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    ‘SNL’ Pokes Fun at Trump’s Tariffs and Economy Chaos in Easter Cold Open

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    Among the sources of all the fun is ‘The White POTUS,” a parody that casts members of the administration in their own twisted playground for the privileged.With Easter approaching, it seemed appropriate for “Saturday Night Live” to resurrect a favorite bit: a scene from the Bible that is interrupted by a comic monologue from James Austin Johnson playing President Trump.This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Jon Hamm and featuring the musical guest Lizzo, began with what looked like a straightforward re-enactment of the Cleansing of the Temple, with the role of Jesus played by Mikey Day. “This will not stand,” Day said, overturning a money changer’s table. “I will rid this place of all its money.”The action paused so that Johnson could enter as Trump. “Remind you of anyone?” he asked. “Wow. I also got rid of money last week. But instead of one temple, I did whole country. Maybe even the globe. The money’s gone.”Johnson continued: “Hi, it’s me, your favorite president, Donald Jesus Trump, comparing myself to the son of God once again. You know, many people are even calling me the messiah, because of the mess-I-ah made out of the economy.”The financial turmoil, he said, was “all because of my beautiful tariffs — they’re so beautiful. They were working so well that I had to stop them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jay North, Child Star Who Played ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73

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      Mr. North was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on the television series, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963.Jay North, who played the well-meaning, trouble-causing protagonist of the popular CBS sitcom “Dennis the Menace” from 1959 to 1963, died on Sunday at his home in Lake Butler, Fla. He was 73.His death was confirmed by Laurie Jacobson, a friend of Mr. North’s for 30 years. The cause was colorectal cancer, Ms. Jacobson said.Mr. North played the towheaded Dennis Mitchell, who roamed his neighborhood, usually clad in a striped shirt and overalls, with his friends, and often exasperated his neighbor, a retiree named George Wilson, who was played by Joseph Kearns. Herbert Anderson played Dennis’s father, and Gloria Henry played his mother.Dennis winds up causing lots of trouble, usually by accident.In one episode, a truck knocks over a street sign, and Dennis and a friend stand it up — incorrectly. Workmen then dig a gigantic hole, meant to be a pool for a different address, in Mr. Wilson’s yard.The show, which was adapted from a comic strip by Hank Ketcham, presented an idyllic, innocent vision of suburban America as the 1950s gave way to the tumultuous ’60s.But things were not easy for Mr. North behind the scenes.Many years after “Dennis the Menace” ended, Mr. North said that his acting success came at the cost of a happy childhood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘S.N.L’: Live From New York, It’s More Military Secrets.

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      Mikey Madison hosts and Luigi Mangione, Squidward and Ashton Hall make appearances.There was no uncertainty as to whether “Saturday Night Live” would offer its own satirical take on the news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed attack plans for a U.S. strike on Houthi militia fighters in Yemen during a text chat that mistakenly included the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. It was only a question of how “S.N.L.” would do it.This weekend’s opening sketch featured the cast members Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman, as well as the guest host, Mikey Madison, as teenage girls whose group chat was interrupted by an unexpected message, read aloud by Andrew Dismukes: “FYI: Green light on Yemen raid!” he exclaimed.Dismukes, as Hegseth, continued to recite the texts he was sending (“Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago”) along with the emojis he was using for punctuation (“Flag emoji, fire emoji, eggplant”).“Do we know you, bro?” Madison asked. “This is Jennabelle.”“Oh, nice,” Dismukes replied. “Jennabelle from Defense, right?”Warned by Nwodim that he was in the wrong group text, Dismukes answered, “LOLOLOL could you imagine if that actually happened? Homer disappear into bush GIF.” He added that he was “sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      White House Correspondents Cancel Comedian Booked for Annual Dinner

