With McCarthy playing Spicer, ‘SNL’ cranks up Trump satire
NEW YORK — Melissa McCarthy lampooned White House press secretary Sean Spicer in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch where she taunted reporters as “losers,” fired a water gun at the press corps and even used the lectern to ram a Wall Street Journal journalist.
“SNL” opened with Alec Baldwin reprising his President Donald Trump and phoning foreign leaders with chief strategist Stephen Bannon by his side. Bannon, with hood and scythe, was portrayed as the grim reaper. He nodded affirmatively after the successive calls to countries like Australia and Germany dissolved into Baldwin vowing, “Prepare to go to war.”
But it was McCarthy’s mid-show sketch impersonating a pugnacious Spicer that sparked the bigger response in the NBC show’s second episode since the inauguration. McCarthy’s Spicer insisted that “no one was sad” at Trump’s supreme court nominee unveiling. “Those are the facts forever,” she said, before accidentally giving her email password. Off to the side, she kept a CNN reporter, chastised as “fake news,” jailed in a cage.
“I want to begin tonight by apologizing on behalf of you to me for how you have treated me these last two weeks,” McCarthy said in opening the mock press briefing. “And that apology is not accepted.”