Issa Rae Joked About Being SNL's First Black Woman Host, and the Audience Believed Her????
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Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live kicked off with an expected cold open about November’s presidential election, with Jim Carrey as Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Alec Baldwin as Republican incumbent Donald Trump (no more toothless SNL political satire, society has progressed past the need for toothless SNL political satire). But the real laughs only started once host Issa Rae took the stage one sketch later.
In her opening monologue for the episode, which also featured Justin Bieber as its musical guest with a special appearance from Chance the Rapper, Insecure’s star-slash-creator joked about how she was supposed to host back in March when she had two movies and a new season of her show coming out but now has “no reason” to be there now: “People keep asking me, ‘What have you been working on?’ And I’m like, ‘Uh…puzzles, bitch? I don’t know, what have you been working on?’”
She also did a bit about being super nervous, “but I’m gonna hold it down because I’m the first Black woman to host SNL, y’all!”
The crowd went wild, despite that being……obviously not true??
“Y’all really clapped,” Rae laughed. “OK, what if I just kept lying to y’all all night? Half of y’all wouldn’t even notice. But if this show goes bad tonight, just blame it on me, Mary J. Blige.”
The other big highlight of her monologue was when she talked about how bizarre it’s been to experience so much personal success over the past four years as the world around her crumbles:
My show premiered exactly four years ago this month, right before the last election. Yeah, it was crazy because the results came in and of course everyone was freaking out. I was freaking out, and it just felt really awkward for my life to be going so good, you know? Like, it was rude for me to be peaking right when democracy was collapsing. It’s just weird to say, ‘Thank god for what happened in the fall of 2016.
Watch it in full below.
RuPaul’s Drag Race season 12 fave Heidi N. Closet, who was named Miss Congeniality for being, well, so damn congenial, shared some compassionate words of wisdom for queer Black youth as part of a Trevor Project campaign focused on Black LGBTQ young people’s mental health and well-being.
“Surprisingly, something as simple as loving yourself can be very difficult, especially since just by being yourself can cause you to be ridiculed and cause inner turmoil,” she said, per PinkNews. “Just know you are exactly who you are meant to be and you are deserving of love.”
While we’re talking about Heidi, have you watched her new-ish collab with season 12 winner Jaida Essence Hall? If not, you should probably watch her new-ish collab with season 12 winner Jaida Essence Hall. #HallCloset2020
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