And Your Host…
Josh O’Connor has the good SNL host fortune of being a super-serious actor who also looks a little goofy and who genuinely seems down to get silly. Which makes this middling episode feel like a missed opportunity almost all around. I liked O’Connor’s monologue, which had a little more effort put into it than is customary these days, the British actor’s recurring references to the internet-rumored live-action Ratatouille remake that he’s definitely not starring in as the jug-eared Chef Linguine a winning bit of self-effacing charm.
But low-key was too often the watchword for tonight’s show, with sketch after sketch shunting the engaging host into the bystander role, or at one point smothering him in no-doubt cumbersome makeup to little effect. A host’s first sketch acts as a barometer of the show’s appraisal of its guest’s abilities, and the post-monologue bit (another game show, hurrah) had O’Connor basically just sit on a stool and act flummoxed that one of his Dating Show-style contestants is a a cantankerous old woman. O’Connor truly only got to cut loose and do something fun in one sketch, late in the show. Otherwise, it felt like SNL hadn’t much idea what do do with the talented star.
The Best and the Rest
The Best: Speaking of, the college study group looked like it was yet another sketch where O’Connor would get to sit and smile pleasantly as someone else went for the laughs. Bowen Yang stars as the 12-year-old prodigy whose smug brilliance curdles into screeching embarrassment every time his obliging mom (Ashley Padilla) pops in to helpfully bring him his lunch, jacket, or study notes. Yang and Padilla are very funny, their codependent relationship playing out in a perfectly timed duet of dueling hurt feelings followed by sing-song reconciliation. (Bowen whining “Heatherrrrrr” stays funny, improbably.) It’s the sort of one-note gag that could get really tiresome if not for the lived-in dynamic two excellent sketch actors bring to it. So when O’Connor helpfully reveals that his mother is their professor only for the teach to similarly arrive with helpful advice, O’Connor’s immediately whiny “Barbara! Don’t do this, Barbara!” suggests a comic pitch he otherwise didn’t get to use much. Not a brilliant sketch (Yang and Padilla are pretty close, though), but a hint of how game Josh O’Connor really was to play.
The Worst: That’s that game show sketch, another uninspired post-monologue kick-off sketch that sucked the air out. And here I’ll take a break from my season-long praise of the clearly star-bound Ashley Padilla to say that her characterization of a motor-mouthed octogenarian dating show contestant here just doesn’t take off. Padilla’s done pretty much no wrong this season, exhibiting a deceptively effortless looking ability to imbue characters with a fascinating inner life. But this turn felt flat and one-note, a lot of noise and effort calling attention to the noise and effort. Certainly, Padilla’s not the biggest issue—the sketch’s one joke is basically, “old ladies—ewww!” (The cutaways to the placidly smiling O’Connor reacting to the other contestants’ cliched answers is funnier.) This feels like the sort of oversized characterization somebody thinks is going to catch on and come back, again and again. And it might. Unless we stop it.
The Rest: It was a toss-up between the game show and the Wizard of Oz sketches for worst. (Oz got saved by my desire for compositional symmetry.) A lot of effort went into this one, at least in the costuming realm. (The animated short plus commercial break that followed allowed everyone time to get stripped and scrubbed for the next live sketch.) Not so much the writing, as, apart from the tenuous Wicked connection, the single joke here didn’t justify dredging up a nearly hundred-year-old movie one more time. I mean, you have to have a reason beyond a dick joke, right? Or at least this dick joke, as it turns out Kenan’s Cowardly Lion has been relentlessly trying to get Bowen’s Oz to give him “a big ol’ thang” for some time now. The tone is all over the place in this one, with Bowen’s floating head Oz relishing the chance to tell Sarah Sherman’s Dorothy “Shut the hell up, girl!” when not reading out the various descriptions of just how big an ol’ thang the Lion would like to have. The makeup is fine but the impersonations are bland (O’Connor’s Tin Man made zero impression), and the sketch just isn’t much of a thang, sadly.
