Melissa McCarthy’s White House press secretary Sean Spicer roared back to “Saturday Night Live” louder, angrier and more preposterous than ever — and with a much bigger wad of chewing gum.
If Spicer himself thought it was time for “SNL” to tone down the mean, McCarthy only amped it up. She was even more explosive as she mocked fake facts, extreme vetting, Spicer’s outlandish treatment of the media and the Trump administration’s slam on Nordstrom’s for dumping Ivanka Trump’s products.
McCarthy’s barely contained “Spicey” struggled to control himself at the very start of a press conference in the cold open.
“OK, now I’m gonna open it up for questions and I’m probably gonna’ freak if you start asking stupid questions. Speaking of freaks and stupid ones, Glenn Thrush, New York Times, stupid hack, go,” McCarthy snapped.
When cast member Bobby Moynihan, playing Thrush, asked about the court decision against Trump’s travel ban, a furious Spicey pointed skyward, saying: “You’re testing me, big guy.” Spicey vowed to take it all the way to the “People’s Court.” When Thrush explained that it’s not a real court, a livid Spicey shouted: “Don’t eff with me, Glenn.”
The most jaw-dropping schtick was McCarthy’s demonstration of Trump’s new “extreme vetting” procedure by the TSA at airports. For the “dumb babies” (meaning the reporters), McCarthy dragged “dollies” out of demonstration boxes marked with the presidential seal, including an agent in camouflage and a Barbie doll who’s “a nice American girl, back from her dream vacation,” Spicey explained. “We know she’s OK because she’s blond. So she gets in.”
Then McCarthy disgustedly pulled out a black-haired “Moana” doll. “Uh-oh. Whoa. Whoa. Slow your roll, honey,” Spicey cautioned. “We’re going to pat her down, then we’re going to read her emails, and if we don’t like her answers — which we won’t — BOOM! Guantanamo Bay.”
Spicey ripped the media for failing to report on made-up terrorist attacks, like the Bowling Green Massacre — “not the Kellyanne one, the real one” — as well as the “Horror at Six Flags, the Slaughter at Fraggle Rock, and the Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
Then there was the “light terrorism” when Nordstrom dropped Ivanka Trump’s products. “Nordstrom’s loss,” explained McCarthy’s Spicer, showing off one of Ivanka’s “bangles” on his wrist: “It’s beautiful, it’s shimmery, it’s elegant, and at $39.99, it is unbelievably affordable. Don’t even get me started” on the shoes, McCarthy added, hoisting a high-heeled foot.
McCarthy wrapped up the press conference citing crime statistics that 80 percent of the people in Chicago have been murdered, shouting, “And that’s on you.” Spicey took a leaf blower to a reporter who challenged the statistics, bragging that he was “blowing away dishonesty.”
As he did last week, McCarthy’s Spicer used the lectern as a weapon after the final question from a reporter: “Just mentally, are you OK?” But this time Spicey had a mobile lectern to chase down journalists.
McCarthy was a huge audience pleaser last week in her debut performance as Spicer, and opened the program this week to what has to be a record comedy-sketch attack on a presidential administration in a single show. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway and the president himself were also targeted. Fans adored it.
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