Saturday Night Live returns with C-Span coverage of embattled US defense secretary Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) taking questions from the press. After chugging a Monster energy drink and unilaterally declaring war on Venezuela, Hegseth challenges reporters to “pretend I’m a random fishing boat and fire away!”
He denies ordering a fatal second strike on survivors of an alleged drug smuggling boat while letting slip how much he’s craving alcohol: “If I had a drink for every Venezuelan we’ve killed, I’d really like that number of drinks.”
After a brief appearance by disgraced former congressman turned partisan “reporter” Matt Gaetz (Sarah Sherman), Hegseth turns things over to Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson), only to find him asleep in the corner, dreamily muttering about his sexual attraction to New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. After waking up, Trump reaffirms his support for Hegseth in the most damning way possible – “Fog of war … it’s a thing you only say after doing war crime …” – before reversing course and admitting that if said support hurts him in any way, “I’ll throw him under one of Mamdani’s free buses.”
Jost’s Hegseth continues to hit the right notes of aggro buffoonery, while the show outright accusing him of committing war crimes and the administration of using the war on drugs as a smokescreen for regime change in Venezuela are refreshing bursts of honesty for a show that, too often these days, pulls its punches.
Melissa McCarthy hosts for the sixth time. She is excited to be in New York during the holidays, attempting to set the mood with Christmas music (she joins the band by playing “mouth horn”), dousing the stage with way too much fake snow, and engaging in a violent tug-of-war over a piano with show elf Marcello Hernández. Half the cast comes out to join her in some more singing, dancing and mouth-horning. McCarthy is SNL’s favorite guest when it comes to physical comedy, with her monologue giving a taste of her slapstick talents.
At a Village Market, McCarthy’s awkward shopper takes an employee’s offer of free cheese samples as a grand act of kindness. She gloms on to the nervous clerk, literally pushing away anyone and anything that comes near, including, in one guffaw-inducing moment, an innocent mother’s baby stroller. Despite that big laugh, everything here feels a bit too loose. Also, McCarthy seems to have thrown out her voice, so some of her lines are hard to make out.
Next, a holiday-themed short film that sees McCarthy’s seemingly kind senior repaying a nice gesture from the 12-year-old boy across the street in a variety of inappropriate ways, including gifting him a gun to use against bullies and hiring a pair of sex workers to make him feel special after his school crush spurns him. A bit of dark Christmas comedy, though not dark enough to leave much of a mark.
At the UPS corporate offices, McCarthy’s delivery driver meets with two members of management to discuss customer complaints lodged against her. She denies any wrongdoing, but security footage shows her going ape after tripping on the complainant’s front porch: throwing, kicking and dropping a People’s Elbow on their packages; dumping trash all over their front lawn, releasing a live bat into their home, and dropping trough to take a 45-minute dump in their bushes. Confronted with this irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing, her only recourse is to pretend to faint while slowly wheeling herself out of the room. A solid showcase for McCarthy’s physical comedy, although the biggest laugh comes from her tearfully bemoaning her firing after giving the company “the best 17 days of my life”.
On Weekend Update, the first guest is Lance, a redhead who just went on vacation (Ben Marshall). Sporting a brutal “hell red” burn over his entire body (save for a sunglasses strip across his eyes and a bikini strip over his nipples) and worried that he may have sun poisoning, Lance encourages those travelling to warmer climates to use plenty of sunscreen, although, as it turns out, he suffered his burns on the plane after leaving the overhead light on too long. The first in what is sure to be a steady stream of ginger jokes from and at the expense of Marshall.
Up next is the Virginia raccoon that recently went viral for ransacking a liquor store, getting wasted, and passing out in the bathroom. Almost every time an animal makes headlines after suffering an indignity, Sherman shows up, in costume, to trash the update desk and give Jost the business (as a trash-eating varmint, she can’t wait to gobble up his scripted jokes). It’s been a minute since SNL has let Sherman go feral like this, which is odd considering it’s what she is known for.
A group of southern homemakers gather in the kitchen during one of their daughters’ sleepovers to drink wine and relax. Before they know it, they’re playing their own game of truth or dare, which quickly moves from innocuous (truth: “How do you like driving your Toyota Tacoma?”) to amorous (dare: “Would you like to go to the bathroom and kiss?”). This pattern repeats itself until all the women have hooked up with one another in increasingly risqué ways (dare: “Would you like to go into the yard and choke me sexually?”). The casualness of it all is part the joke, but unfortunately, it makes the whole thing feel flat.
A lovely friend dinner turns weird after the host (Andrew Dismukes) excitedly suggest they do “Sunday supper” every week. When the others explain that this wouldn’t work due to life obligations, he embarrassingly apologizes and heads upstairs, only to reemerge a minute later carrying a bindle and some suitcases. He announces that he’s running away “because I got too excited about Sunday supper and no one else wanted to do Sunday supper”. Dismukes is enjoyably goofy throughout, but the audience isn’t quite sure how to react, which makes things legitimately awkward. This also feels like the show attempting a version of a post-SNL Tim Robinson sketch, which does make one wonder why he isn’t hosting this month, given that he is a big-name alumnus who just wrapped up the first season of a popular and acclaimed series (The Chair Company). Feels like a missed opportunity.
Next up is a lo-fi holiday music video from Jane Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska that asks the question: “Where do cousins go the rest of the year?” The answer is Cousin Planet, where cousins live 360 days of the year, “every day is the day after a holiday” and there are only two laws: “One: no hooking up. And the second law is that the first law is flexible.”
The night concludes with a local news spotlight on the most decorated home in Yonkers. Christopher and Guillaume (McCarthy and Bowen Yang) are the sassy, bickering, deceptively heterosexual couple behind the makeshift Christmas Village, which includes such campy treasures as a Fashion Jesus statuette, a gingerbread five-story walkup, and a figurine of “Rudolph exploring himself sexually”. Laugh-free (save for a cheap Minions reference), this is a real flat note to go out on.
A funny and sharp cold open and a few notable laugh lines kept this episode from being instantly forgettable, but it is not one of McCarthy’s stronger showings, with precious little of the go-for-broke slapstick we’ve come to expect from her. SNL, meanwhile, seems to be leaning into the Christmas spirit even more than usual. With two more episodes before the holiday scheduled, we can probably expect some big-name guest stars to pop up in the coming weeks.
