Saturday Night Live was back live for the first time in several weeks last night, and it zeroed in on chaotic trading in the shares of GameStop, the struggling Grapevine-based video game retailer, whose shares were sent through the roof in late January by individual traders touting the stock in online message boards. The surge sacked the strategies of professional investors who had placed big bets against the stock.
In the new episode’s cold open, Kate McKinnon appears as host of her talk show “What Still Works, where we take a look at every part of American society and wonder what still works? We have a new year and a new president, so some things should work. But do they?”
The segment takes aim at government (the newly elected U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon backer); stock market (GameStop); social media (Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg); the vaccine rollout (O.J. Simpson gets the COVID vaccine, but “teachers can’t”); and Tom Brady.
“Now, let’s take a look at the stock market,” McKinnon says, examining the notion that profitability is supposed to drive stock prices. “That usually works, right? It’s where people invest all their retirement money, so it should probably work. Here to help us answer that question is the new majority shareholder of GameStop,” played by Pete Davidson.
Davidson: “This is crazy dude.”
McKinnon: “So would you say the stock market still works?”
Davidson: “First of all, it’s pronounced stonk market. Hell yeah, it works. I put all my money in GameStop, and I can’t lose.”
McKinnon: “Uh huh. So, normally a stock price reflects a company’s value, right?”
Davidson: “OK. “
McKinnon: “And two weeks ago, GameStop was valued at $17 a share, and then it went to $413 a share. Would you say that reflects the kind of business GameStop stores have been doing in the past two weeks.”
Davidson: “Uh, we sell games?”
McKinnon: “Right, but are you good at it?”
Davidson: “Uhhh, not really. People download all their games now, so we’re kind of like, I don’t know, what do you call it…”
McKinnon: “A dying business?”
Davidson: “Yeah, yeah that’s it.”
McKinnon: “Right, so your price should have gone…”
Davidson: “Down?”
McKinnon: “Instead it went…”
Davidson: “Up the most?”
McKinnon: “So now it seems like…”
Davidson: “The entire system is a joke?”
McKinnon: “Exactly.”
Davidson: “Interesting.”
McKinnon: “Best of luck to you. Uh, so the stock market no longer works," she says, then moving onto whether social media still works.
Then in SNL’s Weekend Update segment, co-host Colin Jost delivers another takedown of GameStop, calling the Wall Street episode one in which “a group of guys on Reddit figured out a way to get rich off GameStop while bankrupting a bunch of hedge funds.”
“If we could all rally and make ‘Now You See Me’ the No. 1 movie on Hulu, that would be as unlikely as GameStop being the No. 1 stock in America.”