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Saturday Night Live must have set some sort of record last night for the acidic level of its political satire on the Bush administration. The opening eight-minute-plus skit nails the befuddled Pres. as he bumbles through a press conference on the Gonzales hearings, calling female reporters “Juggs” and “Hooters,” and saying that Congress can call anyone on his staff to testify under oath…the White House maintenance staff, that is.
But the big star of the show (outshining even host Scarlett Johansson and musical guest Björk) was Torboto, a new character from Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse. In the animated short, Cheny takes Bush down to Guantanamo to demonstrate his new Geneva Convention sidestepping scheme. There’s nothing in the torture treaty about robots torturing people, and Cheny tells Bush that Torboto can “shave, shock and humiliate a man’s genitals in three seconds flat.” Bush, with frat boy enthusiasm: “Heck, I went through some of that in my Skull and Bones initiation.” Torboto dishes out some sickening torture on the detainees, including spraying them with “real urine harvested from the Detroit Zoo.” He even shows off his Cheny shotgun technique, but things go haywire at the end when he rips out the sneering VP’s heart, then makes a bizarre appearance on 60 Minutes.
Hard to top that, but Björk’s performance of “Earth Intruders,” the first single from her new Volta disc, was up there.
