‘Tiger King’: ‘SNL’ Mocks Carole Baskin in Fun Parody

Saturday Night Live found a way to poke fun at Carole Baskin from Tiger King, even during the show’s first quarantine episode. The variety show aired its first episode of “SNL At Home” this weekend, with co-stars filming segments in their homes and then combining them for a surprisingly cohesive sketch. One put Baskin in charge of an online seminar during self-isolation.

SNL featured a parody commercial for MasterClass, an online service where experts teach their discipline to subscribers for hefty fees. All three “experts” in the skit were played by cast member Chloe Fineman, who had a pitch-perfect take on Baskin. She wore a leopard-print jacket over a pink dress, and a long frizzy blond wig with a floral headband to act out Baskin’ MasterClass on bike-riding, of all things. With a few simple green screen tweaks, the parody Baskin was suddenly sitting on a big cat preserve — just like in the Netflix documentary.

“Hey all you cool cats and kittens, come bike with me!” Fineman said in a fair approximation of Baskin. She threw in a few other teasing references, saying: “where are all the kitties? Good thing I’m not covered in sardine oil,” before getting right to the real meat of Baskin’ mockery.

In an awkward, improvised song, parody-Baskin sang about riding her bike, throwing in the line “—and I didn’t kill my husband” for good measure. She got this line in once more before the fake ad was over.

Baskin stole the show in Tiger King: Muder, Mayhem and Madness last month. The new Netflix original series tracks the career of private zoo owner Joe Exotic, along with a few other major players in the industry. That includes Baskin, an animal rights activist intent on stopping the breeding and trading of big cat species in the U.S.

Exotic took Baskin’ criticism of him and his zoo very personally, and hosted a long-running web show about his hatred for her. The documentary culminates in Exotic’s charge of murder for hire, with the jury deciding that he had paid a hitman to try and have Baskin killed.

Still, many viewers were more focused on Baskin herself — particularly the allegation that she had murdered her second husband and fed him to their tigers. Baskin even fed into this theory later in the documentary with an off-handed comment about how cats are attracted to “sardine oil.”

Unlike Exotic, however, Baskin has not been tried — except in the court of public opinion. She continues to operate a massive big cat preserve in Florida.