Meghan McCain, 41, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, 44, have alleged that they can take a joke—unless the joke comes from Saturday Night Live.
The MAGA women complained about SNL’s Aidy Bryant, who played both of them on the show. Bryant, an SNL cast member from 2012 to 2022, received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series during her tenure on the sketch show.
McCain, the former conservative host on ABC’s The View, has picked random fights with Emmy-nominated actors, while Arkansas governor Sanders, who was Trump’s White House Press Secretary from 2017 to 2019, is so unpopular in her state that her constituents once asked her to leave a local restaurant.
McCain brought up Bryant’s impressions to Sanders, and she and Sanders made clear, again and again, that they didn’t think she was very funny.
“I found her interpretation of both of us to be cruel,” McCain said on her Citizen McCain podcast. “You see how Saturday Night Live impersonates Democrat women compared to conservative women. I didn’t find it funny. I can laugh at myself. I didn’t find your impersonation funny. Do you have any feelings about that? Maybe you don’t. I think maybe it just ticked me off in particular because I felt like both of us were being hit out in a way that I felt like was unfair.”
A 2019 parody sketch of The View featured Bryant, playing the Phoenix-born McCain, discussing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Can I just say something, as the princess of Arizona?” she asked in the skit. “There is a crisis at the border, and the border is right up in my Arizona, which was founded on sunburnt women selling turquoise jewelry, not rando Mexicans. And that’s not racist because my makeup artist is gay.”
At the time, McCain called the SNL impersonation a “huge pop culture honor.” She and Bryant attended the same all-girls Catholic high school in Phoenix, though their social circles were separate and they only overlapped for one year, when Bryant was a freshman and McCain a senior.
Bryant said in a 2020 Today interview that McCain “very sweetly” sent her flowers once after a show.
Sanders told McCain she wished someone else had played her on SNL, then expanded her criticisms to the show as a whole.
“Saturday Night Live used to be funny, and now it’s just mean,“ she said, continuing, ”It is so pointed, so political and so angry that it’s not funny anymore.“
She remembered complaining to Trump’s ex-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, 54, about Bryant’s “mean-spirited” impression of her. Spicer, whom comedian Melissa McCarthy parodied on the show, told her, “Well, at least you had somebody of the correct sex,” Sanders recalled.
“I can laugh at myself,” Sanders protested. “I can make jokes about it, but it’s got to be funny, and it’s not funny anymore. And I wish they would go back to a time where they focused on the humorous side because we give plenty of material to be funny, and do that instead of being mean.”
McCain grumbled that SNL didn’t poke fun at Joe Biden during his presidency and that “it was like nothing ever happened, even when his brain was melting down.”
In fact, SNL featured cast members and guests mocking Biden in a multitude of sketches throughout his term and after. Alum Dana Carvey played him as a spacey, babbling octogenarian, cast member Mikey Day depicted him as evasive and opaque, and Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che joked about Biden’s dwindling support from Black Americans.
During Bryant’s time on the show, Kate McKinnon played conservatives Liz Cheney and Kellyanne Conway, Cecily Strong played then-Republican senator Tulsi Gabbard and Fox commentator Jeanine Pirro, and Ego Nwodim played far-right commentator Candace Owens.
Still, McCain said of Bryant, “I just always thought it was funny that they were just like, ‘OK, this actress is going to play all the conservative women no matter what.’”
