A Few Words About Melissa McCarthy’s Surprise ‘SNL’ Appearance Over The Weekend

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Even if you’re not a devoted watcher of Saturday Night Live like I am (to the confusion of many of my peers, including co-workers here at Glide Magazine), chances are all you heard about Sunday when you woke up was Melissa McCarthy’s surprise appearance, where she played current White House Press Secretary and Dippin’ Dots hater Sean Spicer. Storming onto the stage completely out of nowhere, McCarthy slipped into Spicer’s ill-fitting suit and barreled through the sketch’s eight-minute runtime like a flaming cannonball full of dynamite.

While it was easily the best sketch (political or otherwise) that SNL’s tabled up since Tom Hanks’ Trump supporter was a contestant on Black Jeopardy, (which was confoundedly overshadowed by David S. Pumpkins that same night), it’s worth pointing out exactly why history was being made on live television.

Dialing back the clock a couple election seasons, back when Sarah Palin was the most rambling, gaffe-prone politician in the national spotlight, you’ll remember her most attributed quote is “I can see Russia from my house!”

Thing is, though, Palin never said that. Tina Fey did during her first scene-stealing impression as the then-Vice Presidential candidate. Fey’s Palin was an obvious classic less than four seconds into that sketch, a nuanced, detailed sendup that repurposed a dozen or so soundbites and retrofit them into workable punchlines. It was so uncannily good and frighteningly close to reality that Fey’s infamous line just got lumped in alongside every other shrill, folksy word sandwich that Palin managed to regurgitate.

That’s what McCarthy’s impression is cementing here: An impression so unshakably good that it’ll be impossible to not replay it back in your brain the next time Spicer turns up at a televised press conference to yell at the fourth estate for not aptly coddling the man-child currently working out of the Oval Office.

Even Spicer himself seemed to take it in stride (relatively speaking), and only said that McCarthy “could dial back” her impression, which shows that he doesn’t understand how impressions work (or satire, but we already knew that). While it seems likely that McCarthy will get another crack at playing the rage-filled Spicer, especially given the endless material this administration keeps cranking out, it’s unlikely that we’ll get anything as close to perfection as what we got last weekend.