The cold opening for the Saturday Night Live episode airing the night before Super Bowl LV took aim at both Super Bowl commercials and the need of advertisers to reach certain audiences without alienating other potential customers. This led to a series of commercial parodies promoting both pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine beliefs and a commercial which referenced the infamous QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Commercials run during the Super Bowl are big business and companies pay millions of dollars to air their advertisements during The Big Game. This has resulted in many people who aren't fans of American football watching the game purely to see the funny commercials or the Super Bowl trailers for highly anticipated movies. Traditionally, Super Bowl commercials avoided promoting any political philosophy or making any comment on controversial current events for fear of driving away customers who disagreed with their message. However, this attitude has shifted in recent years as more consumers have begun basing their shopping habits around whether or not businesses share their values.
The first sketch of Saturday Night Live's episode on February 6, 2021 made reference to this, with the cast taking on the roles of American football commentators James Brown (Kenan Thompson), Bill Cowher (Alex Moffat), Nate Burleson (Chris Redd), Phil Simms (Mikey Day) and Boomer Esiason (Beck Bennett) as they hosted a Super Bowl 2021 pre-game show. The core joke of the seven-minute sketch was that a greater effort was being made in 2021 to "encourage a spirit of unity" than in previous Super Bowls and this was being done at every level, including the advertising, which set up a series of commercial parodies. A clip highlighting this section of the skit can be viewed in the window below.
The first ad was a relatively benign (if tasteless) commercial full of images of Black Lives Matter protesters along with Civil Rights icons like Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that spoke of how "we must always strive for equality and we must always reach for Cheez-Its." This led Bill Cowher to assure Saturday Night Live's viewers that the progressive ads were balanced out with more conservative ones, setting up a commercial for the Papa John's pizza chain. This commercial parody referenced the QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton ran a secret pedophile cabal from the basement of a pizzeria in Washington D.C. and asked viewers to "stop by with your Q-pon" while assuring them that Democrats would have to go elsewhere to get their pizza with a side of child sex trafficking.
The final pair of commercials were said to be part of an effort by Budweiser Beer to save money by recycling some of their classic advertisements as part of a public awareness campaign to spread awareness of the COVID-19 vaccine. This set up a commercial where one of the Budweiser Clydesdales kicked a hypodermic needle into the arm of a waiting senior citizen. However, in the interest of unity, and respecting the beliefs of the anti-vaccine lobby, Budweiser also financed a second ad, in which the Budweiser frogs replaced their usual chant of "Bud-Wise-Er" with "Don't Trust Pfizer."
There is some irony that Saturday Night Live attempted to present a balanced view with these Super Bowl LV commercial parodies. However, the clear intent of the sketch was to mock the idea that unity should mean respecting all beliefs equally, no matter how insane, ill-informed or hateful. The skit also held up a mirror to the mercenary nature of advertising and the shallow nature of sports commentary, in which some of the commentators described a beer commercial as powerful and how "it really makes you think."