In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Scarlett Johansson returned as a guest host, portraying Denise, a newscaster who added an inappropriately dark edge to her delivery of nightly news. The scene took place at Channel 4 New York, where Johansson’s character contrasted sharply with her upbeat, pun-loving colleagues, drawing laughs by applying the same whimsical tone to disturbing and violent stories.
Her co-anchors, Tommy (Kenan Thompson) and Susan (Ashley Padilla), stuck to cheerful puns on lighthearted topics. Tommy opened the broadcast with a harmless joke about a dog park, calling it a “doggone miracle,” while Susan followed with a warm segment about a coffee shop donating leftover pastries, offering the pun: “we tip our cap-puccino.” Their style was clearly meant to keep things light and cheerful for viewers.
Scarlett Johansson Delivers Morbid Laughs as Dark-Humored Anchor in Absurd SNL News SketchDenise’s Dark Humor Spirals On-Air, Clashing With Serious News And Co-Hosts’ Discomfort
However, Denise, filling in for the nightly broadcast, took a darker turn. When she reported on a woman being assaulted on a train, she tried to match her colleagues’ tone with morbid humor, much to their discomfort. Tommy attempted to redirect the tone with a more fitting story about a candy store’s anniversary, but Denise doubled down with a grim pun on a murder-suicide case, shocking her co-hosts and pushing the sketch into increasingly absurd territory.
The sketch climaxed with a series of similarly inappropriate puns from Denise, including a disturbing immigration-related joke: “hasta la visa, baby,” after reporting on a deported infant. The humor of the sketch lay in the jarring mismatch between format and content, as Johansson’s character remained unfazed by the gravity of the news she was reporting, using the pun format in a setting that clearly called for seriousness, thereby satirizing the sometimes superficial nature of broadcast journalism.