Saturday Night Live has championed women comics, actors and writers since its debut on Oct. 11, 1975.
We know the names — Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Leslie Jones, Aidy Bryant — and the first SNL performer to win an Emmy since 1993, Kate McKinnon.
Why single out Kate McKinnon? Because this past Saturday, Oct. 10, with 24 days to go until the general election, Kate broke character during her “Weekend Update” appearance to ask THE question many of us are asking ourselves right now:
“‘Are you okay?’” Obviously not.”
But before we show the clip, here’s a quick biography.
Kate McKinnon joined the SNL regular cast in 2013, after a year as a featured player. Known for her impersonations of everyone from Justin Bieber and Rudy Giuliani to Elizabeth Warren, Angela Merkel and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Kate has won two Emmy Awards and been nominated seven times for her work on the show.
Born and raised on Long Island, Kate graduated from Columbia University with a degree in theatre in 2006. At Columbia, she founded a musical improv comedy group (Kate grew up playing cello, piano and guitar) and joined a student comedy group that specialized in elaborate pranks.
In 2007 she joined the cast of The Big Gay Sketch Show, an LGBTQ-themed show on Viacom’s Logo TV, where she starred for three years. She did voice-over work and began performing with Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York before joining the cast of SNL in 2012.
Since then, she’s appeared in several movies, including Bombshell and the all-women remake of Ghostbusters, and voiced characters on The Simpsons, Family Guy and Disney’s Finding Dory. Currently, Kate is the voice of Mrs. Frizzle in The Magic School Bus Rides Again, a reboot of the original PBS series, and Squeeks the Mouse on PBS’s Nature Cat.
She and her sister Emily Lynne, also a comedian, co-star in Notary Publix, a web-based series they created that features several SNL writers and cast members. In 2019, the sisters released Heads Will Roll, a fantasy-comedy series on Audible with guests that include Meryl Streep, Tim Gunn and other A-list celebrities.
It was this past Saturday, however, that Kate endeared herself to us. She was playing Dr. Wenowdis, a so-called expert on everything people know. Host Colin Jost was interviewing the doctor, aka Kate, when all of a sudden, Dr. Wenowdis disappeared and Kate — the real Kate McKinnon — appeared, asking the one question so many of us have on our minds:
“‘Are you okay?’ Obviously not.”
Here’s the hilarious clip: