Amy Poehler’s return to Saturday Night Live saw her open the show as a dogged, insulting parody of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The premise of the Cold Open was that Poehler’s Bondi – having answered no questions during her Senate hearing – was called back to be questioned again.
“Nice to be here,” Bondi says of Poehler to begin his testimony. When asked if she will tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” she responds casually: “No.”
The senators then ask Poehler questions and she makes fun of each one. When asked to spell her name, she replies that Bondi is spelled with an “i” because “I’m not going to answer any of your questions.”
After another question, Poehler responds, “Before I don’t answer, I would like to insult you personally.”
She then dodges another with the phrase “I’m not going to dignify this question with a lie.”
At one point, Poehler’s Bondi is asked if President Donald Trump asked him to indict former FBI Director James Comey.
“I’m not going to discuss my private conversations with the president,” Poehler said as Bondi said. “I won’t tell you who fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, or who kept calling me Ivanka and patting their knees.”
The skit parodies Bondi’s recent tense Senate testimony, during which she frequently lashed out at senators who asked her questions.
During the hearing, Bondi responded to numerous questions by either refusing to answer or attacking the person asking.
Later in the SNL opening, Poehler’s Bondi is asked why ICE agents are sent to American cities. The question serves as a segue to introduce a special appearance from SNL legend Tina Fey as Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem.
Fey and Poehler are good friends, longtime collaborators and are both SNL mainstays. The crowd erupted in applause at the sight of the two men together again on the show.
Noem de Fey entered the skit wearing an assault rifle, a baseball cap and blinding lip gloss, living up to her recently acquired nickname of “Ice Barbie.”
“That’s right, it’s me, Kristi,” Noem says of Fey. “I wrote my name with an ‘i’ because that’s how I thought it was spelled.”
Arguably the biggest laugh of the opening skit was when a substitute senator insisted to Fey’s Noem that Democrats want to end the government shutdown more than Republicans, to which she responded “ha — that makes me laugh more than the end of Old Yeller.”
Noem and Fred Gipson, the author of Old Yeller, wrote books in which dogs are put down by their owners, the main difference being that Gipson’s book was fiction and Noem’s was a memoir.
