'SNL' Meets 'Girls' And It Is Glorious & Ironic

Saturday Night Live returned last night, with alum and beacon of wonderfulness Tina Fey in the hosting position and with their blindingly white new cast members rounding out the night as support. The latter is pretty reminiscent of some of ye olden discussion around HBO's Girls , so it was pretty fitting that one of the new cast-members was featured in SNL 's Girls parody last night .

The parody, which mimicked a promo for the show, welcomed Albanian caricature Blerta (Fey) into the sisterly fold of trouble twenty-somethings. New cast-member Noel Wells did her best Lena-Dunham-as-Hannah impression, with Cecily Strong, Kate McKinnon, and Vanessa Bayer as the other girls (McKinnon's Jessa impression was a real stand-out).

"If you speak they will know you are simple," Fey's Blerta says to Bayer's Shoshanna as they sit on a Brooklyn doorstep and talk man-problems. "If they know you are simple they will drown you in river. I am very hungry — please may I eat donut from your head?"

The best exchange is definitely the following:

Blerta: It's OK, you're only fifteen.Hannah: No I'm not, I'm twenty-four.Blerta: Twenty-four?! What the [bleep] is wrong with you?!

The parody speaks for itself, really, so I recommend you watch it below. I'm excited to see Wells and the rest of the cast flex the skills that made Lorne Michaels take notice, but the combination of the new cast with a parody of Girls — a show which has been sent up pretty widely as one of many examples of white-washing — does strike up some interesting issues of representation and who just happens to get cast in the important roles for the important shows. It's a big discussion, but for now we'll just leave you with one of our past articles about the casting, and with this on-point tweet from HitFix's Daniel Fienberg:

Image: NBC