It should come as no surprise that Saturday Night Live, marking its return with a Thursday mini-spinoff last night, has managed to make the already-tired week-long spotlight on Joe Wilson’s five-second moment seem newly hilarious. Re-imagining the behind-the-scenes planning of the “You Lie!” cry, SNL satirizes a team of uniformly Southern-drawled, blue-tie-wearing Republican senators, and finally gives us a more reasonable explanation for Wilson’s comment. As with the Tina Fey as Sarah Palin sketches last season, the laughs come not from hyperbole, but from the eerie accuracy to real events–and even though Palin is now out of the picture, Kristen Wiig as Michele Bachmann provides a preview of what might become material for a whole season.

—Fernanda Diaz

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