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      Here’s another thing getting cut in Washington: comedy.The White House Correspondents’ Association said on Saturday that it canceled a planned performance by Amber Ruffin, the actress and talk-show host, at its annual black-tie dinner on April 26.A monologue by a featured comedian is usually the highlight of the journalists’ soiree. Memorable performances by Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, among other stars, have turned into touchstones of political satire.But amid rocky relations between President Trump and the White House press corps — and numerous efforts by the administration to undermine the news media — the correspondents’ group decided to go in a different direction.“The W.H.C.A. board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year,” the association’s president, Eugene Daniels, wrote to members on Saturday. “At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.”Representatives of Ms. Ruffin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The announcement was a sharp break from the group’s position in early February, when it trumpeted Ms. Ruffin’s comedic style as “the ideal fit for this current political and cultural climate.”“She has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day,” Mr. Daniels said in a news release. “I’m thrilled and honored she said yes.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Dyslexic Comedian Walks Into a Recording Booth …

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      Phil Hanley stood in a womb-like studio, psyching himself up to record the final section of his memoir. Peppermint tea, check. Hands in meditation position, check. Sheaf of highlighted, color coded pages printed in extra large type, check.But when Hanley leaned into the microphone to read from “Spellbound,” his candid account of growing up dyslexic, he sounded more like an anxious student than the seasoned comedian he is.He eked out 13 words, then stumbled, exhaling sharply in triplicate, Lamaze style. He tried again, the same sentence with slightly different intonation. Puff, puff, puff. And again, making it through three more words. Puff, puff, puff. On his fourth attempt, Hanley choked up.It was his 60th hour in the booth at his publisher’s office, not counting practice sessions at home. Most authors are at the studio for a fraction of this time; the average recording length for a 7.5 hour audiobook is 15 hours. But because Hanley has severe dyslexia, the process was protracted. And complicated. And emotional.“The most traumatic moments of my life have been having to read out loud,” Hanley said. “I can’t even express how tiring it is to do the audiobook. It feels like chiseling a marble statue with a screwdriver and a broken hammer.”Nevertheless, he was hellbent on reading his own story. What would it say to the dyslexic community if he handed off the mic?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge John Hodgman on Knowingly Mispronouncing Words

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      Once you’ve been corrected, is it OK to keep going?Maggie writes: My sister, cousin and best friend all pronounce the Spelling Bee’s pangram as “pan-a-gram.” I have nicely pointed out their mistake, but they continue to gleefully mispronounce it. They don’t care that they’re wrong. Make them stop.For those who only read this column and then throw the magazine (or their phone) away, I’ll explain. In The Times’s Spelling Bee game, a pangram is a word formed using all seven letters in the puzzle. More generally, a pangram is a sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet, just like this one (if I had included Q, X and Z) does! “Pan-a-gram,” by contrast, means nothing — yet. But the gleefully wrong tend to get their message out a lot faster these days than we snobs, so “panagram” may eventually win a spot in our living dictionary. Until then, I rule in your favor. You should never speak to these people again. As those of us who play it understand: The Spelling Bee is more important than any sister, cousin, friend or thing on earth. More

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      Conan O’Brien’s Oscars Monologue: Little Roasting, No Politics, Very Silly

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      Conan O’Brien brought the bizarre back to Oscar hosting.In a studiously silly (and sniffily) performance that began with the gross-out humor of his emerging out of the body of Demi Moore from “The Substance,” O’Brien evoked some of his delightfully experimental bits from his old late-night show.For winners whose speeches go on too long, he promised to cut to a shot of a game John Lithgow “looking slightly disappointed.” He continued a fun Adam Sandler bit from the Golden Globe Awards. And in a concise joke delivered deftly, he said: “Bob Dylan wanted to be here, but not that badly.”The whole thing had a light touch: little roasting and no politics. The edgiest joke might have been when he promised that no A.I. was used in making the Oscars, before fessing up: “We used child labor.” But you got the sense this punchline mattered less than his follow-up, when Conan added out of nowhere: “We lost little Billy.” Not since David Letterman, the most underrated Oscar host of the modern era, has a monologue been this loopy. More

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      Conan O’Brien Pokes Fun at Top Movies and Stars in Oscars Monologue

