If Kash Patel happened to be at home watching TV on Saturday night and not, say, out getting hammered at a bar after another banner worst week ever serving under Donald Trump, I hope for his sake that he wasn’t watching NBC. Either way, I fear the hangover is a nasty one. The FBI director was skewered on Saturday Night Live this weekend in a pitch-perfect scene that worked only because of the surprise star brought in to play him: Aziz Ansari. And yes, he made fun of Patel’s bulging eyes.

In a cold-open sketch that smartly compared Patel’s swaggering machismo to that of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, here played by Colin Jost, Ansari lampooned the FBI chief as a pompous party boy who is woefully wrong for the job. “Everyone says Indian people are smart, hardworking, incredibly intelligent,” Ansari joked as Patel. “I prove without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites.”

This was the first time SNL has tackled Patel, even though he has long been ripe for parody. The show doesn’t have any brown actors on its current roster, so it hadn’t yet found a way to mock the bureau chief for acting as if he’s the first guy ever to have a girlfriend, or for those weird fan-fiction children’s books he wrote about Trump. But the recent controversy swirling around him evidently prompted Lorne Michaels to make a call, enlisting Ansari to play, as he says in the sketch, “the first Indian person to suck at his job.”

Given that both Hegseth and Patel enjoy berating reporters, it made sense to set the scene at a White House press briefing that quickly goes off the rails—much like the one Patel held last month. In that appearance, Patel railed against the Atlantic for its bombshell story alleging that he drinks excessively, is frequently MIA, spiraled after he got locked out of his email, and may soon be fired. “That’s just more lies,” Ansari said in the sketch. “I’ve always been able to log into my email, except for a brief 36-hour period of time when I forgot I had changed my password to Kashmeoutside69.”

Ansari hasn’t been on SNL since he hosted back in 2017, but his casting was a stroke of genius here. The diminutive star, best known for the douchey, little-brother energy he displayed across seven seasons of Parks and Recreation, here summoned all his acting skills to capture Patel’s … douchey, little-brother energy. Like Jost’s version of Hegseth, Ansari’s Patel is bombastic, overly bro-y, and a fan of a stiff drink. (When a reporter in the sketch asked Patel about excessive drinking, Jost’s Hegseth initially assumed that the question was for him.) But seeing Ansari puff his chest while being dwarfed by the press room lectern made the impression instantly devastating for Patel. “For those of you saying I’m doing a bad job running the FBI,” Ansari said, “well, what if I told you this agency is only six weeks away from pinpointing the exact location of Osama bin Laden.”

Patel was first introduced by Jost’s Hegseth as “someone else who wants to come say hello before he’s almost certainly fired.” The defense secretary had set the frat boy tone for the skit, calling reporters “dingbats,” “butt munchers,” and “weak asses” while singing the praises of the war in Iran. “As you might have seen on our sick-ass TikTok, we’ve been bombing stuff, doing sick air raids,” Jost’s Hegseth said. “This war has been a movie! Specifically The NeverEnding Story.

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“Everyone’s always asking me, ‘When is this war gonna be over?’ ” he continued. “That’s like asking when is sex gonna be over? Answer: When the man is done!”

At several points during the skit, Ansari was able to spoof Patel without any words at all. When he first appeared to cheers from the surprised audience, he grabbed the lectern and immediately made his eyes go as wide as possible, creating an eerie resemblance to the real Patel and his famous “crazy eyes.” Referencing the investigation into last week’s attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Ansari then joked, “We dotted every t and bulged every i.

“President Trump loves me. Everybody loves me. Even the Correspondents’ Dinner shooter said, ‘Kill everyone but Mr. Patel,’ ” Ansari added, referencing Patel’s reported omission from the suspect’s hit list. “You get a shout-out like that in a psycho’s manifesto, you must be doing something right!”

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The real Patel is suing the Atlantic for $250 million, claiming that the publication’s story defamed him with false reporting. Ansari’s version also wanted to set the record straight on Saturday. “Let me be clear: This FBI director has never been drunk or hungover on the job,” he said. “This FBI director has never filled a 40-ounce travel mug with ice-cold gin and a swirl of dry vermouth and six lemon peels and called it a Kashtini. 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 of TAO Nightclub and Asian Bistro and shouted, ‘Who wants the nuclear codes? JK! I ain’t got ’em.’ ”

It remains to be seen what will happen with Patel’s lawsuit—and how long he will still have a job. But this shouting appearance on SNL isn’t likely to endear him any further to the president, who famously is not a fan of losers or weakness. Much like Hegseth, Patel’s inflated masculinity seems to fold instantly when it’s the subject of parody. Maybe it’s time for a Kashtini.

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