Saturday Night Live has some amazing upcoming hosts and musical performers to help celebrate its milestone 50th season, but lately the celebrities might not be the primary reason many are tuning in. We just so happen to be approaching a presidential election, and Maya Rudolph has returned to SNL to portray Kamala Harris alongside current cast member James Austin Johnson and his scary-accurate impression of Donald Trump. Fans have been loving the political sketches since SNL returned to the 2024 TV schedule, but what do the candidates think? Harris has answered that very question.
Kamala Harris spoke to Charlamagne tha God in an interview for The Breakfast Club, where he asked her about the Saturday Night Live skits that have parodied the way she answers questions. When asked if Maya Rudolph and SNL’s overall portrayal of her is fair, the vice president responded:
Hasn't Maya Rudolph been wonderful? I have nothing but admiration for the comedy. And I think it's important to be able to laugh about yourself and each other in the spirit of obviously comedy and not belittling people.
Kamala Harris seems to have no problem with Saturday Night Live’s brand of political humor, as long as it remains good-natured. There’s certainly been plenty of that to go around — on both sides of the aisle — as SNL has taken a pretty big risk by bringing in non-cast members to help portray some of this election cycle’s most prominent players.
On the October 12 show, for instance, Kenan Thompson reprised his Steve Harvey impression for a political Family Feud sketch, which featured not only James Austin Johnson and Maya Rudolph as the presidential candidates but also Bowen Yang as JD Vance, Mikey Day as Donald Trump, Jr., Dana Carvey as Joe Biden (which the SNL vet had discussed with Lorne Michaels long before Biden dropped out of the race), Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz and Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff.
Speaking of the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff was also asked about Maya Rudolph’s impression of his wife before Saturday Night Live’s Season 50 premiere, and he had hoped the show would add “a good Doug character.” Andy Samberg may not be the Hugh Jackman or Ryan Reynolds that Emhoff was hoping for, but hopefully he’s just been as amused with the Brooklyn Nine-Nine star as Kamala Harris is with Rudolph.
We’ve still got a few weeks to go until Election Day, so I don’t expect the political sketches to stop anytime soon. Saturday Night Live is historically known to offer some pretty great presidential impressions after all, so we’ll have to see if and how real-world events necessitate face-offs between the fictional versions of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump even after November 5.
You can catch it all on new episodes of SNL at 11:30 p.m. ET Saturdays on NBC and streaming with a Peacock subscription.