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'Laura Ingraham' pushes non-Islamic 'chickpea mash' in new SNL cold open
In the latest Saturday Night Live cold open, Kate McKinnon played Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
"Good evening. I'm Laura Ingraham, and as soon as I marry your dad, I'm sending you straight to boarding school," McKinnon said before listing several drawbacks of living in "Biden's America."
Even "former Wendy's spokesgirl Jen Psaki" had to admit things were bad, McKinnon-as-Ingraham said. She then cut to a choppily edited clip that arranged snippets from Psaki's press conference into the phrase "we are not good people. The American public should vote us out."
McKinnon-as-Ingraham then presented a list of "THINGS LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE FROM YOU," including "guns," "backup guns," and "using the word 'mayonnaise'" — "It's 'aioli' all of a sudden? No thanks, Lin-Manuel!"
Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz (played by Aidy Bryant) then joined "Ingraham" as a guest. In response to a question about "his" beard, Cruz/Bryant responded, "Oh yeah! My beard is like Jan. 6: shocking at first, but sadly it's been normalized."
"Ingraham" then welcomed Pete Davidson, playing Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, who was deported from Australia for being unvaccinated. "I never thought I would hear myself use the word 'deported' in a bad way," the pseudo-host of the pseudo-Ingraham Angle mused.
Next up was conservative commentator Candace Owens (Ego Nwodim) — McKinnon-as-Ingraham's "one Black friend" — who cut right to the chase, saying, "Martin Luther King would've voted for Trump."
"Hello to you too," said "Ingraham."
She then paused to thank her sponsors, including "Paula Deen's Chickpea Mash": "It's not radical Islamic hummus; it's American chickpea mash!"
The final guest of the night was former President Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson.
Johnson-as-Trump closed out the cold open by solving a Wordle puzzle, a process that included references to COVID booster shots, the new show How I Met Your Father, Jason Momoa, and his own inevitable re-election campaign.