{"id":23918,"date":"2026-05-03T14:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T14:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/23918\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T14:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T14:56:09","slug":"s-n-l-recruits-aziz-ansari-to-play-f-b-i-director-kash-patel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/23918\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018S.N.L.\u2019 Recruits Aziz Ansari to Play F.B.I. Director Kash Patel"},"content":{"rendered":"

The F.B.I. director Kash Patel may or may not be<\/a> a personnel problem for the White House. But he does present a challenge for \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d where there are no cast members of Indian descent to impersonate him.<\/p>\n

So this weekend, \u201cS.N.L.\u201d dug deep into its celebrity Rolodex to recruit Aziz Ansari, the \u201cParks and Recreation\u201d alumnus, to play the embattled Patel in its opening sketch.<\/p>\n

This weekend\u2019s broadcast, which featured Olivia Rodrigo as its host and musical guest, began with a parody of a White House news conference, introduced by Ashley Padilla as the press secretary Karoline Leavitt.<\/p>\n

Speaking over the sounds of nearby construction \u2014\u201c Hold the work on the ballroom, please!\u201d she shouted \u2014 Padilla said she would soon be taking a maternity leave.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when you tell President Trump about your maternity, and he says, \u2018Leave,\u2019\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

She went onto bring out an administration colleague she called \u201cthe man, the myth, the liability\u201d: the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, played by Colin Jost.<\/p>\n

Jost entered carrying an oversized glass of what he said was Scotch (\u201cI said I\u2019d have just one\u201d) and passed it on to Padilla (\u201cfor the baby,\u201d he said).<\/p>\n

He then took questions from other \u201cS.N.L.\u201d cast members playing reporters, including Ben Marshall, who asked if he was aware that the \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d dialogue he quoted at a recent Pentagon service<\/a> was not actually in the Bible.<\/p>\n

After an audible pause, Jost answered, \u201cYeah! But also I do believe that someday it will be. In \u2018Bible 2: Electric Bible-aloo.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that he would not apologize just because \u201cI wear my religion on my sleeve, he said. \u201cLiterally. I have a tattoo on my forearm of Jesus choking out Jimmy Kimmel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jost, in turn, brought out someone who, he said, \u201cwants to come say hello before he\u2019s almost certainly fired\u201d \u2014 that was Ansari, playing Patel in his first \u201cS.N.L.\u201d appearance since he hosted in 2017.<\/p>\n

Following a wide-eyed stare into the camera, Ansari announced that \u201cafter the attempted assassination of President Trump, anoth-ah one,\u201d he said, invoking the DJ Khaled catchphrase<\/a>. \u201cWe conducted an investigation that could not have been more thorough. We dotted every T and bulged every eye.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Patel\u2019s F.B.I. has been criticized for its lack of results, Ansari said, \u201cWell, what if I told you this agency is only six weeks away from pinpointing the exact location of Osama bin Laden?\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that he should be celebrated for the \u201chistoric nature\u201d of his appointment. \u201cI\u2019m a trailblazer,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m the first Indian person to suck at their job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ansari added, \u201cEveryone says Indian people are smart, hard-working, incredibly intelligent. I\u2019ve proved without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites.\u201d For extra emphasis, he exchanges a high-five with Jost.<\/p>\n

When she wasn\u2019t performing two of her newest songs on \u201cS.N.L.,\u201d this week\u2019s host and musical guest Olivia Rodrigo was putting her pipes to work in several sketches that called for her to sing. In her opening monologue, she sang a parody of her hit single \u201cdrivers license,\u201d about the bureaucratic difficulties of obtaining a REAL ID. She also appeared in a filmed music video about a woman who discovers she\u2019s a specimen in an alien zoo; and in a live sketch where she, Marcello Hern\u00e1ndez and other cast members exchanged musical accusations in a fight involving two suspicious members of a couple, each of whom believes the other is cheating.<\/p>\n

And just for good measure, in her first performance this weekend, Rodrigo was introduced by Debbie Harry, the Blondie frontwoman and rock music icon, who last appeared on \u201cS.N.L.\u201d as a musical guest in her own right<\/a> in 1987.<\/p>\n

Weekend Update jokes of the week<\/p>\n

Over at the Weekend Update desk, the co-anchors Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the collapse of Spirit Airlines, the gunman at the White House press dinner and King Charles III\u2019s royal visit to America.<\/p>\n

Jost began:<\/p>\n

We start tonight with some breaking news. Just a few hours ago, Spirit Airlines permanently shutdown midflight. The airline stranded thousands of passengers at airports with no employees manning any of the check-in desks. Spirit said they were proud they were still maintaining their normal level of service.<\/p>\n

Che continued:<\/p>\n

Cole Tomas Allen, the alleged Correspondents\u2019 Dinner shooter, took this selfie in his hotel room shortly before his assassination attempt, which he captioned, \u201cFELT CUTE. MIGHT DELETE PRESIDENT.\u201d<\/p>\n

This week, King Charles visited the U.S. and met Zohran Mamdani, and I\u2019m surprised he didn\u2019t take Mamdani back to England with him, because he is an Indian treasure.<\/p>\n

Jost picked up the topic:<\/p>\n

King Charles visited the U.S. to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence from Britain, and to seek the release of a British hostage being held by an American terrorist. [His screen showed a photo of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.] King Charles also presented President Trump with the original bell from a British submarine and said, \u201cShould you ever need to get ahold of us, just give us a ring.\u201d Or Trump could just call the guy saved in his phone as \u201cAndrew (Island).\u201d [Jost\u2019s screen showed an image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew.]<\/p>\n

Across the pond of the week<\/p>\n

\u201cS.N.L. UK,\u201d the London-based spinoff of \u201cS.N.L.,\u201d continues to be a worthy companion to its American cousin in its very first season. This weekend\u2019s \u201cS.N.L. UK,\u201d hosted by the \u201cWhite Lotus\u201d star Aimee Lou Wood, used its opening sketch<\/a> to satirize the recent royal visit to the United States as King Charles III (Larry Dean) and Queen Camilla (Emma Sidi) reminisce on their flight home. (\u201cI\u2019m glad to be heading home,\u201d Dean said in the sketch. \u201cI just hate being in any country where my mummy\u2019s not on the money.)<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s too highbrow for you, there was also this sketch<\/a> that imagines the Nintendo characters Super Mario (George Fouracres) and Princess Peach (Wood) as a bickering New York couple somewhere between \u201cThe Honeymooners\u201d and a Tennessee Williams drama. Talk about one-upping the competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The F.B.I. director Kash Patel may or may not be a personnel problem for the White House. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14705,14706,13039,8,11894,9,14704,7829,14703,14702,7],"class_list":{"0":"post-23918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-ansari","9":"tag-aziz","10":"tag-comedy-and-humor","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-kashyap","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-olivia-2003","15":"tag-patel","16":"tag-rodrigo","17":"tag-saturday-night-live-tv-program","18":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116511230107933114","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}