Colin Jost's Pete Hegseth Welcomed the USS Lincoln Home on SNL. Nobody Asked Him to Sing

Colin Jost has a good job. He sits at a desk on Saturday nights and reads jokes off a card, and then he goes home to Scarlett Johansson. Most men would stop there. Jost, for reasons of his own, also plays Pete Hegseth.

He's been doing it since last season, when he debuted the impression in the season premiere, and it's become one of the show's regular political bits. On Saturday, with Shane Gillis hosting and Rosalía as the musical guest, the cold open had Jost's Hegseth welcoming home sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln after a 322-day deployment, and catching them up on the news they missed.

Among the crew's accomplishments, he praised them for surviving with zero working toilets, which is the sort of honor nobody puts on a résumé. James Austin Johnson came out as RFK Jr. with enormous forearms to give a health update, and the whole thing ended with Hegseth singing Linkin Park's In the End, which I believe is the first time that song has been used as a threat.

Now for the numbers. By Sunday morning the cold open had about 76,000 views on YouTube, far ahead of the 13,000 for the host's monologue, which Variety's critic said did not go well. It's early, and political cold opens tend to grow all week, but that's a healthy start for a sketch that aired after most of the country went to bed.

Here's my take. Jost doesn't do the impression so much as wear it, like a borrowed jacket that's a size too tight, and that's the joke: a man who reads the news for a living, playing a man who used to read the news for a living, now running the Pentagon. It's not subtle. Satire seldom is. A hammer doesn't apologize to the nail.