Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: NBC
On October 4, 2023, with the writers’ strike newly in the rearview, NBC announced that Saturday Night Live was finally returning from its extended hiatus. Just a few days later, a profoundly tragic chapter in world history began to unfold. In the eight and a half months since, the show has had a weekly decision to make about how to cover it — or whether to cover it at all.
While plenty of stand-ups have found ways to process what they’re seeing in Israel and Palestine with humor, SNL opted out almost entirely, seeming to wade in only where the show appeared least likely to catch a boycott and leaving it to guest hosts like Ramy Youssef to address the tricky stuff. Whether that decision was wise, cowardly, respectful, or cowardly for different reasons, rests in the eye of the beholder (or the eye of anyone pointedly not beholding).
Thankfully, what SNL didn’t satirize was only one piece of this season. Other metanarratives ran throughout, such as who among the recent cast would pull ahead of their cohort (Marcello Hernández). There were major surprises, like Shane Gillis getting to host after being fired four years earlier without ever appearing on the show. (Decidedly less surprising: Gillis and the show ended up not being a great fit.) And somehow, the low-cut tops Sydney Sweeney wore when she hosted inspired one of the more tedious, perplexing, and possibly dumbest conservative culture wars of late. (“Culture circle jerk” would be more accurate.)
Oh yeah — there were also some phenomenal sketches. A lot of them, even! Season 49 seldom stayed at cruising altitude for very long, but it often soared and had more highs than lows, which is about all you can ask from a nearly-50-year-old comedy show whose Achilles’ heel has always been consistency.
Here are the 17 best sketches from this past season.
Who better than the guy who co-starred in Barbie to demonstrate the proper way to revitalize ancient IP? Adult dead ringers for Beavis and Butt-Head separately find themselves at the same public event — and seem to be the only ones who have never heard of Beavis or Butt-Head. Frequent writing partners Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell had apparently been kicking around the idea at table reads and rehearsals for five years prior to getting it on the air. When they did, it instantly became the SNL sketch with the largest cultural impact in some time. Ryan Gosling and Day even reprised their roles at the premiere of The Fall Guy. It isn’t that the idea of a live-action adult Beavis and Butt-Head is inherently funny or that the makeup effects are so spectacular. (They are, though.) What cements this sketch as a banger is Heidi Gardner’s breaking whenever she’s asked to make eye contact with either of her two aloof co-stars. This is the one that season 49 will be remembered for, and the excessive hype is justified.
Sometimes a sketch hinges on a high concept, and other times it simply asks, “What if ABBA made a Christmas album?” Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig join former castmate and first-time host Kate McKinnon and a Nordic-bearded Bowen Yang to play “the Fleetwood Mac of cold weather” and sing directly into one another’s open mouths. An instant Christmas classic.
Josh Brolin was a dark horse for best host of the season, but he just might take the crown. Here, he’s an 1890s Viennese socialite, Kinskey, obsessed with the titular tower he bought to blow everyone away at his fancy party. He plays the fixation as valid and urgent, which keeps us anchored in something like reality — even after Sarah Sherman’s amorous archduchess shows up and things get truly deranged.
The first major cultural moment of 2024 came just days into the year when Katt Williams sat down with football hero and celebrity podcaster Shannon Sharpe. The resulting scorched-earth shit-talk-athon essentially condensed five years of Brian Cox–level hatred into three hours. No one who ever crossed paths with Williams was spared. It would be a couple of weeks and change before SNL returned from its holiday break — possibly too much lag time to make a sketch about the wildly viral clip. But Ego Nwodim’s Williams just had too much juice to keep off TV. She captures the exact way Williams performs in every second of that interview as if he were onstage taping a special — making outrageous claims and ludicrous faces as though his life depends on it. Meanwhile, Devon Walker’s semi-credulous Sharpe does more than get out of the way; his objections form a necessary counterbalance to the sheer force of Nwodim as Williams.
Wiig had help from some A-list friends when she hosted one of the season’s top episodes. Sketches like “Jumanji,” though, suggest that she didn’t need ’em. In this one, her dinner-party guest is forced to reveal she has a strict no-board-games policy lest she get “Jumanji’d.” She can’t believe the naïve nitwits around her are so cavalier about playing board games in a world governed by Jumanji rules. A lesser sketch would have milked the others’ skepticism for longer before the inevitable turn. Instead, the focus quickly shifts to picking apart Wiig’s understanding of Jumanji lore, rather than why she believes it’s real. In this game, the viewer wins.
Musical guest Ariana Grande didn’t need to audition to host SNL after showing up in a pair of sketches in Brolin’s episode; she had already pulled double duty back in 2016. But the straight face she maintains while slipping “Happy Birthday” into this extended cut of the love medley from Moulin Rouge! (for the third time) probably will have earned her the gig anyway when Wicked comes out in November. Yang, her scene partner here, also co-stars in Wicked. He revealed on Las Culturistas recently that Baz Luhrmann enjoyed his work in this sketch so much he sent a nice email about it.
The top topical impression this season belongs to Scarlett Johansson, who was crushing it on SNL long before husband Colin Jost made it to “Weekend Update.” The guest star mastered her take on Katie Britt’s cosmically cringe response to the State of the Union address within 48 hours of its airing. The only time the senator has been heard from in the two months since was when she proposed a federal database for collecting information on pregnant women, which suggests that Johansson’s much-applauded portrayal may be the only thing anyone remembers about Britt.
