University of Virginia alumna Tina Fey visited the desk of SNL’s Weekend Update: Summer Edition to impart some wisdom.
Her coping mechanism, and one she suggests others do this weekend instead of joining up with “screaming matches” that might turn violent across the country, is to essentially eat an entire sheet cake in one sitting.
“I would urge people this Saturday instead of participating in the screaming matches and potential violence, find a local business you can support,” Fey suggests. “Maybe a Jewish-run bakery, or an African-American-run … bakery. Order a cake with the American flag on it, like this one, and just eat it.”
“Sheetcaking is a grassroots movement, Colin,” she said to one of Weekend Update’s anchors, Colin Jost. “Most of the women I know have been doing it once a week since the election.”
Fey’s segment on the show was peppered with insults slung at both conservatives and the neo-Nazis involved in last week’s violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va.
“Who drove the car into the crowd, Hilary’s emails?!” said Fey, after she criticized Ann Coulter’s remarks that antifa attacked Republicans in Berkeley, Calif. Fey also criticized the president’s continued stance that there was violence on “both sides” of Charlottesville.
“The ‘other side’ is Nazis and klansmen,” she said.
While shoveling cake the entire segment, Fey reminded viewers of the time President Trump previously destroyed historical monuments instead of defending their significance as he urges people not to remove Confederate statues around the country.
“Google ‘Trump Bonwit Teller,'” she said. “And then your family says ‘Oh, Mom, you need to calm down,’ and then you feel powerless, and that is when you need to dip a grilled cheese into the cake.”
Her visit ends with a joke about ill-attended movies that have two female lead actresses, as well as a mention of Thomas Jefferson’s behavior towards the slaves he owned. People online have criticized both the ending and her intent of the sketch as tone deaf.
Others criticized her for encouraging the same people who have likely not shown up to any protests to continue to not show up.
While her “sheetcaking” suggestions may or may not have been meant to be taken literally, as it could have easily been a critique itself of people who swing too far away from action, Fey’s visit to the second episode of Weekend Update: Summer Edition helped the crew through a tough week.
Jost and Michael Che, the other co-anchor of Weekend Update, reminded the audience that “obviously, this is a tough week to do comedy.”
Watch the full clip below.
