SNL’s Walking Dead Sketch Plays The Undead Race Card

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

What do you get when you cross AMC’s The Walking Dead with more hilarity than you can possibly muster? That’s a serious question that I don’t have an answer to just yet.

What I do know is what happened when the “Not Ready for BRAINS!” players from Saturday Night Live sprinkled their spoof dust all over The Walking Dead this past Saturday. While it wasn’t the dumbest thing on TV Saturday night, I’ve seen Tic-Tac-Toe games that were more unpredictable. I’ll give it up to the actors, who always try to raise the bar for SNL‘s mostly hackneyed writing, and to host Kevin Hart for showing the world what a Kevin Hart zombie would look and act like. (Hint: It looks and acts like Kevin Hart!) Check out the video and feel free to call me foul names while you profess how strong the material really is.

Hey, I love a good non-pedophile Michael Jackson joke, and I totally wish Bill Hader could be Daryl and Merle’s other brother. My somewhat petty issue with the sketch is that, while part of the sketch relies the corny trope of someone pretending to be something they’re not, the other source of the humor comes from the obvious difference in races between characters. But instead of cleverly pointing out how often the show dismisses its male black characters, it just becomes a big “all white people are partly racist” joke. Which I wouldn’t have a problem with necessarily, except there have already been a fair amount of racist scenes within the actual show itself. So this isn’t spoofing anything so much as just playing the exact same form of prejudice for laughs.

But honestly, I might just be this worked up because I fucking hate Fake Carl as much as the real one.