The second episode of Saturday Night Live at Home aired this weekend, with cast members once again putting on performances in their own homes.
There were a number of highlights, including Kate McKinnon reprising her role as the crazy cat lady of Whiskers R We (not to be confused with her upcoming role as Carole Baskin), and Kyle Mooney staging a surrealist nightmare-party populated by ten different versions of himself. But probably the most notable segment was Brad Pitt's cold open as Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
After thanking "all the older women in America who have sent me supportive, inspiring, and sometime graphic emails," Pitt's Fauci goes through a number of clips of President Donald Trump commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic in recent daily press briefings in order to "explain what the president was trying to say."
It must be genuinely exhausting for Dr. Fauci and other medical experts to stand quietly at the sidelines of those briefings while Donald Trump lies about the availability of testing and speculates wildly about possible cures and a timeline for the pandemic to end. But now, adopting the doctor's gravelly New York accent, Brad Pitt is allowing that exhaustion to be properly expressed with comments like "miracles shouldn't be plan A," and "when he said 'everyone can get a test,' what he meant was, 'almost no one.'"
After responding to Trump's recent suggestion of possible cures by burying his head in his hand ("I know I shouldn't be touching my face, but..."), Pitt's Fauci went on to comment on Donald Trump's emphatic denial that he is planning to remove Dr. Fauci from the task force: "So, yeah, I'm getting fired."
But probably the most important part of the segment was when Pitt removed his wig and glasses to thank Dr. Fauci for his "calm and clarity in this unnerving time." Hopefully we can count on him as a voice of reason for the remainder of this crisis.