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Throughout its nearly 50-year history, Saturday Night Live has had no shortage of ridiculous characters wearing equally ridiculous costumes. From beloved sketches that feature the Land Shark to infamous bombs like Robert Downey Jr.âs Suitcase Boy, the SNL cast members have never been too afraid to look silly on TV. Itâs just really charming when a show that airs hours past the kidsâ bedtime suddenly starts feeling like Sesame Street with cast members dressing up like cartoonish aliens or whatever David S. Pumpkins is supposed to be. In a show thatâs typically focused on parodying our fellow humans, thereâs something extra refreshing when it goes full weird and surreal, letting its actors play talking geese or Thanksgiving-parade floats.
The Weekend Update desk has strangely avoided this style of humor, opting instead for standard impressions of human celebrities or archetypes â at least until recently. It did feature a few nonhuman characters in eccentric costumes throughout its first 45 seasons (youâll see plenty of them below), but it really wasnât until Bowen Yang joined the cast in 2019 that Update started regularly embracing this style of comedy. Yang loves nothing more than to dress up like a weird little disgruntled gremlin, and the results have been so successful that the rest of the cast is getting in on it. Here we rank 12 of the most memorable nonhuman Weekend Update guest characters so far, with special attention paid to how high-effort the costume design seems and how much fun the actor appears to be having with it:
First appearing in response to the Catholic Churchâs child-abuse scandals making headlines in 2010, the Devil quickly became the showâs go-to guy for emphasizing how dark a real-life issue is. Sudeikisâs Devil is proudly evil, sure, but heâs fun evil, not real-life evil. He likes to put annoying pop-up ads on websites, not take advantage of societyâs most vulnerable citizens. Thatâs why heâs horrified to learn the details of the 2011 abuse scandal at Penn State, or that QAnon theorists in 2021 are involving him in their conspiracies. Heâs the perfect vehicle for the writers to get their shots in on the worst people currently in the news. This personâs so bad, the segment argues, that not even the devil would want to hang out with them.
Sudeikisâs Devil is ranked at the bottom of this list solely due to how low-effort the costume feels. Just a regular suit dyed red and two measly horns? Yang on an off-day would put this get-up to shame.
Although Gumby was a beloved recurring character throughout Murphyâs time as a cast member in the â80s, it wasnât until 2019 that he made it to the Weekend Update desk. Here heâs his same abrasive, overconfident self, yelling at Colin Jost and Michael Che the whole time for not inviting him back. In the segmentâs best moment, Murphy accidentally breaks into laughter. When the audience laughs with him, Murphy snaps right back into character and yells at them with a stern âcut it outâ arm gesture.
Gumbyâs costume looks somewhat old and worn out here, but that only adds to his appeal. This feels like the same Gumby outfit Murphy was wearing all those years earlier, like itâs been kept away in a closet somewhere waiting for this very moment. For an episode that was all about appealing to the older SNL fans, re-using what looks like the same exact outfit from the â80s was the perfect choice.
The SNL writers have seemed oddly obsessed with the untimely demise of poor Flaco the Owl, as theyâd already joked about him in the Update segment earlier in the month and let James Austin Johnson dress up as Flacoâs grieving cousin in that same episodeâs infamous Hooters sketch.
Shermanâs portrayal still shines here, however, as the grieving widow quickly reveals that her late husband had multiple STDs and a voracious sexual appetite. âFlaco banged anything with a pair of wings,â she laments to Jost. âI once caught him dipping tip in a frozen turkey.â The sketch has a lot of the typical Sherman humor, including constant below-the-belt digs at Jost and a ton of sexual innuendo, but even if that style of comedyâs not to your taste, you canât deny Sherman looked good doing it. That owl costume, from its realistic feathers to the subtle mourning veil, looked like it mustâve taken days to make and a long time just to put on correctly.
One manâs hero is another manâs villain, which is why it should be no surprise to learn that the heroic Captain Sully (who pulled off an emergency plane landing in the Hudson River in 2009) is enemy No. 1 to the geese community. Showing up the week after the incident, and again a year later to honor the goose victims, Larry describes the event as âthe Day the Crazy Loud Big Thing Came At Us Out of Nowhereâ and urges Seth Meyers to take his pain seriously, even as Larryâs absurd goose squawking makes that impossible to do.
At first glance, Sambergâs costume doesnât seem that high effort here â for his beak, they just paint his nose yellow â but Samberg deserves credit for how he subtly added signs of aging to Larry in his second appearance. Samberg also proved his love for playing birds in Cameron the Blackbird, a 2011 Update segment where he plays a gay bird in love with a gay fish (Taran Killam). These segments were never huge hits, but theyâre still pleasant enough to warrant a rewatch.
Introduced in 2019, this is easily one of the most controversial recurring Update guests. Baby Yoda, once the cute standout character of The Mandalorian, is here transformed into a Gen Z slang-spewing monstrosity, with a grating voice and delivery meant to mock the worst of TikTok influencers. âIf thatâs what Baby Yoda looked like on the show, the Mandalorian would have let him die,â reads the top comment on his biggest sketch, and itâs hard to argue otherwise.
Still, Baby Yoda deserves props for the sheer amount of effort that went into the costume. Kyle Mooney is nearly unrecognizable in the role, and thereâs a specificity to the characterâs quirks and intonation that proves that laziness, at the very least, is not the problem here. Mooney was famous for having his best sketches cut for time, so this character feels like a testament to just how much work he had to go through to get his moment in the spotlight. This might not be Mooneyâs best work on the show, but at least it repeatedly made it to air.
