Keke Palmer proved the online rumor mill correct when she opened up a floor-length suit jacket to reveal her baby bump during her host monologue on “Saturday Night Live.”
“It is bad when people on the internet spread rumors about you y’all, but it’s even worse when they’re correct,” the “Nope” actress said, before joking that the reason she kept her pregnancy under wraps was to secure a lucrative liquor sponsorship.
The actress’s ambitions were riffed on throughout the episode — from her “manifesting” a best-actress Oscar nomination to pandering for an Emmy with drawn-out, depressing monologues in the “Kenan and Kel” reboot spoof “Kenan and Kelly.” The original comedic children’s show ran from 1996-2000 and was a playful portrayal of two high school friends, played by Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell. Mitchell reprised his role in the sketch, briefly reuniting with Kenan and his beloved orange soda before being tragically gunned down.
Earlier, in the show’s cold-open sketch, Thompson played Georgia senate candidate Herschel Walker, who meets with Republican party leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (James Austin Johnson), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Cecily Strong) and Sen. John Cornyn (Mikey Day). The sketch portrays Walker as a hapless fool, unable to comprehend the most straightforward statements and filled with childlike excitement. As he enters the scene, Walker apologizes for being late because he “was having too much fun in that free merry-go-round” out front. (A revolving door.)
Saturday’s episode leaned heavily into accusations made by alleged former partners of Walker who say that the antiabortion candidate pressured them into getting abortions. During “Weekend Update,” co-host Colin Jost said, “The Georgia Senate runoff set records for early voting. Herschel Walker has always encouraged his supporters to take care of voting early before it becomes a problem.”
Jost seemingly got all of the hot-button jokes of the evening, as he was also tasked with tackling Ye’s bout on “Info Wars” with Alex Jones. Managing to hit two Ye controversies in a single-one liner, Jost says “Kanye West made antisemitic jokes and said ‘I like Hitler’ which is also the password he used to get into Mar-a-Lago.”
“We’re basically dealing with the omicron variant of Kanye,” Jost continued. “We thought he’d fade away but now we realize we may have to live with the brain fog of long-haul Kanye.”
correction
An earlier version of this report gave an incorrect title for a reboot spoof in a sketch. It was “Kenan and Kelly,” not “Kenan and Keke.”