Saturday Night Live has just returned from a three-week break, and the big story everyone was hoping they’d cover was Kristi Noem and her poor dog, Cricket. South Dakota’s Republican governor (and VP hopeful) sparked viral outrage recently when she announced in her novel, with seemingly little prompting, that she’d once murdered her 14-month dog Cricket. While it seemed she revealed this to sound tough, it instead made her seem like a psychopath, even to the fellow GOP peers she was trying to impress.
Early into this week’s episode it almost seemed like the SNL writers were planning to let the whole story go. Colin Jost got a fun burn early into “Weekend Update” where he compared Noem shooting poor Cricket with Trump wanting to put down Mike Pence. “Something tells me Trump would fully support killing disobedient pets,” Jost muses, as Pence’s picture displays beside him. Dua Lipa’s monolgue also involved a brief Noem impression by Heidi Gardner, but the host jokingly shut her down quickly.
Luckily, it turns out that SNL was saving its Noem material for young cast member Marcello Hernández, who showed up on “Update” in an adorable dog costume and a seemingly pleasant, excited attitude.
“My name is actually Cricket the Seventh,” he quickly explained. “Yeah, the first six were bad dogs, Colin. But you know what they say, lucky number seven, right?”
Quickly, Cricket VII’s confidence starts to fall apart, as it becomes clear that his insistence that Noem’s “a great dog owner” who’s simply the victim of “media spin” is just something he’s saying to avoid suffering the same fate as her first six pets.
“Scared? I’m not scared,” he tried to assure Jost. “I have a great life. [Noem] gets me so many toys. She even got me one of those dog button mats you can press to talk.” As he pressed the buttons, they sounded out, “She is going to kill me.” A terrified Cricket VII tried to play it off: “These are like broken or something.”
The implications grow more ominous as the poor dog revealed that Noem been explicitly threatening him: “She’s writing another book. She keeps saying, ‘You better behave or you’re going to go in the book.’”
When Jost expressed shock and concern, Cricket VII sarcastically told him “Yeah, Colin, she kills all her animals,” before discreetly slipping him a note that reads, “I’m not being sarcastic.”
Cricket VII’s final words in the segment are a desperate shout of “I’m a good boy!” Although Kristi Noem’s memoir strongly implies that this might not be enough to save him, we sure hope Hernández’s Cricket gets the happy ending he deserves.