U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, in Fredericksburg recently for a business meeting, recalled making history a few months ago.
But the Democrat’s story didn’t have anything to do with legislation or policy, though one could argue that it involved political theater.
Kaine on Nov. 2 became almost certainly Virginia’s only U.S. senator or former governor to appear on “Saturday Night Live.” He shared details of the appearance while at the Eagle Village office of the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance, the area’s economic development marketing organization.
The senator said he was campaigning for re-election in Lynchburg about a month before the show would air when his staff called and said, “John Mulaney wants to talk to you.”
And Kaine, not knowing the comedian and former SNL writer, recalled thinking: Who is John Mulaney?
The staff told the senator that the show might want him to appear on the last episode before Election Day, but that the writers don’t put the episodes together until days before they air. So they really wanted to know if he would say yes if asked the week of.
“My staff had worked up all the reasons to pressure me to do it because they knew I would say no,” Kaine recalled. “It’s the Saturday before Election Day. I’ve got to be out campaigning.”
But what his staff didn’t know was that his daughter lives in New York and was going to run the New York Marathon the next morning, on Sunday, Nov. 3.
“I thought, ‘Well, I could go to do Saturday Night Live, she’s an actress, she would love to go with me, I could feed her some spaghetti and take her to the starting line, then come back and campaign,’” Kaine said. “So I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’”
Each subsequent week he would ask if anyone had heard from SNL, but the answer was always no.
Cut to Thursday night before the Saturday in question. Kaine was campaigning in Leesburg when he got another call from Mulaney. They wanted him to do the show, and he learned the basic idea of the sketch he would be in.
“I said, ‘Can you send a script?’” Kaine said. “‘Well, we don’t have the script yet. It’s two days before.’”
A show representative later sent the script to the politico’s staff, who called him Friday morning with potentially bad news. They said, “You know, Senator, they kind of make fun of you.”
“And I said, ‘Listen, a politician willing to make fun of themselves? This is not going to hurt me with the Virginia voters,’” Kaine said.
So he went to New York on Friday night and got closer to the main event.
What Kaine didn’t know was that the cast and crew do a two-hour dress rehearsal before a live audience from 8 to 10 p.m. Saturday and then throw out a half-hour of material that doesn’t work.
“So I really couldn’t tell anyone I was on, because I didn’t want to be on the cutting-room floor,” he said.
There were a lot of laughs from the audience during the dress rehearsal, though, so Kaine learned he would, in fact, be on the show. But first came advice from SNL’s famous creator, Lorne Michaels, who told him to make sure to look at the camera when delivering lines.
“It’s like, OK, that’s what I’ll do,” Kaine said. “He goes through the whole thing, I made the cut and we’re getting ready to walk out, and he looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh, by the way, you guys are first.’”
That meant there’d be the cold open, monologue and then the senator would star.
What was the skit about? Well, Kaine’s staff was right. It did kind of make fun of him.
It was about a game show called “What’s That Name?” Mulaney, SNL’s host for the week, played a contestant who, despite seemingly being a Kamala Harris backer, couldn’t remember that Kaine was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election.
Nonetheless, Kaine said the experience was a “truly magical night.” It’s rare for a politician other than a president or presidential candidate to be on the show.
“It was really random and surprising and fun,” Kaine said.
Earlier in SNL’s season, its 50th, “Weekend Update” segment host Michael Che made fun of Kaine’s political opponent at the time, Hung Cao, saying the Republican had a “fantastic drag name.”
Apparently, some of Cao’s supporters said he should sue NBC for giving Kaine free airtime on SNL before the election, but he didn’t.
Cao was unsuccessful in challenging Kaine, but President Donald Trump recently nominated him to be under-secretary of the Navy. He awaits Senate confirmation.
Fredericksburg also was mentioned recently on SNL.
On the March 1 episode, comedian Shane Gillis poked fun at the Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, joking in the show’s monologue particularly about historian Shelby Foote’s role in the film. Gillis quipped that Foote fabricated tales, giving a hypothetical example about the Battle of Fredericksburg.
“Why’d you just make up that story in the middle of the show?” he said. “I’m not a historian, but I know that didn’t happen.”
