We\u2019re living in a tricky age for satire at the moment, as comedians and pundits attempt to uncover the absurdity of a political reality already so screamingly absurd that the whole process is a bit like trying to rub a highlighter onto the sun. Take, for instance, a story Saturday Night Live\u2018s Colin Jost told on\u00a0The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon\u00a0last night, revealing that he\u2019d actually nixed a gag about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the grounds that it\u2019d be too ridiculous for a human being to do, even as a joke\u2026 only for Hegseth to then just go ahead and actually do the dang thing two weeks later.<\/p>\n
\ufeff\ufeff<\/p>\n
Jost was referring to a cold open for the sketch series he\u2019d been working on with his fellow writers, when he pitched the idea of the performatively religious and belligerent\u2014belligerous?\u2014Hegseth trying to give a prayer and then having it devolve into the heavily altered \u201cEzekiel 25:17\u201d Bible verse that Samuel L. Jackson delivers in Pulp Fiction. The idea was ultimately killed, both because it would have eaten a fair amount of the show\u2019s running time, and because it would be \u201ctoo ridiculous\u201d for the audience to believe. Which made it a bit of a shock a few weeks later<\/a>, when Hegseth held a prayer sermon at the Pentagon\u2014already a very cool and normal sentence\u2014and ended up delivering a very close riff on Jules\u2019 monologue to his assembled warfighters. (Hegseth\u2019s press people later stated that he was using a specialized prayer used by pilots, which itself was adapted from the Pulp Fiction\u00a0dialogue; we assume Quentin Tarantino\u2019s lawyers will eventually work out who owes them what for its use.)<\/p>\n The upshot is a reminder that it never pays to assume that the world of 2026 won\u2019t descend to meet even the lowest of expectations. Also, in Jost\u2019s words: \u201cThe good news is, I\u2019m being surveilled. So, that\u2019s a relief.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re living in a tricky age for satire at the moment, as comedians and pundits attempt to uncover…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-672855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}