‘Race War Is Coming!’ Dilbert Himself Pays Visit to Weekend Update Amid Creator’s Racist Rant Implosion

Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update got a visit from Dilbert, who talked about the mass dumping of creator Scott Adams after a racist rant.

This week’s edition of Saturday Night Live featured Travis Kelce as guest host and country pop sensation Kelsea Ballerini as the musical guest. Variety reported on Kelce’s hosting gig, noting:

Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end is making his “SNL” hosting debut. It also reps the first appearance for Ballerini as musical guest. Her appearance comes after her new EP, “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” and its accompanying short film were released on Valentine’s Day. Ballerini is also staging the “Heartfirst” U.S. tour starting off in March.

Kelce teased the appearance with an online mini-sketch promo in which he reenacts a famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark as castmembers Ego Nwodom and Bowen Yang look on.

But many fans of the sketch show wait around just to see the musical guest, then catch the weekly nightly news parody anchored by Colin Jost and Michael Che.

Weekend Update became a mainstay of SNL from the very first episode — on October 11, 1975 — of what was then called simply NBC’s Saturday Night. Chevy Chase anchored solo, and opened the sketch with a gag about disappeared Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It has since evolved into a less-faithful imitation of news show that instead has developed and adopted its own rhythms and conventions.

The news parody has become a tentpole of the show. In a recent interview from Chris Wallace’s series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace on HBO Max, onetime producer Dick Ebersol told Wallace that Weekend Update was key to keeping viewers tuned in late into the show.

One feature that has come to comprise half of the Update show-within-the-show — or more — are character pieces that feature guest commentators that you really don’t see on the news these days, but used to punctuate local broadcasts in the days of Gilda Radner‘s legendary bits.

The show also often welcomes a cast member to deliver a comic bit as themselves to deliver a comedy bit — sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes in the form of commentary, and sometimes as a stylized version of themselves. The castmember bits date back to early SNL, as well, and have become a regular feature of Weekend Update.

This week, Che and Jost were visited by Dilbert, who riffed on the controversy and expressed some revolutionary ideas.

Watch just the jokes above via NBC’s Saturday Night Live.