Parodying Lil Pump, the rainbow-haired 17-year-old SoundCloud rapper, probably isn’t as easy as it seems. His only mainstream hit, “Gucci Gang,” is the shortest song to make the Billboard 100 in over 40 years; his catchphrase, “ESKETIT,” could easily be a demand for pasta; his interviews can make you dumber. But all of this outlandishness and absurdity means that writing a joke that actually lands—a joke that he hasn’t already thought of himself, then turned into a song and profited from—is difficult.Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson has taken that challenge on lately—the Lil Doo Doo character he brought out when Chance the Rapper hosted was shamelessly aimed at Lil Pump—and last night he brought a sketch that worked on its own. “Tucci Gang” lifts everything from “Gucci Gang”—the beat, the slurred hook, the high school video, the tiger prowling the halls—and twists it into a tribute to character actor Stanley Tucci (played here by host Sam Rockwell). “There’s a certain guy, Davidson says. “He’s a character actor we both love. He’s very under-appreciated. This is for our boy, Stanley.”As a very distant admirer of Tucci’s work, I’m pleased to have learned something from the parody, and to have spent the next 20 minutes browsing around the internet for interesting mini-facts. Did you know, for example, that Tucci has two cookbooks? One is called The Tucci Cookbook and the other, brilliantly, is called The Tucci Table. He looks like a man who would make a very good three-course meal for a group of friends and insist that everyone drink the after-dinner liqueur that he brought back from Italy last month. I’d like to go to that party. I’d like to drink that liqueur.But the important thing is that, now Davidson has nailed the parody, it’s only a matter of time before Lil Pump ends up with an Instagram picture of himself, Davidson, Tucci, and Rockwell-as-Tucci. In a way, that's a good thing.Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.
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