Everyone’s favorite chameleon Kate McKinnon reprised her role as slow-talkin’ Attorney General Jeff Sessions on this week’s “Saturday Night Live” — but this time with a Forrest Gump twist to skewer the good ol’ boy.
Gump/Sessions had plenty to chew over about Kellyanne Conway, Russians and races in the cold open — then gobbled down a delicious piece of poop pie.
The scene opens with McKinnon/Sessions/Gump plunked down on a bus stop bench with a box of chocolates talking to various people in a parody of the opening scene from the 1994 Tom Hanks movie.
“My name’s Jeff, Jeff Sessions,” McKinnon first tells Leslie Jones. “I’m the attorney general of the whole United States. I got to meet the president and everything.”
“Bein’ in the government is so fun. Have you ever been in it? You meet so many nice people.”
McKinnon pulls out the infamous “Couchgate” photo of “my best good friend Kellyanne,” where Conway is sitting with her feet tucked under her on a sofa in the Oval Office surrounded by the heads of historically black colleges and universities. “You ain’t got no legs, Kellyanne,” McKinnon smiles, very nearly losing it and ducking behind the photo.
“We’re about as close as peas and carrots. She’s the best talker you ever heard. They say she could sell stink to a skunk! But they don’t let her talk anymore.”
“I always say life is like a box of chocolates,” McKinnon says, adding sadly: “Sure are a lot of brown ones in there.” That’s Jones’ cue to leave.
Sessions tells another sympathetic listener about his tough times being caught lying at his confirmation hearings about never meeting with Russian officials in 2016.
“I had a bad week,” Sessions/McKinnon explains. “It started out real good. The president made a great speech... We were all as happy as a monkey with a peanut machine. Then I went to bed, I got 800 messages and phone alerts saying I was a sneaky little liar. I didn’t know what to do, so my lawyers said, ‘Run, Jeffy! Run!’”
“No,” Sessions says he explained at his confirmation hearings. “I never talked to any Russians ever.” Then he tells yet another bench partner: “I talked to the Russians — twice... I met with a fella who turned out to be Russian on account of he was the Russian ambassador.”
After a bus pulls up and drives away, Sessions has a new benchmate: Beck Bennett, doing his best shirtless Vladimir Putin. He tells McKinnon: “This meeting never happened.” Sessions responds: “I wasn’t going to remember it anyway.” They fist bump.
Finally, the character Minny Jackson from “The Help,” played by “SNL’s” guest host Octavia Spencer, who played Jackson in the movie, sits down and asks Sessions if he’s the one Coretta Scott King wrote “that letter about.” That was “40 years ago, you still remember that?” McKinnon asks. “A lot of people in Alabama remember that,” Spencer replies. She introduces herself as “Minny... you don’t know me, I’m from a different movie.”
Then she offers him the infamous shit pie that she served her employer in the film. “That is a mighty kind gesture,” says McKinnon’s Sessions. “It looks delicious. Hey, is this what I think it is?”
“It is,” Spencer smiles sweetly.
“Mmmm... my favorite,” McKinnon declares, and gulps down a mouthful, leaving bits of brown on her teeth.
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