During her video address to the Al Smith Dinner on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris attempted humor by including former Saturday Night Live cast member Molly Shannon dressed as her Catholic school girl character from 25 years ago.
Harris is the first presidential candidate of a major party to skip the dinner since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon both attended in 1960. The only years that a candidate did not appear on the dais were the 1996, 2000, and 2004 election cycles when the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation didn’t invite any candidate to attend.
The dinner, named after New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic candidate to run for president (1928), is usually a fun “roast” style event where the candidates share the stage and poke fun at themselves as well as their opponents.
While the Harris campaign initially reported that Harris was not going to attend at all, sometime later it was decided that she would cut a video address to the attendees during this year’s event, which occurred on Thursday.
Harris’s video kicked off with the VP addressing the dinner while former SNL star Shannon pranced around behind her. Eventually, Harris stops her address to ask “who was that?”
From there, Shannon zips into the frame dressed as her hapless Catholic school girl character Mary Catherine Gellar. And she and Harris go on to banter back and forth about what Catholics need to hear in the vice president’s address.
Watch:
While it is obvious that the Mary Catherine Gellar character has a Catholic theme, it was probably not the best idea for Harris to have reached back 25 years to one of Saturday Night Live’s least popular bits, mocking the Catholic faith and traditions, as her introduction to the Al Smith Dinner.
Indeed, the Mary Catherine Gellar character was the subject of the 1999 SNL movie, Superstar, which happened to be the worst received, lowest rated bomb of all the movies based on the late-night series’ characters. It has a low 32 percent rating among critics and only 59 percent among fans on the movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes.
Her video was raked over the coals as “cringeworthy” and “historically bad” after viewers saw the bit:
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