SNL dreams up a Fauci-hosted game show where contestants vie for the vaccine

Not, it seems, by taking aim at the current administration. Despite debuting Alex Moffat as the newest in a long string of Biden impersonators in December 2020, he’s spent 2021 primarily portraying other characters. (The politics of SNL are no secret, but this omission is pretty glaring.)

(Well, mostly new subjects. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) keeps coming up. Over and over and over.)

On Saturday, the cold open assumed one of the SNL’s more reliable formats: the fake talk show. In this instance, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci (Kate McKinnon) hosts a show titled “So You Think You Can Get the Vaccine,” in which contestants present arguments for why they should get the coronavirus vaccine. A trio of Democratic governors — California’s Gavin Newsom (Moffat), New York’s Andrew M. Cuomo (Pete Davidson) and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer (Cecily Strong) — serve as the judges.

“Getting the vaccine shouldn’t be a competition, but Americans will only want to get it if someone else can’t,” says McKinnon’s Fauci, who refers to himself as “America’s voice of reason and celebrity hall pass, for some reason.”

Of course, not everyone can win a vaccine. Those who don’t, SNL’s Fauci says, will go home with a Pfizer Visor, “a visor with the world Pfizer on it.”

The architecture of the sketch allows for a series of brief appearances from wacky characters.

There’s the Michigan-based Only Fans IT worker Jane F. (Heidi Gardner), who has “a really bad attitude,” is “allergic to dust,” has herpes and is immediately mortified that she announced all this on television after learning those don’t count as preexisting conditions. The pretend granny (Ego Nwodim) who wants the vaccine so she can spend some quality time with the recently single man she’s been talking up for a decade. The pregnant woman (Melissa Villaseñor) who wants the vaccine, only to be told by the governors that they don’t know if it’s safe for her. And the fake smoker (Bowen Yang) who acts like he loves cigarettes because New Jersey gives early priority to smokers.

Oh, yeah, and Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant), yet again, making jokes about his arms being tired after flying in from Cancún. “Can you really blame a brother for wanting to get some sun?” Bryant’s Cruz asks, before screaming “FREEEEEEDOM!” and dropping the mic.

The winner of “So You Think You Can Get the Vaccine” is Seymour Foreman (Mikey Day), an 85-year-old retired Army doctor who is “now just the world’s proudest granddad.” He’s not likely to actually receive the vaccine, though, as he only uses his computer for Spider Solitaire and doesn’t know how to book an appointment.

Anyway, as luck would have it, SNL’s Fauci announces, a nearby CVS has lost power and its store of vaccines are going bad — so it’s first come, first served.

Aside from the tired Cruz bit, Saturday’s cold open was arguably the strongest of 2021. If nothing else, it offered an inventive skewering of a real issue Americans are currently facing — particularly the joke about Day’s Foreman not knowing how to book an appointment and needing to ask someone in the younger generation for help. (He wonders if the mailman might help, before Davidson’s Cuomo asks if the man has “three straight days to help you click ‘refresh.’” If he doesn’t, Cuomo says, and “you do feel sick, make sure your leave the nursing home and get to the hospital. Wink.”)

After four years fixating on the Trump administration, which pleased the former president’s critics but didn’t make for interesting comedy, it’s refreshing to see the show’s writers getting creative — even if there is a curious lack of Biden jokes.