Dakota Johnson’s stint hosting Saturday Night Live this past weekend revealed a few truths, including that the SNL writers’ room was more interested in that damn dress than its Leonard Nimoy tribute and that, once the headline writers run out of puns and Fifty Shades Of Grey’s walk of shame into pop-culture irrelevance is complete, Dakota Johnson is going to be fine. Neither of these are particularly shocking, as far as revelations go. But here’s one that ought to be surprising (key words “ought to”), given the huge ratings for SNL 40 a couple of weeks ago: some people still don’t know that SNL is a comedy show.
This news, brought to you by the same people that necessitated the creation of the “Satire” tag on Facebook, comes as The Hollywood Reporter, The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Tonight, and other media outlets collect outraged tweets from people offended that SNL spoofed ISIS in a digital short. In the fake ad, which parodies a Toyota ad featuring a dad dropping off his daughter at the airport as she reports for military duty, a tearful Taran Killam bids farewell to his daughter (Johnson) as she leaves home for the first time. Here, watch it for yourself:
Why this particular sketch made Twitter users “physically ill” (their own words) and SNL’s other ISIS sketch from last November didn’t is anyone’s guess, but it may be because the previous sketch was at least tangentially related to upstanding American Mark Cuban, while this one starred the girl from the movie with the whips. You can’t trust her kind—at least until she gets the lead role in NBC’s upcoming sniper series or some other acceptably sexless, satire-free, all-American form of violent entertainment. In the interim, Twitter will continue to sit in not-so-silent judgement, unless, of course, someone posts a picture of some polka-dot leggings that also look kind of like a giraffe, in which case all bets are off.