Looks like Mrs. Maisel may have some competition. Not really, though a recent sketch on Saturday Night Live made us wish she did.
SNL parodied Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel with the show's star, Rachel Brosnahan, reprising her role as the titular character. The sketch opened up with Mrs. Maisel performing at The Gaslight Café, her regular comedy digs. After her set, a bright-eyed bar employee named Rita, played by Leslie Jones, can’t stop, well, marveling over the fact that a woman is onstage performing stand-up.
Mrs. Maisel tells her to give it a go and to just “say what’s on your mind.” That’s when “The Raunchiest Miss Rita” is officially born. The fake promotional trailer for her new series sees Rita channeling raunchy, blue comedy comedians like LaWanda Page and Richard Pryor. Every other word out of her mouth is bleeped out and still, the crowd keeps laughing.
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“I gotta say, that Rita’s really got something,” said Aidy Bryant, impersonating Alex Borstein’s Maisel character Susie. Mrs. Maisel, growing worried, wonders what will happen to her career if Rita starts competing with her. “Yeah, somehow I don’t think there’s much overlap,” Susie tells her. Kyle Mooney also appears in the sketch as “an even more exasperated Tony Shalhoub,” that latter being who plays Midge’s father on the actual series.
The fictional series is billed as “a little less stylized and a little more in your face.” And the trailer even managed to sneak in a Bill Cosby joke at the end, with Kenan Thompson playing the disgraced comic.
Amazon, please make “The Raunchiest Miss Rita” a thing.