Saturday Night Live usually counts it as a win when one side is mad. This weekend’s Weekend Update managed to anger both.
The segment focused on last week’s big Democratic midterm wins. Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, who won his Senate race by about seven points according to The Daily Beast, will be the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. When Colin Jost began, “Abdul El-Sayed made history as the first Muslim…”, the studio audience broke into its loudest cheers of the night.
Then the twist: “Well, first openly Muslim,” Jost said, as a photo of Barack Obama appeared beside him. The joke played on a long-running rumor that Obama is secretly Muslim. That claim is false: Obama is a Christian, and the conspiracy theory has been debunked many times. Jost followed up on El-Sayed’s hint that Chuck Schumer should be replaced as Senate leader: “I don’t think my first move would be: ‘Get rid of the Jewish guy!’” Some viewers on the left called the jokes Islamophobic. El-Sayed has faced antisemitism accusations, which he rejects; he says his criticism is aimed at the Israeli government, not Jewish people.
The right had its own grievance. In the same episode, cast member Jeremy Culhane played Elon Musk asking his AI chatbot Grok for a “vulgar roast.” The robotic reply included the line: “Maybe if you have 100 more kids, one of them will talk to you.”
Katie Miller, the wife of incoming White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, was furious. “SNL is literally the antithesis of comedy and satire. It takes weak men to take cheap shots — especially about @elonmusk’s kids,” she wrote on X, calling it “a political hit job masquerading under the banner of comedy.” Replies were split, with some users agreeing that the show “hasn’t been funny since the 80s.”
SNL has not responded to either complaint. That is typical for a show that has spent five decades making political jokes and taking heat from both sides.