O’Connor spent much of the night batting around his IMDb resume of playing queer characters, locking lips with a couple of male cast members and basically continuing his reign as everyone’s sexually ambiguous dream boyfriend. (The straight-identifying actor has been thoughtfully candid about his string of roles in movies like Champions, God’s Own Country, and The History of Sound, among others.) The bachelorette party sketch saw O’Connor and Ben Marshall show up as the hand-picked strippers for bride Ashely Padilla, a pair of cardigan-wearing, performatively enlightened sweet boys who, in the end, wind up acting on their trembling same-sex smooch-urges. With their carefully pitched come-ons (“You are enough”), ostentatiously toted Hanya Yanagihara novel, and breakaway sweaters and jeans (over more sweaters and jeans), the two sensitive sex workers win over most of the assembled ladies. Jane Wickline looks especially uncomfortable delivering her one skeptical bridesmaid’s calls to see the guys “Ticonderoga pork pencils,” etc. And Veronika Slowikoska gets the Mikey Day prize for getting stuck with pointing out that these overly sensitive strippers are overly sensitive and isn’t that weird. Overall, Marshall and O’Connell needed to bring a little more energy to a simple concept, but it was… fine.
It’s holiday time, which means that that music service currently running ads for a white supremacist purge army is sending customers its summary of what they listened to during 2025. Not one to be left behind is that food delivery app, at least according to SNL‘s moderately clever parody commercial. The joke is that while nobody’s going to be that embarrassed by their own musical taste (no matter how much Steely Dan is on there), nobody wants to see what, how much, and from whence we get all our lazily delivered shame-food. Andrew Dismukes finds out he’s in the top 1 percent for “nuggets,” Ben Marshall screams into a pillow at the total amount he’s spent on junk food, and marrieds James Austin Johnson and Ashley Padilla are alarmed that their calculated ages are “52 and fat” and “dead” respectively. Amusingly topical and all, the best bit is on its own, as Padilla’s wife’s annoyance at JAJ booping her tummy explodes as, “What woman in the world would like what you just did?!”
Sticking with your idle internet enjoyment, those Variety actors/directors interviewing actors/directors mini-vids clogging your YouTube homescreen get aired out with a fictional holiday character version. (The Grinch interviews Scrooge, Rudolph and the Partridge in the Pear Tree, you get it.) The funny bit is that these elaborately costumed fictions all speak in the same practiced, mutual-appreciation cliches. (“When we did ’12 Days’…,” Bowen’s Partridge windily begins, while Kenan’s Little Drummer Boy tells Marcello Hernandez’s fawning Tiny Tim that he wants to go by Drum Daddy now.) Another minor-key premise centered on a disposable bit of pop culture, capped off with the knowing reminder to “Let these autoplay on your computer so a bunch of nice people get to still work at a magazine.” Content is king, everybody.
Weekend Update Update
Jost and Che joined in on the cold open’s open season on Trump as figure of fun, with Jost leading off with the sort of collection of Trump speech gaffes that have proven so super effective in preventing a hateful old racist/rapist from being elected twice. But I kid a couple of kidders content to cruise into the holiday season while ignoring the most egregiously mockable set of crimes, outrages, and hypocritical absurdities ever offered up by any administration, ever.
Trump threatening to overthrow a sovereign government on ludicrously trumped-up pretext in order to set up a regime-friendly oil puppet state? Jost jokes about Trump’s encroaching dementia. Trump renews his racist slurs against Haitian immigrants and openly calls for more all-white immigration? Che jokes about Times Square Elsa. The vibe is remains, “We’re too cool to truly engage,” with a sub-theme of, “We’ll be fine, no matter what.” Jost even joked about the official Homeland Security social media account’s anti-immigrant trolling without bringing up the fact that those same trolls keep using Saturday Night Live content to do the same. Skillful deliverers of glib cleverness is a legacy, I guess.
Look, I like Marcello Hernandez. He’s charming, energetic, and winning whenever he’s on screen. But he’s faded a bit in the screen time rankings this season, and so an Update bit doing a chunk of his stand-up wasn’t surprising this week. Hardly groundbreaking holiday-themed stuff, but Marcello’s likable enough to squeak by, not that that’s going to cut it going forward. A joke about boyfriends at family dinner was solid (“You don’t like the food, Kyle, you like having sex with my cousin”), while the “If I did that when i was a kid, my Cuban mother would beat me” stuff fairly creaked.
Speaking of people in even direr need of an Update bump, Jane Wickline brought out her keyboard. The unassuming comic was brought on board largely on the back of these sorts of ditties, which I do like as much as their offbeat charms inspire. Her song about the true dangers posted by the Stranger Things kids is the sort of silly swerve (from the dangers of A.I.) Wickline’s songs thrive on, and while I understand there’s a vocal segment of the SNL viewership out there screaming for Wickline’s dismissal (at least), it’s tough to imagine her amusing little musical doodles inspiring such venom.