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      Conan O’Brien was literally born to host the Oscars.After a pretaped sketch on Sunday in which O’Brien emerged out of the back of Demi Moore, the star of “The Substance,” before turning around to dig into her spine cavern for a lost shoe, the comedian broke into his monologue.He poked fun at many of the show’s nominees, and himself, starting with a list of recent films — “A Complete Unknown,” “A Real Pain,” “Nosferatu” — that he joked he was called on the red carpet. “I think two were fair,” he said.The monologue also razzed Netflix’s 18 nominations (and price increases), the length of “The Brutalist” and the recent controversy about “Emilia Pérez” actress Karla Sofia Gascón’s offensive social media posts.“Little fact for you: ‘Anora’ uses the F-word 479 times,” he said. “That’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofia Gascón’s publicist.”O’Brien also called out best actor nominee Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of the musician Bob Dylan from the stage, and the absence of Dylan himself: “Bob Dylan wanted to be here tonight, but not that badly.”He also riffed on the recent news that Amazon has taken control of the James Bond franchise, joking that it had found its next 007: Amazon’s senior vice president of global affairs, Steve Belsky. “Ladies love him,” O’Brien said. (According to an Amazon corporate website, the real senior vice president and chief of global affairs is David A. Zapolsky.)After a joke about Adam Sandler’s fashion sense, O’Brien suddenly changed tone to address the devastation of the wildfires in Los Angeles, and how an awards show can seem self-indulgent if that context was not addressed. He praised the craftspeople and others behind the camera who devoted their life to film, and how the ceremony was to celebrate their work too.“Even in the face of terrible wildfires and divisive politics, the work, which is what this is about, the work continues,” he said. “For years to come through trauma, and joy, this seemingly absurd ritual is going to be here.”“I will not,” he continued. “I’m leaving Hollywood to run a bed-and-breakfast in Orlando. And I’d like to see you there.”O’Brien closed his monologue by promising not to waste time, before breaking into a musical number about how he would not waste time, complete with a dancing Deadpool and the sandworm from “Dune: Part Two” playing “Chopsticks” on a piano.“Well, we’re 40 minutes over,” O’Brien joked. More

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      Hair Transplants and the New Male Vanity

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      Last year, I noticed that two comedians I like talked about getting hair transplants. One of them, Matteo Lane, named his special “Hair Plugs & Heartache,” which opens with an extended bit about the transplant experience. I appreciated Lane’s radical (and very funny) transparency regarding the cosmetic enhancement. He talked about the expense, described the 10-hour surgery and the long recovery, and joked about his hair growing in gradually “like a Chia pet.” He’s very happy with the outcome.Lane also talks about why he got his surgery in the United States instead of in Turkey. He said he didn’t want to go through customs with his head swollen like the alien from the movie “Mars Attacks”: “I want to be ugly at home.” Going to Turkey to get a cheaper hair transplant is such a cliché that there’s an entire genre of social media video dedicated to depicting men’s beef carpaccio heads on “Turkish hairlines” flying back to their homes from Istanbul.The British tabloid The Mirror just ran a story about one regular bloke who traveled to Turkey for hair transplant surgery and is quoted as saying that he feels he has “a new lease of life.”This is a marked change from just a few years ago, when men were less forthcoming about getting surgery on their domes. In 2021, my newsroom colleague Alex Williams wrote about the men who got hair transplants during the locked-down days of the pandemic. “There’s still that old stigma, where guys aren’t supposed to worry about how they look and spend a lot of money on their appearance,” one hair transplant recipient said at the time.That stigma is very old, indeed. There’s long been anxiety over hair loss among men, according to Martin Johnes, a professor of modern history at Swansea University in Wales who has researched masculinity, modernity and male baldness. But the stress really started ramping up in the 1930s, when men stopped wearing hats regularly and popular media started valorizing youthfulness more aggressively.In the 1930s, it was considered effeminate to pay too much attention to your appearance yet many of these men still wanted to take action if they were unlucky enough to go bald. They called baldness obscene, a major disaster and, poetically, a favored nightmare. One 30-year-old upholsterer said:I do not care to see bald heads. I can only tolerate them if the owner has a large head, or if his personality will not allow himself to look pitiable.While the bad feelings around baldness clearly aren’t new, talking about those feelings in public is. And hair replacement technology has improved so much in the last couple of decades that transplants look real now — it’s not just snake oil or cheesy infomercials for hair in a can anymore.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More