Two days after the USS Abraham Lincoln returned to San Diego following a record-breaking combat deployment that was reportedly plagued by shortages of food and other supplies, “Saturday Night Live” opened its show over the weekend with a sketch poking fun at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s bravado during a visit to the aircraft carrier on its last full day at sea.
On Wednesday, Hegseth spoke to the Lincoln’s crew for about 15 minutes during an all-hands gathering on the ship, which at one point went more than 260 days without a port call. During his address, Hegseth awarded the Lincoln carrier strike group a Presidential Unit Citation, the highest unit-level award for valor during combat. The Lincoln and its strike group of accompanying ships launched some of the first attacks in the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, and later enforced a maritime blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.
During his speech, Hegseth acknowledged he was the one who had twice ordered the Lincoln’s deployment extended. But he did not mention the difficult conditions aboard the ship. Military officials have said there were eight suicide attempts among strike group personnel during the deployment, including a Lincoln sailor who reportedly jumped overboard Aug. 3.
During the show’s cold open, cast member Colin Jost, reprising the role of Hegseth, asked a group of “SNL” cast members playing sailors how they were doing.
“We’re bad,” one of them deadpanned.
“OK, I heard ‘awesome,’” Jost joked.
“After seven months at war, you’re back home safe in sunny San Diego, which the president just asked Iran to blow up,” Jost continued — a reference to President Donald Trump’s remarks during a campaign rally in Nebraska last week.
During last week’s visit to the Lincoln, Hegseth praised the crew for carrying out its combat mission with zero crew deaths or aircraft mishaps. Jost echoed that line, with a twist.
“You executed over 3,000 combat missions, and you did it with zero casualties, zero flight mishaps and zero working toilets,” Jost joked.
According to some reports, flooding in bathrooms and galleys was a major problem aboard the Lincoln. One family member who spoke to the Union-Tribune at Thursday’s homecoming said his sailor reported “flooding of the restrooms, where everybody had to go from one side of the ship to the other to just use the restroom,” and a resulting foul odor.
The ship’s commander, Capt. Daniel Keeler, briefly addressed those issues during a news conference Thursday.
“It’s a big floating city, you can see how large it is,” Keeler said. “At any one moment there might be a clogged toilet, it happens. But I have a lot of trained engineers to fix those things. When things were broken, they got fixed.”
Unrelated to the Hegseth-Lincoln sketch, “SNL” also stirred up controversy over the weekend when guest host Shane Gillis used an expletive during a sketch on the live broadcast, and in his monologue used homophobic language as well as derogatory language to describe women who dress in tight shorts at the gym. That comment drew criticism from those who argued it objectified women, especially at a time when an alleged gang rape at Cornell University has brought sexual assault into the national spotlight.