Ted Cruz’s CPAC speech mocked on SNL: ‘I just flew back from Cancun, but can you blame a brother for wanting some sun?’

Aidy Bryant reprised her role as the Texas senator

Ted Cruz’s CPAC speech was made fun of on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live, with Aidy Bryant reviving her impression of the Texas senator.

The segment was included in the cold open of the broadcast on Saturday (27 February).

It consisted in a faux TV show called So You Think You Can Get the Vaccine, which mocked the difficulties of the coronavirus vaccine rollout.

Hosted by Kate McKinnon as Dr Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious disease expert in the US, the fake game show saw bewildered contestants attempt to get granted access to the Covid vaccine.

Their fates were decided by three “governors” – Alex Moffat as California’s Gavin Newsom, Pete Davidson as New York’s Andrew Cuomo, and Cecily Strong as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

Among those contestants was Bryant’s Cruz, introduced the previous week in a skit skewering the senator’s recent trip to Mexico amid an extreme weather crisis in his state of Texas.

Bryant revisited Cruz’s CPAC address, standup-comedy style, asking the crowd: “I just flew back from Cancun… but can you really blame a brother for wanting some sun?”

She also mimicked Cruz’s cry of “Freedom!”, with which he chose to conclude his real-life CPAC speech.

Other “contestants” included Heidi Gardner as a woman listing her “bad attitude” in her pre-existing conditions (to no avail), Ego Nwodim as a young woman trying to pass for an elderly person (ditto), Melissa Villaseñor as a pregnant woman, Bowen Yang pretending to be a smoker to access the vaccine in New Jersey, and Mikey Day as a former Army doctor who’s “now the world’s proudest grandad”, told to make an appointment online much to his confusion.