Pete Hegseth’s caricaturist pitched a doomed joke about the Defense Secretary, only for it to then happen in real life.
Saturday Night Live cast member Colin Jost was speaking on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday, when he revealed he thought it would have been funny to do a bit about Hegseth using a fake prayer from Pulp Fiction.
Jost, 43, often depicts Hegseth, 45, satirizing his so-called warfighter mentality, bro-culture sensibilities, and relationship with alcohol.
Jost said that life narrowly escaped imitating art earlier this year after his idea to have his Hegseth parody read a fake Bible passage from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit was thrown out in the writers’ room.
“We were pitching, we were talking in the writers’ room, we were pitching ideas for one of the cold opens, like, two months ago,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Would it be funny if Hegseth just did that Bible verse that they have in Pulp Fiction?’ Remember, they’re like, from Ezekiel… we talked about it, and we were like, ‘That would be too ridiculous.’ And it would take up all this time in the cold open.”
“And then he for real did it! Like two weeks later!”
The fictionalized verse is said by Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic hitman Jules Winnfield.
Hegseth dropped jaws with his April recital of the made-up passage, which sounds similar to Bible scripture but had more in common with Jackson’s fictionalized recital.
“They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17, so the prayer is CSAR 25:17, and it reads, and pray with me, please, ‘The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth said to a room full of people.
“Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know My call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.”
Jackson, meanwhile, before shooting and killing a man in Pulp Fiction, says, “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.
“Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children, and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the law when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”
The real Ezekiel 25:17 is a little different, and reads: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
Jost’s cold open impressions of Hegseth have become one of SNL’s mainstay comments on the Trump 2.0 administration, regularly digging out his shouty demeanor.
One sketch featured Matt Damon as Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Aziz Ansari as FBI director Kash Patel, as all three hung out in a bar.
