Tag: cecily strong
#EndorseThis: Yes, Jeanine Pirro Is Back — And She’s Still Shouting!

#EndorseThis: Yes, Jeanine Pirro Is Back — And She’s Still Shouting!

Did you miss Jeanine Pirro, the suspended female Fox News judge? Saturday Night Live brought her back — or at least her alter ego, the brilliant Cecily Strong.

Egged on by Colin Jost, she opens with a shout out to her super-fans: “Mean, horny men laying on in-home hospital beds and white prison gangs who control the remote on Saturdays. Thank you for watching!”

As she explains to bemused Colin, Pirro can’t help shouting all the time. “Mama’s got one volume and it’s three chardonnays deep at a crowded party!” Of course, she’s most excited about the Mueller Report — or at least Bill Barr’s distorted version — so excited, in fact, that she can’t quite keep her seat.

Not that wacky Jeanine thinks anyone should ever see the actual text. She has a much better idea for what Barr should do with that damned thing.

This is among SNL’s most uproarious Weekend Update episodes. Click and laugh.

SNL Cold Open Ices Roger Stone And Tucker Carlson

SNL Cold Open Ices Roger Stone And Tucker Carlson

No way could Lorne Michaels and the SNL resist the biggest satire target in America today: the brazen dirty trickster and comic-book villain Roger Stone, indicted last week by the Russia special counsel. Last night’s cold open featured one of comedy’s great stars as the out-of-control consultant, whose murky role as a conduit in the Russian hacking of Democratic emails is at last under the spotlight.

Preceding him as a “guest” on Fox News with Tucker Carlson — whose personal tics are hilariously exploited by Alex Moffat — were cast regulars Cecily Strong as Jeanine Pirro and, in remarkable makeup, Kate McKinnon as Trump’s out-of-touch Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Funny as both were, the audience shrieked when Moffat tossed to Steve Martin, embodying Stone in a crazy white hairpiece, bizarro eyeglasses, and pinstriped zoot suit.

Boasting and lying just like the real guy, this Stone has an urgent message for the president. That’s why he’s on Fox News!

Click and roar.

 

 

SNL Cold Open Hilariously Roasts Laura Ingraham And Jeanine Pirro

SNL Cold Open Hilariously Roasts Laura Ingraham And Jeanine Pirro

Saturday Night Live loves its recurring characters, who now include Laura Ingraham (Kate McKinnon) and Judge Jeanine Pirro (Cecily Strong), who graced last night’s SNL cold open for the second time in a month. The spoof of Ingraham’s wacky Fox News show holds nothing back, beginning with the host’s harsh monologue on the midterm blue wave.

“Let’s talk about the rampant voter fraud that allowed Democrats to literally steal the election,” she rants. “Some have claimed that suburban women revolted against the Republican party, but doesn’t it feel more true that all Hispanics voted twice? You can’t dismiss that idea simply because it isn’t true and sounds insane.”

Judge Jeanine chimes in with her brilliant “reporting” on voter fraud, which echoes Trump’s lunatic claims. What she has are clips from old movies: Tyler Perry from Madea, “voting twice in Atlanta,” and Eddie Murphy with the Klump family from The Nutty Professor, seen by Jeanine as a man pretending to be five different people. When Laura asks if that’s really Eddie Murphy, she agrees. “It’s as if he really wants to be caught.”

And there’s more, including Alex Moffat as Mark Zuckerberg and Leslie Jones as Nancy Pelosi’s would-be nemesis Rep.  Marcia Fudge (D-OH).

Click and laugh.

Strong Looks Sharp At White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Strong Looks Sharp At White House Correspondents’ Dinner

By Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Whatever Cecily Strong was going to say about President Barack Obama at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, there was no way it would sting as much as what he inadvertently said about her.

Trying to establish a bond, Obama hailed the Saturday Night Live cast member as a “Chicago girl,” but then he called her, repeatedly, “Cecily.”

So maybe Strong is not the most famous comic to ever stand at the podium during the annual commingling of reporters, their Washington sources and celebrities ranging from movie to reality-TV stardom.

But the 31-year-old Strong, raised in Oak Park, Ill., and trained at Second City and iO, did well enough Saturday night to earn herself much greater name recognition, perhaps even from the commander-in-chief.

It was hard to gauge Obama’s reactions, but cameras showed the president laughing very hard when Strong journeyed from a personal jab to a much bigger societal issue:

“After six years in office, your approval rating is at 48 percent,” she told Obama. “Not only that, your gray hair is at 85 percent. Your hair is so white now it can talk back to the police.”

One of Strong’s edgiest lines also broached the topic of institutional racism by police. After chiding the Secret Service for its troubles protecting the president, she then feigned sympathy, saying, “They’re the only law enforcement agency in the country that will get in trouble if a black man gets shot.”

That one made people sit up in their seats, and Strong came back quickly, and self-assuredly, with, “Are you saying ‘boo,’ or are you saying ‘true’?”

Her demeanor was friendly enough to be disarming, but Strong, the daughter of a former Associated Press bureau chief in the Illinois capitol of Springfield, was pointed in her politics. She said, for instance, that she’s a fan of the craft store Hobby Lobby, where “I just bought the cutest little wicker basket to hold all my morning after pills,” she said.

If comedians miss the mark at the dinner — in tone or in quality of material — it can hurt them. The national star of radio deejay Don Imus began sinking after he bombed while hosting a different Washington dinner in 1996.

But a risky set can pay big dividends. The 2006 hosting turn of Stephen Colbert was perceived in some quarters to be too barbed an attack on President George W. Bush and the press. But in other circles it is revered for its gutsiness and for going beyond joke-telling into the headier realm of satire.

Where Colbert was playing beyond the room, using it to announce himself as a voice to pay attention to, Strong’s ambitions were more modest. The room even supplied part of the material.

“It’s great to be here at the Washington Hilton,” she said with a dramatic pause, “is something a prostitute might say to a congressman.”

Strong has rallied nicely on SNL, doing lots of great sketch work this season after the perceived demotion of being taken off the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor desk. She never found the right tone for the mock news-reading gig (her successors Colin Jost and Michael Che still struggle with that).

But Saturday she showed she could deliver an extended comic monologue under bright spotlights. Like Seth Meyers, a fellow former SNL newsreader, four years before her, her monologue was a succession of mostly taut, well-crafted lines about social issues, media institutions and figures, and the upcoming presidential race.

Ted Cruz, she figured, was right wingers’ wanting the opposite of President Obama, “a Canadian Latino who’ll never be president.” Then there was Rand Paul, “as in, ‘he didn’t get elected, but at least he Rand.'”

Working, she said beforehand, with writers from SNL, Tonight, and Meyers’ Late Night, Strong wisely went to the video screen only once, for a so-so take on former Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock. Some of her best material related to her own status as only the fourth woman to be the entertainer at the correspondents dinner, sometimes referred to as “Nerd Prom.”

“Feels right to have a woman follow President Obama, doesn’t it?” Strong began, the first of many references to Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

But, she said: “Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’m going to go easy on you people. I’m going to go easy on you people because my brain is smaller.”

The strongest positive reaction Strong got was when she called on the press to repeat a vow with her: “I solemnly swear / Not to talk about Hillary’s appearance / Because that is not journalism.”

Perhaps feeling the need to add an actual joke, she then undercut the forceful feminism with a dose of mock insecurity. “Also,” she immediately added, “Cecily Strong looks great tonight.”

That’s one possible review. The real point, though, is that she entertained on a high level. It’s “Cecily,” Mr. President.

(c)2015 Chicago Tribune, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Screenshot via YouTube/C-SPAN