Watch “SNL” Take on Last Week’s Vice Presidential Debate

Yes, they riffed on the fly

"SNL" Vice Presidential debate
This week, "SNL" parodied the Vice Presidential debate.
NBCUniversal

Was “Maya Rudolph speaking in the most epic Pennsylvania accent imaginable” on your sketch comedy Bingo card for this week? If so, you may have savored last night’s Saturday Night Live more than most. The episode began with Rudolph (playing Kamala Harris) and Beck Bennett (playing Mike Pence) riffing on this week’s Vice Presidential debate.

Both Rudolph and Bennett had plenty to riff on — Bennett doing variations on a pompous theme, while Rudolph played Harris in a way that recalled her character on The Good Place. An exchange about fracking early in the sketch also prompted Rudolph to showcase the most over-the-top Pennsylvania accent since Kroll Show‘s Pawnsylvania, which is never a bad thing.

And if you were wondering whether or not the sketch would involve the fly that landed on Pence’s head in the real-life debate, well, that also came up — alongside an extended riff on a certain David Cronenberg film. And while there wasn’t a Jeff Goldblum cameo per se, the sketch did allow for Jim Carrey to do a solid impression of his Earth Girls Are Easy co-star.

As with many a Saturday Night Live political sketch, this one focused more on references to things that had happened rather than following a specific arc — but given that it also made space for some glorious weirdness at the end, the 12-plus minutes of this one rarely dragged.

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