With Ashley Padilla’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt kicking off the segment with a press briefing at the White House, the “Hegseth and Patel Iran Press Briefing Cold Open” soon saw Jost and Ansari masterfully playing these parts.
Aziz Ansari stuns as Kash Patel in SNL cold open
Ansari immediately stole the show, walking out on stage to a thunderous applause and cackling hooting. “For those of you saying I’m doing a bad job running the FBI…,” the Parks and Rec star hit out against those subjecting Patel to criticism. Staying in character throughout an “eye-bulging” performance, he went on, “Well, what if I told you, this agency is only six weeks away from pinpointing the exact location of Osama bin Laden?”
He continued through studio cackles, “You guys should not be reporting the lies and the gossip. You should be reporting on the historic nature of my appointment. I’m a trailblazer. I’m the first Indian person to suck at their job. Everyone says Indian people are smart, hardworking, incredibly intelligent.”
“I’ve proved without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites,” Ansari’s Kash Patel added, high-fiving Jost’s Pete Hegseth.
Kash Patel vs the US Media
The SNL parody, this time starring Ansari as Kash Patel, turned out to be a big surprise, especially in the wake of the Indian-origin FBI director’s recent feud with certain US news outlets over what he described as “defamatory” claims. The latest Saturday Night Live episode comes about a week after Patel’s $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic stole headlines.
The legal action, in turn, followed the bombshell article titled “The FBI Director is MIA,” penned by Sarah Fitzpatrick, accusing the top Trump aide of excessive drinking on the job and unexplained absences from duty, among other things. In addition to The Atlantic piece alleging that the real Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with his supposedly problematic behaviour, a series of other unflattering reports, including one by Politico, recently suggested that his job termination was “only a matter of time.”
Contrary to claims in such reports, Patel has vigorously challenged them via furious social media posts and a lawsuit worth hundreds of millions of dollars. On the same page, Karoline Leavitt insisted in a statement to Politico that Patel was “a critical player on the administration’s law and order team.”
Beyond his beef with The Atlantic, Patel had also lodged a complaint against MS NOW columnist after he suggested on air that the FBI chief spent more than in nightclubs than at the bureau’s headquarters. However, a federal judge in Texas has since dismissed the suit.
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