“Saturday Night Live” had its season finale on May 18, leaving its cast with no comedic outlet for the jury reaching a guilty verdict for former President Donald Trump on all 34 charges Thursday in a New York court. But no need to fear, comedy fans — James Austin Johnson was cast on “SNL” after going viral for walking down the street and delivering rambling, stream-of-consciousness rants as Trump mixing in pop culture references, and he went back to social media to do just that Thursday afternoon.
Instead of ranting about the specific charges Trump was convicted on, though, Johnson had another target in mind: family Italian restaurant Buca di Beppo and the salacious images of women that hang on its walls.
“When you go to a Buca di Beppo, there’s so many wonderful things that are on walls, and that there are on the table, frankly,” Johnson began. “If you look at the Pope room, there’s a big head of the Pope, and you should be able to play with it, I think, like an action figure or something.”
“You know, when you go to collectible store and they have so much behind glass, and you can’t look at any of it?” the impressionist continued, comparing the family restaurant with a hobbyist outlet. “The last time I checked, Buca di Beppo was not a collectible store, so we would like to be able to take the framed photographs down from the men’s room at Buca di Beppo.”
“And instead what you have is a very disgraceful judge who has said that you’re not allowed to do that, when in fact, you should be allowed to do that,” Johnson-Trump added, using language reminiscent of how Trump would regularly attack Judge Juan Merchan from his New York trial. “Because they’re fun pictures, and the carbonara is very expensive. And I think carbonara, what is that, like four or five ingredients — peas… it’s bacon, you know, they give it a different name, Italian name, but it’s bacon — and I think some cheese, maybe a couple eggs. And it sounds like breakfast, but it’s a very yummy pasta.”
“But they charge you so much, they’re charging people so much and there was no way, it’s an absolute disgrace, there was no way to pay for the carbonara,” the “SNL” star said, moving on from a carbonara recipe back to price and talking about the photos of attractive women on the restaurant’s walls. “And so I was very justified in taking the photos of the beautiful ladies down from the men’s room, Sophia Loren, and there were some butts where you couldn’t see the faces, and a couple others, but they were they were pretty hot — old-timey hot, old-timey hot — still hot, but old-timey, not modern.”
“So you have a politically appointed and absolutely disgraceful general manager who said we could not take these photos down, and even though we had a screwdriver, we had everything that we needed to do so, but they said we couldn’t do it,” Johnson said as he concluded. “Our country is in decline, Buca di Beppo is in decline, the breadsticks are not as good, people say that, people say that the bread’s not as good, definitely not very good.”
Johnson followed up the video with another post to promote the fact that he is on tour this summer, doing live comedy with support from his “SNL” castmates Andrew Dismukes and Devon Walker.
Watch the full video above.