Recurring Sketch Report
It’s a mixed blessing that this SNL cast hasn’t developed many recurring characters over the past few years. (Boo, Domingo, boo. You are not a thing.) After all, my love-hate relationship with Saturday Night Live‘s storied history of going to the well 10 times too often gets its own review category and everything. There’s an elusive alchemy to the rare repeater that never wears out its welcome. The more the performers and writers appear to want to make a hit character happen, the thirstier it feels. Mostly a promising bit is revealed to have only one bullet in the chamber, each successive dud going off in the studio with pale, strained echoes.
So where does Bowen Yang’s weirdo doctor with the long hair fit in? Never a huge laugh (unless Ryan Gosling gets another of his giggle fits), these pieces where Yang’s impossibly fey and creepy doc delivers diagnoses amidst absurdist interruptions and bouts of hesitant flirting with his equally odd colleague (O’Connor here) and bags of inexplicable snack food cruise along on a deliberately offputting rhythm. I think I like them? This outing benefits from nurse Ashley Padilla’s getting in on the act via some rat-a-tat deadpan with Yang. (“Doctor, your 5 o’clock…” “Is dead?” “No, is ugly.” “Then kill him.” “I’ll try.”) O’Connor, when not busting out some Cockney medical results to patient Andrew Dismukes, mumbles along as Yang’s intern/lover/possible relative, also getting in some fine Airplane!-riffing. (“What? Are you serious?” “I am. And don’t call be Serious. My name is Shirley.”) Sure, sometimes these feel like a roomful of Stefon wannabes looking for a franchise. But this is Bowen Yang’s realm, a gay-coded comic sandbox he’s helped establish and where he reigns in singular, weirdo splendor.
I’m conflicted about Brad and His Dad, back for another go-’round of animated underplaying. For sure longtime stalwarts Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day have put in time and work enough to earn a rare SNL showcase. And I like the shorts’ whole vibe—the relationship between doting but dissolute divorced dad and distracted, obliging son walks a skillful line of heartfelt and puncturing incident. Here the two go Christmas tree shopping, the dad’s effortful attempts at connection running up against his boy’s ungainly go-along spirit. There’s a queasy sweetness to these pieces, the clear voice of sons and fathers of divorce, complete with the uncomfortably unspoken attendant fears and foibles. (The dad’s bleary happiness that his son is coming over on Christmas morning after all involves him shooing last night’s barfly hookup out of bed.) Whether Brad and His Dad have enough charisma to earn their place in the average show’s lineup is another story—these are so low key and personal that they stretch the format perhaps too far to fit. Still, I’m always complaining that SNL needs to take more stylistic chances, so I’m not going to squark overly.
Political Comedy Report
The Trump cold open tonal teeter-totter thunked back into silly-buffoon Trump this week. As ever, James Austin Johnson’s is SNL‘s premiere version of this perennial vulgarian target, the technical craftsmanship always amusing, no matter the week’s real-world Trump-ian horrors. Maybe its a measure of how vulnerable the would-be destructor of American democracy and human decency seems during the writing week, but this Trump number leaned hard into the sundowning, barely coherent Trump, perhaps owing to a week filled with legal and legislative losses, further reports of bleary napping on the job and health questions, and the most recent dump of damning Epstein photos. I don’t begrudge those working the topical Trump joke mines each week—god knows it’s tough to find the traditional “aw, look at that silly president” humor when said president is actively engaged in a white supremacist campaign of illegal international terror.
Here, JAJ’s Trump emerges from the bowels of Air Force One to abusively field questions from the sheepish press corps, make undisguised passes at his press secretary, and otherwise gibber around in the current affairs pool like a half-gone old bigot at the country club bar. So far, so accurate. These Trump sketches basically allow SNL to do a bit of weekly news clean-up/public service, simply by having JAJ’s Trump ramble on about his actual atrocities. So here we get his takes on the U.S. straight-up murdering and hijacking foreign nationals on the high seas (“We’re doing pirate now, arrrr!”), Trump and cronies’ open, juvenile contempt for female journalists (“Can a man ask me a question?”), and that time Trump gleefully confessed to peeping on underage beauty pageant contestants. The premise allows JAJ to do his thing while pinging all around the fringes of the Trump crap-show. It’s fine for what it is and does, even if there’s a queasy complacency creeping in once more. (That bowl of Trump-branded comedy condoms at a convicted underage sex trafficker’s party would sink a politician if we didn’t live in a caucasian cult-nightmare.)
Clownish, doddering Trump is still at the helm of a genuinely evil movement digging out the heart of a pluralistic democracy while openly plundering the world’s wealth for personal gain and propping up literally every dictator, strongman, and bloodthirsty, xenophobic cretin in power across the globe, so, you know, there’s a lot more to work with, should SNL choose. Just this week, Trump’s all-troll administration used Saturday Night Live footage (for the second time in as many weeks) to prop up its ethnic cleansing campaign against American immigrants of color, a deliberate provocation to a supposed critic if ever there was one. To do nothing (again) with that looks an awful lot like capitulation, cowardice, and/or dereliction. If you’re up-top satirical target is taking ugly liberties with your show and you don’t swipe back, it’s a bad look.
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
It was a Bowen Yang sort of night, as he drove two major sketches, squeezed into a form-fitting body suit and prosthetic head, and scored more often than not. And while I know you’re itching to being child genius Simon back, I’m assuring you that he’s a tidy little one-and-done success.
Kenan continues to rack up never-to-be-beaten records.
Featured player-wise, Kam Patterson, Jeremy Culhane, and Tommy Brennan were all but shut out. (At least Culhane’s was a surprise.) Meanwhile, Padilla’s a star while Slowikoska and Jane got to sing a little.
10-To-Oneland Report
Thanks to SNL for anticipating my need to write about Lily Allen’s pair of stripped-down, ex-shredding new songs tonight. The very public breakdown of the British singer’s relationship with a certain American actor (and former SNL Grouch) forms the basis of Allen’s recent album, represented tonight by a couple of numbers whose unadorned specificity teetered between gripping heartbreak and self-parody. (Dakota Johnson was a surprise reveal voicing the other side of one song’s recreation of the back-and-forth between Allen and one of her exes’ mistresses.) So the brunch sketch, in which a quartet of diners (and Kenan’s server) break out into Lily Allen-style musical complaints similarly tilted from pandering praise for the musical guest and cheeky acknowledgement that Allen’s ultra-granular litany of complaints about the complicated nature of her former relationship situation is eye-poppingly awkward in practice. (Side note: Don’t screw over a singer-songwriter. It will not go well for you.)
The sketch itself passes the test of being amusing regardless of the celebrity cameo of it all, thankfully. Aping Allen’s prosaic lyrical laments with songs detailing just why the various characters are ticked off about someone eating more than her share of flatbread or Bowen’s diner sending beck his too-spicy drink (even though the restaurant expressly says their spicy margs are very spicy) go on just long and specific enough for the joke to land. And the inevitable Allen drop-in got weird enough too, as the singer—after being mistaken for a server—does a spotlight verse about that time she worked an entire Cheesecake Factory shift because she was too polite to correct anyone. Plus, we have what I believe is Saturday Night Live‘s first ever ferret guest appearance. I am prepared to be corrected, but here’s to Peepers.
Stray Observations
Being a little Josh O’Connor-ignorant, I spent the morning watching the new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man for research. O’Connor, playing a pugnacious priest, is terrific as sidekick/spiritual foil to Daniel Craig’s peerlessly dapper dandy detective Benoit Blanc, while the movie is another of Rian Johnson’s slyly slicing social satires in the guise of a locked room mystery. Not to compare apples and whodunnits, but the movie’s take on America’s cult-of-personality grievance culture set a bar that tonight’s typically wishy-washy SNL Trump stuff just couldn’t clear.
What with the Ratatouille and Flushed Away references in his monologue, O’Connor has clearly been getting “he looks like a rodent” comments. Honestly, it kind of works for him.
The season-long attempt to pump some laughs into bad game show sketches via funny names continues. Here, Kenan’s host is Garth Vader, which would be a little funnier if the sketch didn’t rush to point out how funny it is.
Props to the very good dog and the very good ferret who largely kept it together on live TV tonight.
Apart from the military blowing up Santa, the Trump-as-Santa conceit beginning the cold open was a big ol’ nothing, huh?
[On Trump claiming that “affordability” is a word Democrats made up to hurt him.] “But if Democrats wanted to make up a word specifically to hurt Trump it would probably be ‘fatmentia.’”—Che.
Episode Grade: A lackluster C-Plus of missed opportunity.
Next week: We close out 2025 with second-time host Ariana Grande and scond-time musical guest Cher. (Whose first time was 38 years ago.)
