What To Know
- Aziz Ansari made a surprise debut on SNL‘s cold open as FBI director Kash Patel.
- He made self-deprecating jokes about incompetence and stereotypes.
- Ansari’s Patel humorously addressed controversies about his job performance and alleged drinking.
Saturday Night Live‘s cold open just featured Aziz Ansari making his surprise debut as FBI director Kash Patel.
During the Saturday, May 2 cold open titled “Hegseth and Patel Iran Press Briefing Cold Open,” Ashley Padilla as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced her maternity leave before Colin Jost as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth kicked things off by taking questions from reporters.
One reporter asked about Hegseth reciting a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction and whether he knew it wasn’t really from the Christian scripture. “Yeah! But also, I do believe that someday it will be… Now I’m not going to apologize because I wear my religion on my sleeve, literally. I have a tattoo on my forearm of Jesus choking out Jimmy Kimmel.”
Later, Jost, as Hegseth, shared, “OK, everyone’s always asking me, when is this war gonna be over? That’s like asking when is sex gonna be over? Answer:When the man is done.”
In an unexpected twist, Ansari as Patel was next to take the podium. He confidently declared, “For those of you saying I’m doing a bad job running the FBI, well, what if I told you this agency is only six weeks away from pinpointing the exact location of Osama bin Laden?”
Patel also claimed to be a “trailblazer” by being “the first Indian person to suck at their job.” He explained, “Everyone says Indian people are smart, hardworking, incredibly intelligent. I prove without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites.”
When asked if he is nervous about reports that President Donald Trump is angry with him, Patel exclaimed, “Hell no! President Trump loves me. Everybody loves me, even the Correspondents’ Dinner shooter said, ‘Kill everyone, but Mr. Patel.’ You get a shout-out like that in a psycho’s manifesto, you must be doing something right.”
Additionally, Patel addressed reports of his drinking. “Let me be clear, this FBI director has never been drunk or hungover on the job. This FBI director has never filled a 40-ounce travel mug with ice cold, and swirl of dry vermouth, and six lemon peels, and called it a Kash-tini.”
He continued, “This FBI director has never used taxpayer dollars to take a private jet to fly him and his girlfriend to three different Buffalo Wild Wings locations across the country to see if they could taste the difference. And this FBI director has definitely not stood on top of a couch at the VIP room at the VIP room of Tao Nightclub and Asian Bistro and shouted, ‘Who wants the nuclear codes?! JK, I ain’t got ’em.’”
Saturday Night Live, Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC