“Saturday Night Live” continued its cavalcade of big-name guest stars playing figures in the day-to-day drama of the Trump administration this weekend by opening with a reunion of “Meet the Parents” stars.
Ben Stiller, playing Trump attorney Michael Cohen, endured an interrogation from Robert De Niro, as special counsel Robert Mueller, in a revival of their classic lie-detector scene from the 2000 film.
“We’ll start out with some easy ones,” De Niro told Cohen. “How’d you like that pee-pee tape? I’m kidding.”
At one point Cohen’s admission that he was trying to “milk information” led to a reprisal of another “Parents” moment, the actors’ exchange over whether a cat could be milked. Both stars were heavily made up to resemble their real-life counterparts.
Earlier, Stiller’s Cohen met with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon) and Vice President Mike Pence (Beck Bennett) and groused that this week’s raid on his law offices was “a violation of attorney-criminal privileges.” The show’s usual Donald Trump impersonator, Alec Baldwin, did not appear.
Earlier drop-ins as White House newsmakers have included Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump, John Goodman as Rex Tillerson and Bill Murray as Steve Bannon.
This weekend’s host was stand-up comedian John Mulaney, a Chicago native and St. Ignatius alum. He brought unusual credentials to the Studio 8H stage, having written for “SNL” without ever being part of the cast. (Past hosts Conan O’Brien and Larry David had the same C.V.)
Over the course of the night, Mulaney played a waiter with drag queen attire and attitude, a student reluctant to walk out because he was in an aroused state, the creator of a creepy (and fictional) old sitcom now being revived, a pair of gay twins on a Bravo reality show and a plastic surgeon enlisted to remove a man’s horns.
Though Mulaney has written much of the dialogue for one of “SNL’s” most beloved characters, Bill Hader’s Stefon, there were no sightings of the excessively hip club kid.