‘You Can Tell I Have Swagger’: New NYC Mayor Eric Adams Gets Hilarious ‘SNL’ Treatment
The team at Saturday Night Live (Jan. 15) had a hilarious welcome for Eric Adams, New York's new mayor, roasting him over his promise to bring a little swagger back to the pandemic-beleaguered city.
“New York is back, baby,’’ said comedian Chris Redd, who played Adams, 36, a brash former New York City cop. “The city’s never had a mayor with so much swagger before. I mean, y’all see me outside — the peacoats, the scarfs, the shine on the bald head, yo. You can tell I have swagger. Keeps me healthy. See, the city’s been suffering from what I like to call a swag-less existence.”
Almost immediately after opening the floor to questions, Redd warned reporters that he does “not do chaos,” according to the New York Daily News.
“I was a police officer for over 70 years,” Redd exaggerated. “If I get startled I start kicking people’s a--es.”
That’s when his press secretary, played by host and West Side Story star Ariana DeBose, interrupted him to reassure the audience that Bill de Blasio is the ex-mayor.
“He will kick your a--,” she said, the report notes.
Redd also tackled Adams’ plans to keep students in schools amid the pandemic, saying students need to be in class “to learn about life,” rather than from their “swagless parents.”
“As a mayor that is so saucy, just dripping in swagu, it hurts my heart,” he said. “It’s dangerous to have your kids out there with no swag.”
Redd also addressed a January 4 news conference, when Adams landed in hot water for comments about blue-collar workers, saying, “My low-skill workers, my cooks, my dishwashers, my messengers, my shoe shine people, those who work at Dunkin’ Donuts… They don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office.”
Redd rewrote the script, saying, “By unskilled workers, I meant folks with trash jobs. I mean trash lives. No wait, what I mean is if you were better at life, you would have a desk,” he said. “We in a society, OK? And there are kings and queens and then there are everybody else below that, the dirty people.”
Following a slew of JFK jokes and plans to make 28-year-old Saweetie his Marilyn Monroe, Adams assured the SNL viewership that New York City is in “good, Black, Paul Bunyan hands. We’re going to beat this virus together. I believe that.”
Watch the full sketch below:
