The 2017 ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch Tina Fey will always regret: “I chumped it”
One of the most pleasant surprises about 2026 so far, amidst the seemingly endless global insanity, has to be the success of the UK version of Saturday Night Live.
From the time it was announced to its first episode, most people feared the worst, but the producers played a trump (no relation) card right off the bat by drafting in Tina Fey as the first host.
Having Fey on board for the opening show gave it all a much-needed shot of American authority and a stamp of approval from over the pond, aside from the fact that she is one of the leading comedy talents of the last couple of decades. Once she’d mucked in with the young upstarts in London, there was no looking back, and SNL UK has been renewed for a second season already.
After all, Fey spent nine years on SNL in New York, joining in 1997 and becoming head writer within just two years, the first woman to hold the spot. Across her time on the show, she graduated to ‘Weekend Update’ presenter, continuing to write and appear in sketches and picking up an Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series’ in 2001.
It can’t be understated just what an impact Fey had on the NBC show, and many consider her the most important person in SNL history. When she left to write and star in the six-time Golden Globe-winning sitcom 30 Rock in 2006, Fey retained her links with her old show that filmed in the same building, returning to make guest appearances and to host the show, again winning an Emmy in 2010 for ‘Outstanding Guest Actress’.
Often teaming up with long-term collaborator Amy Poehler, Fey would focus on the political characters in the US, like playing the vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, but in 2017, the first year of Donald Trump’s inaugural term in the White House, she struggled with an appearance on ‘Weekend Update’ that attempted to deal with a country poised on the brink of anarchy.
In August of that year, a Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, where thousands of alt-right, white fascist, neo-Nazis and Klansmen descended on the town to protest the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee from a public park, with counter-protestors also out in large numbers.
The events turned chaotic when one white supremacist drove his high-powered muscle car at speed into the crowd, killing one woman and injuring dozens more, so Fey and the SNL team decided to try to take the sting out of the situation by putting together a ‘Weekend Update’ segment featuring Fey dressed as a University of Virginia student trying to persuade everyone to eat cake rather than protest, something she later said she regretted, misjudging the tone completely.
She explained she’d written the piece while travelling on a plane, feeling she had got most of it right, but compared the ending to a gymnast landing and breaking their ankle.
She told David Letterman on his podcast, “…It’s literally within the last two-three sentences of the piece that I chumped it. And I screwed up, and the implication was that I was telling people to give up and not be active and to not fight. That was not my intention, obviously. I didn’t want anybody to get hurt.”
Although legendary chat show host Letterman felt that the sketch was ‘perfect’, many in America watching that weekend didn’t agree, calling it naive and believing that it was rooted in privilege.
Fey continued, “If I had a time machine, I could go back…I would end the piece by saying… ‘Fight them in every way except the way that they want’. But I didn’t write that in time! I wrote that two days later as I was pacing in my house. It’s painful. I wanted to help, but I chumped it. But the culture of apology is not for me.”
