Nearly two years after playing the Titanic-sinking iceberg on Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang played another news-making white object floating in the Atlantic: the Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, February 4.
Just hours after that Air Force operation sent the balloon plummeting into the Atlantic, NBC’s SNLparodied the diplomatic incident in the cold open of Saturday’s episode.
“Good evening. It’s good to be with you,” Chloe Fineman said in the sketch, in character as MSNBC anchor Katy Tur. “Tonight, our long national nightmare is over. We got the balloon.”
After reporting how the spy balloon “inflamed already volatile U.S./Chinese relations,” Fineman’s Tur turned to expert commentary from a Pentagon official named General William Hamilton, played by Kenan Thompson. And Hamilton said the balloon was “somehow able to get past our West Coast anti-balloon defense system, the Seattle Space Needle.”
Later in the sketch, Tur cut to a live feed of the deflated balloon, with Yang dressed in a round, white costume — and wearing floaties on his arms — as he bobbed against a backdrop of an ocean vista. “Well, you got me. Congrats, you shot a balloon,” he said. “I entertain you people for four days, and then get shot by Biden? I can’t believe I’m Joe’s Osama.”
When prompted by Tur, the balloon explained what it was doing flying over Montana earlier in the week. “I love the show Yellowstone, so I was just there. It’s like Succession but outside,” he said. “Now I’m all wet, so what a day.”
“Well, I’m actually surprised you’re still floating,” Tur observed. “Experts were saying you’re the size of three buses.”
“OK, ouch,” the balloon replied. “I’m a balloon, so that’s my body. Now, how would you like it if someone measured your width in buses?”
And Yang’s balloon brushed off Americans’ concerns about privacy. “Everyone is being surveilled constantly, but it’s always ‘shoot the balloon’ and never ‘unplug Alexa,’” he said. “If you care so much about your data, why do you all keep your bank passwords in the Notes app, OK? You mail your literal DNA to a company to find out if you’re, like, 10 percent French.”
“Now, the concern was that you were taking sensitive images of the U.S.,” Tur pointed out.
“No, I was so far away. It’s like when your aunt takes a concert video on her iPad, and you’re like, ‘I guess that’s Michael Buble?’” the balloon said. “I couldn’t even tell when I was looking at from up there. Like, frankly, I thought the state lines would be, like, drawn out. I thought I would see words over the places.”
“Well, we just did what we had to do to protect the security of our country,” Tur responded.
“Oh, why? Is everyone freaking out because I’m a ‘Chinese balloon’?” Yang’s character clapped back. “Because where I come from, I’m just a balloon.”
Saturday Night Live, Saturdays, 11:30/10:30c, NBC