By the time this segment aired in 2022, it was already at least the third time Yang played a bug on SNL. Is it healthy that Yang likes to perform flamboyant, antagonistic insects this often? Probably not, but with results this funny itâs hard to complain. Responding to the constant PSAs in northeastern America that spotted lanternflies are an invasive species and you should kill them on sight, Yangâs Spotted Lanternfly introduced himself as a parody of a loud, defiant, trashy reality-talk-show guest.
Even the audience gets into it, booing Bowenâs character while he soaks it all in. Itâs a delightfully campy Update character, one of what must be dozens from Bowen at this point, and it also works as a genuinely effective PSA. The attention to detail on Bowenâs fabulous bug suit (which he flaunts to a booing audience) means that millions of viewers now know exactly what a spotted lanternfly looks like, and theyâre more motivated than ever to squash it dead.
Shortly before Norm MacDonald was fired from his Update anchor gig for making one too many O.J. Simpson jokes, he was visited by his future replacement, Colin Quinn, in a lion suit. The joke here is that Lenny, despite being a zoo lion, is basically just a repentant former criminal trying to better himself. âItâs all about my father, I was just acting out his rage,â he tells MacDonald. âI know that now.â It turns out that lions arenât so scary; theyâre just going through their own complicated emotional journey.
This is the earliest nonhuman Update guest to make the list, and the funniest part about it is just how bemused MacDonald is throughout the whole thing. The whole schtick is beneath him, he sure seems to think, but heâs delighted to see it through anyway.
Another entry from this year, Nwodim plays the famous stingray in a North Carolina aquarium who got pregnant under mysterious circumstances. To this day, people are still trying to figure out what happened there, but luckily the Stingray came out on Update to set the record straight. Yes, she really is pregnant, and the father is Michael Che.
Dressed in an adorable stingray costume, Nwodim doesnât just throw in a ton of raunchy bestiality jokes, but she also makes history as one of the first guests to properly make Che squirm. Usually itâs poor Jost being thrown through the wringer, forced to suffer through joke swaps or roasts from Sherman, but here itâs Che whoâs finally blushing with embarrassment. This dynamic would be dialed up to 11 with Caitlin Clarkâs later appearance, in which she humbles Che once and for all for his constant lazy WNBA jokes, but Charlotte deserves credit for doing it first.
One of the bitterest ironies of the modern world is that we almost put an end to adolescent smoking, but then those pesky vape pens swooped in and rendered years of effective TV PSAs useless. So in came young cast member Longfellow with his surprisingly detailed cigarette costume, complete with smoke somehow rising from the top, to defend the OG cancer causer. âSmoking makes you skinny and popular,â he tells the impressionable kids at home, all while declaring vape smokers to be âdorksâ who lack confidence. Is this the most socially responsible segment in Update history? Probably not, but Longfellow deserves props for his charming, chaotic delivery, and for the sheer attention to detail on that ridiculous outfit.
Photo: NBC
Although the amount of misinformation being spouted throughout the 2008 election paled in comparison to what we regularly see today, it was still a big enough problem to grab esteemed cast member Will Forteâs attention. Naturally, he dressed up as a giant silver telephone, telling Seth Meyers in a robotic voice all about how Obama is a gay terrorist. The tragic part is how Robocall knows this job is beneath him, but he just really likes the attention that comes with lying to elderly voters. This is easily one of Forteâs funniest Update characters, and one of the most high-effort costumes of any Update guest ever. Future cast member Aristotle Athari would pull off a similar trick 13 years later, but Forteâs far more adorable telephone robot wins out between the two. Itâs a shame the segment still hasnât been posted on the official SNL YouTube channel; if you want to watch it today, youâll need a Peacock subscription.
When that 4.8 magnitude earthquake hit New York in April, we knew SNL would do some sort of sketch about it, but we didnât know theyâd do it via a parody of two WWE wrestling stars trash talking each other before a match. (Fittingly, this aired the same night as Wrestlemania XL.) Marcelloâs earthquake brags about how he gave New York âa bunch of teeny-tiny punches like a scary massage,â but Kenan Thompsonâs eclipse comes out to set him straight. âCome Monday, all of America will be covered in eternal darkness!â he taunts. But much like the earthquake, his big talk is undermined by how the eclipse would only last a couple minutes, and only a small section of the country would get to fully see it.
Marcelloâs costume is the most effective. There is no intuitive way to design a costume for an earthquake, so giving Marcello a hat with a trembling Manhattan on top feels like a stroke of genius. Kenanâs costume is a lot more straightforward â SNL already pulled the same basic trick with TimothĂ©e Chalamet and the moon â but it still got the job done. This is one of the most energetic Update segments in recent history, and in the years that come, it should prove to be a quaint little time capsule of what life was like during this one very busy week in April 2024.
Everybody always talks about those poor souls who perished on the Titanic, but nobody talks about the poor iceberg who was just minding his own business before a giant boat crashed into him. (Half his ass was gone, guys!) This is the basis of one of Bowen Yangâs greatest characters and the greatest nonhuman guest in Update history. Yangâs iceberg is a total diva, an ice queen who just wants to relax, look good, and make music. But unfortunately all the media wants to talk about is how â30 or 40 people died or whatever.â But what about the Icebergâs new album, guys? Surely thatâs more important.
When watching this segment, one gets the impression that Yangâs been workshopping this bit for years. He seems to have understood that a premise this stupid needs to be pulled off with perfection, and everything from his line delivery to the breathtaking ice hat rises to the challenge. This was a moment that changed Weekend Update history, that proved that an inanimate-object character could go just as viral as Stefon or Drunk Uncle. Yang proved that going full stupid could make for a work of art, and the rest of the cast has spent the past three years following in his footsteps. The Titanic may not have successfully led its passengers to a better life in America, but the Iceberg Who Sunk the Titanic did lead Update to a more adventurous array of weekly guest characters, and thatâs worth some celebration.