Luigi Mangione fans stun SNL’s confused Nancy Grace

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Saturday Night Live delved into the nation’s morbid fascination with Luigi Mangione, the man accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The cold open began with Sarah Sherman’s incredulous true-crime entertainer Nancy Grace complaining that “women and gay men alike” had turned Mangione into a “sex symbol.”

She said Mangione looked like “Dave Franco with Eugene Levy eyebrows.”

“This man is not a sex icon. “This man is – and I cannot say this more clearly – a murderer,” she said, slurring the “u” to the point of incomprehensibility.

Later in the sketch, she asks a character played by Kenan Thompson if he thinks social media users are actually attracted to the “sexy huntress,” to which Thompson replied, “Well, I mean, you can look at him and say that he h* *S.”

“I mean, women love bad boys,” said Thompson, whose character was at the Altoona, Pennsylvania, restaurant where police discovered Mangione.

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The skit cuts back to Grace asking his character about the state of healthcare in the US, then cuts back to Thompson shoving a McDonald’s burger into his mouth.

“People say health care in this country is bad. Then how come the dentist offers me free breast exams?” she asked.

“Well, Nancy, I’ve been eating McDonald’s every day for 10 years,” Thompson’s character said. “I have type 10 diabetes. … Do you know what my health insurance is called? ‘I hope it goes away.'”

Grace’s final guest: a “guy who looks like Luigi Mangione”, played by actor Emil Wakim.

Being confused with Mangione was “kind of a roller coaster for me,” he said.

“On the one hand, I’m constantly being attacked by bounty hunters, but on the other hand, I’ve gotten some of the hottest DMs of my life,” he said.

The moderator on Saturday, comedian Chris Rock, also addressed the phenomenon surrounding Mangione’s fan in his opening monologue.

Rock joked that if Mangione looked like Jonah Hill, “no one would care.”

“You would give him the chair, okay?” he said.

Rock expressed his condolences for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and reminded the audience that he is a real person with a family.

“But sometimes,” he said, “drug dealers get shot.”

Thompson was shot dead on the streets of Manhattan by a gunman – believed to be Mangione – sparking a days-long manhunt for the killer.

He now faces a second-degree murder charge in New York.

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The CEO’s assassination has exposed the absolute contempt some Americans have for the U.S. private health insurance industry.

Some social media commenters expressed no sympathy for Thompson, and many recalled how her loved ones either died after their health insurance claims were denied or lived in pain because their claims were denied.

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore – his 2007 documentary Sicko questions the US healthcare industry – was reportedly mentioned by name in Mangione’s manifesto. After being asked by some media outlets to condemn the killing, he said he did — but he also condemned the murders of Americans by health insurance companies and politicians protecting what he called a for-profit health care industry.

He said Americans were “1,000 percent right” to express their anger at health insurers and said he wanted to “pour gasoline on the fire.”

Even UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty acknowledged that the U.S. insurance industry is broken.

“We know the health care system isn’t working as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustration about that,” Witty said in a recent commentary The New York Times. “No one would design a system like the one we have.”