Saturday Night Live Cold Opening: SNL Spoofs Signal Scandal
Saturday Night Live spoofed government officials over the Signal texting scandal in its cold open on March 29, and the video is going viral.
The SNL cold opening featured Mikey Madison as a show host and Sarah Sherman and Ego Nwodim as texting teenagers. The skit starts out with the teens making banal conversation about hot classmates.
Andrew Dismukes, playing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, then shows up in the chat to randomly inform them about military plans.
“FYI: Green light on Yemen right now,” Dismukes texts in the cold open. "Who is this?" asks one of the girls. He then adds a number of flag and eggplant emojis.
"I think you have the wrong group chat?" one says to Dismukes.
Saturday Night Live Cold Open Signal group chat!#SNL pic.twitter.com/f4JgkCabPD
— Lunar Surfer (@TheLunarSurfer) March 30, 2025
"Sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines," says Dismukes.
The spoof is a play on the real controversy in which Vice President JD Vance and other top administration officials discussed military plans involving Yemen in a Signal chat that mistakenly included Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg, according to CNN.
Actors playing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Goldberg, and Vance also showed up in the SNL spoof chat. Vance's character dialed in from Greenland. "Nobody knows why I'm here, especially me," said the Vance character, dressed in a parka.
They then discuss moving the pyramids. "Sending a PDF of all deep cover CIA agents. Don't share," says the Vance character.
“I think you accidentally added us to a government chat,” Sherman says in the skit.
Bowen Yang, playing Vance, says, “It could be worse, you could add the editor of the Atlantic again.”