Saturday Night Live granted viewers’ wishes with their latest cameo.
The sketch comedy series brought in Aziz Ansari to play controversial FBI Director Kash Patel in the show’s latest cold open.
“You guys should not be reporting the lies and the gossip,” Ansari’s Patel told reporters. “You should be reporting on the historic nature of my appointment. I’m a trailblazer. I’m the first Indian person to suck at their job.”
Patel continued, “Everyone says Indian people are smart, hardworking, incredibly intelligent. I’ve proved without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites.”
Ansari’s surprise appearance as Patel comes after months of fan speculation that SNL would—and should—cast him in the role.
“Can anyone else see Aziz Ansari playing Kash Patel in SNL and doing a fantastically hilarious job?” wrote one fan on the Live From New York subreddit in September. The post received 40,000 upvotes.
Ansari’s Patel addressed the mounting rumors of his alleged drinking problem.
Referring to himself in the third person, the SNL Patel said, “Let me be clear: this FBI director has never been drunk or hungover on the job.”
He added, “And this FBI director has definitely not stood on top of a couch at the VIP room of Tao Nightclub and Asian Bistro and shouted, ‘Who wants the nuclear codes?!’”
Patel addressed the ongoing rumors that President Donald Trump is frustrated with his job performance and that he might be the next White House official to be fired.
“President Trump loves me,” Patel insisted. “Everybody loves me. Even the correspondents’ dinner shooter said, ‘Kill everyone but Mr. Patel.’ You get a shoutout like that in a psycho’s manifesto, you must be doing something right.”
The line referenced a real detail in the manifesto written by suspected shooter Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who tried and failed to assassinate Trump and his Cabinet during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Allen wrote, “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”
It’s not clear why Allen made an exception for the FBI director.
Reporters also confronted SNL’s Patel with the allegation that the FBI boss once had a “freakout” after he “struggled to log into an internal computer system.”
The real Patel slammed the story as a hit piece, but his lawsuit against The Atlantic acknowledged that he had indeed been temporarily unable to log in.
“That’s just more lies,” SNL’s Patel said. “I’ve always been able to log into my e-mail, except for a brief 36-hour period of time when I forgot I had changed my password to CashMeOutside69.”
