Fox & Friends Finally Covers Defamation Suit In Vicious SNL Cold Open Parody

Saturday Night Live kicked off the 14th episode of the new season with a vicious Fox & Friends parody in which the Fox & Friends crew covers the $1.6 billion Dominion defamation lawsuit.

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 before Kelce could begin his hosting stint, the cast of the long-running sketch show performed its 937th cold open, a long-running gag in which the show performs a parody — usually related to current events — that ends with performers breaking character and exclaiming “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

The very first cold open — on October 11, 1975 — lasted only 96 seconds and featured Chevy Chase uttering the catchphrase as a confused production assistant on a new show that was then called simply NBC’s Saturday Night. Early cold opens — colds open? — featured Chase performing a pratfall, often in character as then-President Gerald Ford.

It has evolved into an often elaborate and anticipated part of the show that can run closer to ten minutes, and almost always parody current events. Although often uneven in quality and a magnet for jabs from critics, the cold open is also often the most talked-about part of the show.

This week’s cold open featured a vicious lampoon of the aforementioned current event described in the first paragraph.

Fox News has responded to the Dominion filing with a statement from a spokesperson.

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement. “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

Watch above via NBC’s Saturday Night Live.