Continuing a run of alums dropping by Saturday Night Live’s summer edition of Weekend Update, Bill Hader’s spectacular turn last week as Anthony Scaramucci was followed by a series of former Update hosts reclaiming the desk last night. Not only did Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers show up to tag-team a segment as, respectively, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (“Sorry Robert E. Lee, but I prefer generals who win wars”), Fallon’s former cohost Tina Fey also dropped by to suggest a solution on how to deal with the resurgence of white supremacism seen last weekend on Charlottesville: eat some cake.
Fey is a University of Virginia alum—she praised the school for having such great architecture, she didn’t even mind graduating a virgin—so “it broke my heart,” she said, to see hate groups descend on her beloved former campus. She then proposed a whole new resistance movement for dealing with those emotions: “Sheetcaking.” It is, as it sounds, a form of counter-protest that involves not going to those kinds of rallies, and instead shouting all your anger into a sheetcake while you wolf it down.
Funny as it was, and as many good shots as Fey got in at the kinds of people who attend those rallies (“The next time you see a bunch of white boys in polo shirts screaming about taking our country back and you want to scream, ‘It’s not our country, we stole it! We stole it from the Native Americans. And when they have a peaceful protest at Standing Rock, we shoot at them with rubber bullets, but we let you chinless turds march the streets with semi-automatic weapons’”)—not everyone appreciated its sort of literal “let them eat cake” attitude.
Fey ended by encouraging everyone to just stay home from future Nazi protests (“Treat these rallies like the opening of a thoughtful movie with two female leads: Don’t show up”), insisting it was only because “I don’t want any more good people to get hurt.” And, of course, no one does. Still, “not showing up” and “just ignore them” isn’t necessarily the best strategy for dealing with actual Nazis in the streets. Screaming into a cake may be cathartic, but it’s not going to stop these assholes. It’s just going to get you some delicious cake. Funny bit, though!