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Message from the President Cold Open – SNL

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Joe Biden’s press briefing takes a hard left turn into Queens, New York.

“Saturday Night Live” opened its first show of 2022 by putting the blame for America’s winter misery on a superhero. In the January 15 cold open, James Austin Johnson’s Joe Biden stood behind the White House podium and, instead of tackling Omicron case counts or inflation numbers, pinned the country’s exhaustion on one specific culprit: “Spider-Man: No Way Home” packing out movie theaters nationwide.

• James Austin Johnson played President Biden addressing the press corps about the Omicron surge, inflation, and public fatigue during the show’s Season 47 return, hosted by Ariana DeBose.
• Johnson’s Biden joked that the box-office smash “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was responsible for the country’s problems, telling reporters to avoid the film specifically rather than movie theaters generally.
• The sketch closed with the standard “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” tag after Biden name-dropped “House of Gucci” as an approved alternative.

The Setup: A Briefing That Goes Sideways

Johnson’s Biden opens the cold open the way the real president often opens his own remarks — mumbling through a few lines about the numbers before pivoting hard. The Omicron variant was still driving record case totals across the country in mid-January 2022, and the sketch leans into that backdrop, with Biden trying to sound in control of a briefing that clearly isn’t going the way he planned.

Rather than walking through vaccination data or hospital capacity, Johnson’s Biden decides the real threat to the nation isn’t a virus — it’s a wall-crawling superhero. The joke lands because “No Way Home” really was dominating theaters that winter, pulling audiences back into crowded auditoriums at the exact moment public health officials were begging people to stay home.

The Spider-Man Scapegoat

The sketch’s centerpiece is Biden’s plea for Americans to simply stop seeing one particular movie. Johnson delivers the line with the same halting, folksy cadence that’s become his trademark impression of the president:

“I didn’t say, ‘Don’t go to the movies.’ I said ‘Stop seeing Spider-Man.’ See anything else. I saw the first half hour of House of Gucci.”

It’s a small bit of misdirection that captures exactly what the writers were going for — an administration that seems more comfortable joking about a superhero franchise than confronting the numbers driving the winter surge. The “House of Gucci” endorsement, delivered as if watching thirty minutes of a two-and-a-half-hour film counts as having seen it, is the kind of specific, slightly deflated punchline that’s become a Johnson-as-Biden staple.

Reasons for the Bit Success

The cold open functions as a spoof of the administration’s defensive messaging during a stretch when approval ratings were sinking and the public was worn down by two years of pandemic disruption. By redirecting blame onto a Marvel blockbuster instead of policy, the sketch pokes at the gap between what the White House was actually saying about Omicron and inflation and what critics argued it should have been saying. It’s the same instinct that’s fueled other SNL swings at political messaging over the years — see the show’s long history of skewering politicians for what they say in front of a camera versus what’s actually happening.

The premiere also marked cast member Ariana DeBose’s hosting debut for the new year, giving the show a fresh episode to reintroduce Johnson’s Biden impression to audiences after the holiday break. Johnson had taken over the role earlier in Season 47, and this cold open served as one of his sharpest showcases yet, built entirely around a premise — blaming a movie for a virus surge — that’s absurd enough to work as pure comedy while still landing a real jab at how the White House was handling its messaging.

Sketches like this one are part of a long tradition of politicians becoming punchlines the moment they step in front of a microphone, and Johnson’s Biden has quickly become one of the show’s most reliable vehicles for that kind of material heading into the rest of Season 47.