The occasion of Bad Bunny hosting SNL made the show put on its first truly bilingual episode. In one of three sketches either entirely or mostly en Español, Bad Bunny plays a 16th-century Spanish king evaluating the riches his explorers found while traveling through America. Fans of mules and those seed-filled juice balloons known as tomatoes might not have enjoyed the proceedings. Most everyone else, though, likely became bigger fans of Hernández, whose turn as the unimpressed prince was an early win for him this season.
It has been a strange year for the Please Don’t Destroy gang: They finally landed a title card in the show’s opening credits, their first feature film debuted on Peacock, and they made fewer videos for SNL than in either of their previous seasons — and fewer of them seemed to catch fire online. One glaring exception: the “Roast” video, in which they and host Dakota Johnson drag each other to hell. The writing is crisp, Johnson is at her Ellen-appearance shadiest, and, best of all, second-gen comedians John Higgins and Martin Herlihy find a delightful way to address all the nepo-baby talk that has dogged them for the past two years. (They quietly did so again months later, bringing their SNL-royalty dads onstage for the Mother’s Day episode.)
Pete Davidson beat Please Don’t Destroy to the punch of a brutal roast by several months, raking himself over the coals in the season opener. One good thing to come out of the writers’ strike — other than, you know, all the protections the WGA won — is that it delayed Davidson from hosting when he was originally supposed to in the previous April. Thanks to that delay, the Barbie phenomenon provided the perfect vehicle for him to vent about his reputation, his struggles with sobriety, and the lukewarm reception to his recent Peacock show. Beyond all the hard truths, it also has plenty of jokes. (Namely that one about Devon Walker.)
Emma Stone has justly cultivated a reputation as one of the greatest SNL hosts of her generation. (She spent so much quality time at Studio 8H she even ended up meeting her husband, Dave McCary, there in 2016 when he directed her in the iconic “Wells for Boys” sketch.) Here, she disappears into the role of a sensuous, prognosticating music producer and delivers possibly the most riveting sketch performance in recent memory.
Most 30-something friend groups likely have at least one couple that’s a little too graphic about their efforts to get pregnant. This sketch provides a fun counterpoint: a gay couple too dumb to know they cannot in fact give birth to a baby. Adam Driver and Yang portray this precious pair who outline their earnest mission to start a family by oversharing the details of how they’re going about it. Watching them be confidently wrong together is a hoot, as is Driver’s sassy reaction when the rest of the group disputes his logic.
The cultural footprint of those “You are not the father” segments on Maury in the ’90s is long and deep. Many of those born later have probably still absorbed the reference enough to get the gist of this sketch, in which a gray-haired Day uses an old Maury-style tape to show his adult son (Andrew Dismukes) “the day I found out I was gonna be a daddy.” But you should be old enough to have breathed Sam Goody mall-store air to fully appreciate the period details here. From Day’s Chess King–ass striped shirt to an audience member’s Starter jacket, this sketch is a representative time capsule of the web-1.0 era. And it’s all in service of a sketch that’s even more of a treat to watch than skipped-school daytime TV.
Few cast members have kicked in the door to their SNL tenure as forcefully as Chloe Troast. In her fourth-ever episode, the musical-comedian plays an Annie-esque orphan who turns out to be quite rightly unadoptable. From the moment she erupts into a throaty basso profundo lamenting her loneliness to the moon (Timothée Chalamet), the studio audience is all the way onboard. They have no idea what they’re in for as Cassidy ends up having way more hysterically disturbing surprises beyond her unlikely singing voice. Troast would use her musical talents many more times this season, and watching “Little Orphan Cassidy” as it aired felt like getting in on the ground floor.
“People-Pleaser Support Group” is a brilliant, uncomfortably relatable sketch, but only if you think so. If you don’t, then I agree — it sucks, it’s hideous, and whoever pitched it should be executed.
“Everything’s all right,” says Kenan Thompson’s barbecue pitmaster turned gynecologist after using grill tongs to find a baby in utero. But everything is not all right. It’s nasty. From the moment Thompson shows up with sauce stains on his lab coat, introducing himself as Fat Daddy, this sketch is deeply wrong in all the right ways. The doctor spends the next few gloriously gross minutes using rib-joint jargon to talk about what’s going on in Nwodim’s body and committing crimes against hygiene to find out. (Technically, they’re actual crimes.) And just when it seems this sketch has given all it has to offer, a roll of barbecue table paper appears from behind the door. Punkie Johnson is unable to contain herself as she unfurls it, and really, who can blame her?
What is left to say about “Washington’s Dream” that hasn’t already been said? Seth Meyers called it a “perfect sketch.” It has nearly 9 million views on YouTube. If “Beavis and Butt-Head” hadn’t exploded on TikTok, becoming popular with people who never watch SNL, this would have been the most talked-about sketch of the season. According to IndieWire’s oral history, it was originally intended for an unnamed dramatic heavyweight who had hosted last year. Fortunately, it went instead to first-time host Nate Bargatze, whose timing and delivery seem designed in a lab just to bring this sketch’s diamond-cutter-precise writing to life. No spoilers for anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of watching — just click away and behold the kind of SNL masterpiece that comes around only once a decade or so.
