Over the summer, when there was a lot of nasty political shit going on and Saturday Night Live wasn’t there to gently ease us through it NBC brought in Weekend Update hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che for Weekend Update: Summer Edition, a special miniseries event that was a lot like the normal show except everyone was wearing cool shorts and waving around pool noodles. On one episode that aired after a white nationalist in Charlottesville, Virginia, drove his car into a crowd of protestors and killed a woman named Heather Heyer, Tina Fey appeared on Weekend Update and offered a lighthearted tip for how people should respond to horrible news like the events in Charlottesville: Ignore the Nazis, stay home, and eat cake.
It was a very Tina Fey approach to current events, but the segment was met with a significant amount of backlash for seeming so out-of-touch that it was—as Splinter writer Isha Aran put it—“white privilege personified.” Now, Fey has admitted that she really “chumped it” with the Weekend Update appearance, telling David Letterman on his Netflix show that she was doing just fine up until the last “two or three sentences of the piece” when she inadvertently suggested the audience should “give up and not be active, and to not fight.”
Fey explains that she just wanted to give people an alternative to engaging in more violence, and she told Letterman that if she could go back she would end the piece by saying “fight them in every way except the way that they want.” She says she came up with that a few days after the segment aired, as “that’s the nature of SNL.”
