Harry Styles’s Dead-On <em>SNL</em> MAHA Sketch
· The Atlantic
Any fan of medical dramas would know the scene well. An elderly woman is being wheeled hurriedly into the emergency room; she collapsed, we’re told, at her birthday party. She has delayed breathing, her blood pressure is through the roof, and the doctors and nurses are catching one another up, trying to figure out the right course of action.
And then the head doctor, someone usually strong of chin, steps in. As expected, he instantly assesses the situation and knows exactly what to do. “What she needs is a steak,” declared Harry Styles, the host of last night’s Saturday Night Live and the Noah Wyle stand-in for a sketch riffing on the HBO hit series The Pitt. “She needs protein, people,” he added with steely certainty. “Give me beef tallow and six raw eggs, stat.”
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“MAHAspital” was a withering parody of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, a fake promo for a TV show aimed at “people who love The Pitt but can’t stand its phony liberal science.” Naturally, it was brought to us by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the TV personality and fitness trainer Jillian Michaels, and “The Facebook group ‘Beach Moms Against Vaccine Tyranny.’” (“‘Five stars,’ raves the Liver King.”) Though the sketch’s first target was the constellation of poorly qualified skeptics who now direct much of American health-care policy, its real bite lay in showing how reliant these contrarians are on the tropes of mainstream culture, not to mention the medical system itself. As SNL made clear throughout the evening, the parasitic relationship between self-styled truth-tellers and the establishment that feeds their outrage has become ever more absurd—and funnier.
In under four minutes, “MAHAspital” impressively hit all the classic ER/Pitt story beats while also managing to cram in as many pseudoscience talking points as possible. There was the requisite conflict between two doctors clashing over treatment options, with a younger practitioner demanding respect from their supervisor—although in this version, the earnest appeal to credentialism was upended. “I’m a certified energy healer,” a nurse played by Ashley Padilla shot back with dagger eyes when Styles’s doctor questioned her diagnosis. “My Instagram wellness account, DaWellnessChica, has over 3,000 followers, so don’t you dare tell me how to do my job!”
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And of course there was a scene in which a tortured doctor (Ben Marshall) revealed his psychological origin story: His parents died of the COVID-19 vaccine … because he shot them when he found out they had received it. Dialing up the faux bombast to 11, he also nailed other common medical-series beats: He stepped in at the last second to stop a harmful misdiagnosis, slapping a bottle of Tylenol out of a colleague’s hand (“Uh-uh! Not in MAHAspital!”), and he pulled the plug, literally, on a vegan patient (“Well, nothing we could do”).
The final sequence played on a classic set piece: A patient was rushed into the emergency room at death’s door, and the ER’s heroic doctors rescued them from the brink. Only last night, the doctor was RFK Jr, played by James Austin Johnson in a bulging muscle-man costume, and the patient was a dead bear, which Johnson insisted they prep “for jerky. It’s been dead for days, but the meat’s still good.” Although it’s been a year and a half since Americans learned that the then–presidential candidate once dumped an ursine carcass in Central Park, the facts are so deeply strange that the joke’s still good. Johnson’s impersonation of RFK’s vacant stare was spot-on, as was his parody of the sort of emotional team-building moments medical shows just love: “You’ve been told over and over, ‘You’re crazy. What you’re doing is dangerous and irresponsible,’” he told the harried workers, “but you did it anyway.”
The sketch worked as a critique of the anti-science crowd—a group steeped in what Adam Serwer recently called “gullicism”—and the quack treatments they prefer to real medicine. But it also mined a deeper vein: the way a certain type of culture consumer loves mainstream entertainment, and loves complaining about it even more.
“MAHAspital” was a mash-up of two modes of entertainment that excel at raising the audience’s blood pressure. The shock and outrage peddled by anti-establishment media personalities provide as much of an adrenaline boost as fictional medical emergencies, making “MAHAspital” sound almost plausible as an entertainment option. All attention is good attention when you are in the attention business.
This idea was driven home during “Weekend Update,” when the new cast member Jeremy Culhane unveiled a devastatingly accurate impersonation of Tucker Carlson. Ostensibly brought on as a guest to deliver his thoughts on the Oscars, Culhane perfectly nailed Carlson’s staccato delivery with a repeated refrain of “Huh? Really? What are we doing? What is going on?,” along with the commentator's unnerving forced laugh. While discussing Sinners, he complained, “So leftist, woke America’s favorite movie this year is about sinning? Huh? Really? Why does that not surprise me? We don’t go to church anymore. We go to Sinners. That’s the rule. That’s the goal now.”
[Read: Pay attention to the first 10 minutes of SNL]
Culhane’s impersonation highlighted Carlson’s conflicted relationship with mainstream entertainment, which he relies on for his attention-seeking outrage (say, in his memorable tirade against less sexy M&Ms). Similarly, as “MAHAspital” cleverly suggested, the ecosystem of wellness podcasters and Instagram “experts” needs a medical establishment to challenge, even if their dudgeon can sometimes feel, like Carlson’s, a bit disingenuous. The MAHA movement really works only if the majority of the population, doctors and patients alike, think that conventional medical wisdom works. Every crank needs a foil, just as every vaccine skeptic benefits from herd immunity.