Why Melissa McCarthy Had to Play Sean Spicer

Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of the president as a squinty-eyed, bloviating man-child has gotten under Mr. Trump’s skin since before the inauguration. But for truly innovative political parody, look beyond the Oval Office to the briefing room, and to the comic genius of Melissa McCarthy.

As Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, on last week’s “Saturday Night Live,” Ms. McCarthy guzzled gum, offered an apology “on behalf of the press, to me” and doused a reporter with a Super Soaker. She not only delivered a hilarious send-up of the Trump administration’s increasingly tortured relationship to the press, facts, and language itself (“when you use the words and he uses them back, it’s circular using of the word”), she set a new standard for cross-gender casting.

Casting a man in a woman’s role is a time-honored source of cheap laughs for sketch comedy shows. See, for instance, the classic Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese and Graham Chapman, both in drag, pay a visit to Jean-Paul Sartre and encounter his wife, Betty Muriel Sartre (Simone de Beauvoir is nowhere to be seen), played by Michael Palin, also in drag. The sketch is amusing and joyfully absurd (Madame S. employs a goat to eat her husband’s excess pamphlets), but it also rests, like much Python, on the assumption that men playing women are funnier than women playing themselves. Female members of the Python troupe, like Connie Booth, were given relatively little to do, and many Python sketches rely at least in part on the notion that men wearing dresses and speaking in high voices are naturally hilarious.

“Saturday Night Live,” too, has long put its male players in female drag, sometimes just for laughs and sometimes because it simply had too few female cast members to play all the necessary female roles. In 2013, Kenan Thompson announced he would no longer perform in a dress, tired of being the show’s go-to choice to play black female celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Maya Angelou. The show subsequently hired two black female cast members, Sasheer Zamata and Leslie Jones. But it continues to put men in dresses — Fred Armisen’s character Regine, a mean, sexually demonstrative girlfriend, cropped up most recently in 2016.

As Mr. Spicer, meanwhile, Ms. McCarthy makes cross-dressing almost beside the point. She wears a fairly convincing wig, and her ill-fitting suit feels more like a joke about the poor tailoring that plagues the president and his administration than about the incongruity of a woman in male garb.

Ms. McCarthy isn’t funny as Mr. Spicer because she’s a woman, she’s funny as Mr. Spicer because she’s made a career of playing aggressive characters who are often angry for no reason. As Megan, in “Bridesmaids,” she broke new ground as a tough, crude woman with bizarre ideas and no boundaries who nonetheless finds romantic fulfillment, and in subsequent films like “The Heat,” she’s established herself as a powerful physical comedian whose best weapon is her snarl. On “S.N.L,” as she lifts up her podium to attack the press corps, it’s clear she was born to play the mouthpiece of an administration already defined by outbursts of rage.

While her gender isn’t the center of her performance, it matters. There’s a bit of an extra bite in a woman lampooning the spokesperson of a president who once bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, and who was reportedly moved to rage last month when attendance at women’s protests around the world dwarfed attendance at his inauguration. Add to that the fact that President Trump reportedly wants his female staffers to “dress like women,” and Melissa McCarthy dressing like a man to play his press secretary feels like a particularly astute way to needle the White House.

Melissa McCarthy’s turn as Sean Spicer is a reminder that cross-gender casting can be a lot more interesting than just putting a man in a dress — and that when you’re trying to mock an administration that seems almost unmockable in its absurdity, it helps to pick the best woman for the job.