“Pretend I’m a fishing boat and fire away”: Jost plays Hegseth in “SNL” cold open
Colin Jost doesn’t get the opportunity to step out from behind the “Weekend Update” desk too often. The “Saturday Night Live” head writer made the most of his time on two legs, playing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as a swaggering, pro wrestling-esque maniac.
Jost walked out to a press conference about “Operation Kill Everybody” to entrance music, slamming an energy drink while telling the assembled reporters to “shut the hell up.”
“As you probably read in some gay newspaper, we are now at war with Venezuela,” Jost said before throwing up the Dane Cook superfinger. “You got questions for me? Fine. Pretend I’m a random fishing boat and fire away.”
The first reporter, played by Mikey Day, asked if Hegseth authorized a second strike on the survivors of an attack on a suspected drug-trafficking boat in September. Jost’s Hegseth said he wasn’t even in the room.
“I was so jacked up after the first strike, I had to make an emergency call to my sponsor — sorry, a guy I met at an anonymous meeting so I don’t drink something that I like and I want but I can’t have but I want it and I need it and I want it right now,” he said.
When Jost was asked about Mark Kelly‘s criticisms (the senator from Arizona compared him to a “12-year-old playing Army”), his Hegseth lashed out.
“First of all, Kelly? That’s a girl’s name,” he said. “If I was just ‘playing Army,’ would there be 80 dead fisherm- I mean, narcoterrorists in Venezuela right now?”
Sarah Sherman reprised her role as former Congressman Matt Gaetz to ask about the scope of Hegseth’s anti-trafficking operations.
“You’re only killing people who are trafficking drugs, right?” she asked. “So, hypothetically, if someone were trafficking something else, they’d be OK?”
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The cold open then pivoted, as they almost always do, to Donald Trump. The president was shown sleeping side-stage, mumbling sweet nothings to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. He defended Hegseth’s recent comments about the “fog of war,” saying he would stick by his Cabinet official “unless, of course, it could hurt me in any way.”
Watch the clip below via YouTube: