A bar, a bottle and three controversial figures collide in saturday night live’s May 9 cold open, delivering pointed satire and a memorable finale
The latest Saturday Night Live cold open staged a drunk, conspiratorial chat among figures tied to President Trump, turning a tiny D.C. tavern into the scene of a pointed political lampoon. In the sketch that aired in the May 9 episode, the show assembled three caricatures — a brigadier of bluster, a recently judicially emboldened justice and a globe-trotting FBI chief — to trade boasts, embarrassments and booze-infused revelations. The sequence mixed real-life affiliations with invented cocktail names to skew the characters’ perceived priorities and appetites.
Rather than a straight news recap, the segment favored caricature and absurdity. Colin Jost portrayed an aggressive Pete Hegseth who has somehow moved from doing the weather on Fox News Weekends to overseeing military action, while host Matt Damon played Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Aziz Ansari returned to the show as Kash Patel for a second week. The sketch leaned on the familiar format of a cold open — a compact, attention-grabbing kickoff that sets the tone for the episode — and used a dive-bar backdrop called “Martin’s Tavern” to heighten the sense of sloppy candidness.
The tavern setting allowed the sketch to layer small humiliations on top of political critiques. The trio bantered about improbable promotions and recent rulings, with Kavanaugh gloating in a way that echoed real-world controversy surrounding his court activities — including a line suggesting he had helped dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Hegseth’s transformation from weekend weather personality to wartime administrator was played for laughs and alarm, which in turn let the show lampoon how public personas can flip from entertainment to geopolitical consequence. The scene traded on the intimacy of a bar conversation to show how casual cruelty and power can feel connected.
Alcohol became a through-line, with the characters inventing cocktails and comparing war stories like frat brothers. Kavanaugh and Hegseth volleyed punchlines about starting wars and ending abortion rights, with lines reworked for comedic shock — a provocative reversal of common slogans. The sketch introduced visual gags too: Kavanaugh brandished a paper he insisted was a new voting map, only to admit it was actually a scribble from a field sobriety test. Hegseth fretted about his job hinging on the ongoing Iran conflict, offering a self-pitying quip about taking “blue chew” and then failing to get intimate, before retreating to television comfort — all delivered to underline the sketch’s theme of performative masculinity.
Aziz Ansari’s Patel arrived with his own vanity and oddities in tow. The sketch mined the real-world whisper that the actual Patel had custom-labeled bottles for colleagues, turning that rumor into a boast about making an FBI bourbon with his name on the bottle. When a rumor about agency-wide polygraphs surfaced, the character clarified in a baffling way that he had asked for a “graph” of who in the FBI was poly, twisting the concept of a polygraph into a punchline. Patel’s offhand comment about his girlfriend wanting to open the relationship — and him ending up relegated to the living room — carried the sketch’s running theme of emasculation undercut by bravado.
The sketch concluded with an outlandish revelation: the three conspirators hint that they will let Trump extend his presidency into a third term, delivered through an absurdist visual of a tampered founding document and a smug aside — the kind of surreal twist that keeps political satire from collapsing into mere reproach. That zinger amplified the sketch’s tone: equal parts ridicule and alarm. The episode itself was the season’s penultimate installment, featuring Damon promoting an upcoming film titled “The Odyssey” and singer-songwriter Noah Kahan as the musical guest, anchoring the cold open in the broader promotional and entertainment context of the broadcast.
Damon’s take on Kavanaugh wasn’t a one-off. He previously portrayed the justice on the Season 44 premiere in September 2018, a sketch that replayed and exaggerated Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony, including belligerent outbursts and beer-related references. Then, as now, the show blended verbatim lines and amplified mannerisms to make a broader point about public performance and accountability. By revisiting the character, Saturday Night Live reinforced a comedic throughline that links certain public behaviors to wider questions about power, privilege and the spectacle of politics.
In sum, the May 9 cold open used a simple premise — three controversial figures drunk in a bar — to stage a dense set of jabs: about judicial activism, foreign policy as a job security mechanism, the quirks of agency culture, and the persistence of theatricality in modern governance. The sketch relied on recognizable portrayals and sharp one-liners to turn a few minutes of television into a compact piece of political comedy.