SNL’s Kate McKinnon lampoons Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre Philadelphia press conference

NBC sketch show takes on Trump attorney as election challenges meet increasing ridicule

Saturday Night Live’s post-election edition featured a particularly cutting rendering of Rudy Giuliani — fresh off his widely ridiculed appearance that day at a low-end Philadelphia landscape gardening business.

Regular cast member Kate McKinnon has played Mr Giuliani before, but this time deployed her impression at a particularly salient moment, hot on the heels both of Mr Giuliani’s bizarre press conference and of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory speeches.

Asked if he had chosen the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company’s driveway by accident, Ms McKinnon’s Giuliani replied “What?! No. Anyway, I’m glad I made it to the show on time because first I went to 30 Rocks. That’s a granite quarry in New Rochelle. What a night!”

She then went on to mock Mr Giuliani’s increasingly tenuous claims about how the election was supposedly stolen from Mr Trump.

“First we’re gonna throw out these bogus mail-in ballots. Colin, these ballots, they could be coming from Mars” (Mr Giuliani did in fact say these words on Saturday).

Follow: Election results and aftermath

“So we’re gonna demand that we look at all the names. If the name is Meepthorp Xandar, and the address is Mars, we’re gonna get those ballots thrown out.

“Plus! Plus! We got no idea if they really are ballots. They might be tortillas. We’re gonna eat ‘em and see if they’re tortillas. If my butt blows after I eat it, you know that’s a tortilla,” Ms McKinnon’s character added.

Also mocked were Mr Giuliani and his team’s repeated insistence that their poll watchers be allowed as close as possible to poll workers counting votes, and their demands against various states.

“In Michigan, we demanded a recount. In Wisconsin, we have demanded a decount. We call backsies in Nevada, we got safety in Arizona, and in Georgia, opposite day. Plus! Plus! We’re gonna demand that I do the recount personally, and our silver bullet is: I can’t count very high,” McKinnon joked.

Mr Giuliani is currently the president’s highest-profile defender in the Trump campaign’s determined effort to challenge election results across the country. The reaction from Trump critics has shifted from anger to ridicule as Mr Biden’s margins have grown in the swing states that won him the election.

The president, meanwhile, has stayed largely out of view, spending time on the golf course and occasionally tweeting false claims about electoral theft — many of which have been flagged by Twitter for misinformation.

Broadcast the same evening that Mr Biden and Ms Harris finally declared victory, the episode as a whole was a quick turnaround even by the show’s revered standards, with producers managing to assemble a close imitation of the white pantsuit/satin blouse ensemble Ms Harris wore for her speech at just a couple of hours’ notice.