Katie Britt speaks during a news conference on the border, Feb. 15, 2023.Mariam Zuhaib,/AP
Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) gave such a bizarre State of the Union rebuttal on Thursday night that it bordered on satire. But Saturday Night Live turned it up a notch with its own send-up of Britt’s speech, with Scarlett Johansson playing the role of Britt. The monologue explicitly explained what made the original speech so odd.
Britt’s rebuttal felt less like a speech and more like an audition for a college drama program. Johansson’s version leaned into that. “Tonight I’ll be auditioning for the part of scary mom and I’ll be performing an original monologue called ‘This Country Is Hell,'” she began. “I’m not just a senator, I’m a wife, a mother, and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.”
Sen. Katie Britt delivers the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address pic.twitter.com/x7mDzO1sWP
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 10, 2024
The focus on Britt, 42, the youngest female Republican senator ever, as a wife and mother first wasn’t invented by the late night comedy show. It was explicit throughout her speech, which she made from her kitchen. As the senior Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville said, defending Britt’s speech, “she was picked as a housewife, not just a senator.”
In Britt’s speech, the senator lied about the experience of a sexual assault victim in order to attack President Joe Biden’s immigration record. Britt claimed that a woman she met had during a visit to the US-Mexico border in Texas been trafficked and raped by cartels during Biden’s presidency and, she insinuated, this had occurred on US soil. But as reporter Jonathan Katz revealed in a viral TikTok video the horrible events she recounted had in occurred between 2004 and 2008, during George W. Bush’s presidency, and they happened in Mexico.
SNL skewered Britt for this lie. “I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking,” Johansson said in her satire. “And rest assured, every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened.”
Watch the full sketch on the State of the Union:
Correction, March 11: This post has been updated to reflect Katie Britt’s distinction as the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the Senate, rather than the youngest woman of any party.
