'SNL' Recap: John Mulaney Helps Get Us Through The Election

By Joe Berkowitz, an entertainment reporter and cultural commentator.

This moment is a real Schrödinger’s America situation. Like the famous thought experiment about a possibly dead cat in a box, the U.S. right now is simultaneously either rebuking Trumpism once and for all or making its previous rebuke a mere blip on the path to vindication — and nobody will know which is the reality until after we peer inside the ballot box.

Similarly, no one can accurately assess whether Kamala Harris’s giddy cameo on Saturday Night Live last night was “successful” until after the election. But here goes.

Harris’s appearance could hardly have gone any better for her.

The cold open begins with resident Trumpologist James Austin Johnson in a blindingly orange reflective vest — Trump cosplaying as a garbage man earlier this week for reasons as logically flawed as they were aesthetically so. It was a quick reminder of how the candidate has spent his final days on the campaign trail: struggling through vulgar rallies where even his microphones seem to be getting bored of him.

Then comes the contrast — a candidate buoyed by hot-off-the-presses polls making a pit stop to do some live sketch comedy in between star-studded rallies. In that way, the medium was indeed the message, but it would’ve landed with a thud had Harris appeared more nervous or stiff. Instead, she sat opposite her SNL doppelgänger, Maya Rudolph, ostensibly giving herself a pre-Election Day pep talk into a mirror. (It’s a classic device on the show, deployed most recently in the Ariana Grande episode a few weeks ago.) What follows is mostly just the twin Veeps beaming and laughing at each other over wild applause from the studio audience. Crucially, though, the real Harris gets in a dig at Trump for failing to open a door on the first try during his ill-advised garbage truck stunt last week.

Harris and her surrogates talked about joy perhaps a bit too much early in her candidacy, given the stark, existential terms with which they’ve inevitably framed the election in its waning days. The campaign has been pointedly, understandably light on joy recently as Harris makes her closing argument. However, the image of the candidate smiling ecstatically while savagely ripping into her opponent now provides a welcome counterbalance to the apocalyptic vibes of late. It also projects a winner’s confidence.

Obviously, this sketch will look a lot different next week if Harris ends up losing. Why was she libbing out on TV instead of going back to Pennsylvania, people will furiously wonder. They might even be right. For now, though, this final pre-election cold open bears neither the smug, faux-conciliatory façade of 2016 — when Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin broke out of character and dashed through Times Square holding hands, to the soaring strains of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” — nor the gloomy resignation of 2020 — when Jim Carrey as Joe Biden read a rote satirical take on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. This one instead seems aware of recent history, within and outside of the show, and manages to project an optimism that doesn’t feel naïve.

While it won’t be clear until after the election whether that particular sketch was a miscalculation, the verdict is already in on the rest of the John Mulaney-hosted episode. It rocked.

Here are the highlights:

This is John Mulaney’s house — he’s hosting for the sixth time in as many years — and in this house, we reliably perform seven to 10 minutes of fresh stand-up each monologue. This one gets off to a so-so start, leading with material about the diminutive height of everyone in his wife Olivia Munn’s family, based on the levels of Asian ancestry per member. It’s not funny enough to overcome the questionable wisdom of tying a physical attribute to ethnicity in the year of our lord 2024. However, Mulaney quickly pivots to the more self-deprecating subject of dealing with aging parents while aging himself, and here he shines. By the end, he’s cracking himself up while invoking his grandfather, who, by being ineligible to fight in World War II, was “too old for the oldest thing that ever happened.” Mulaney’s last Netflix special captured the stand-up in a transitional moment — this monologue is our brightest snapshot yet of what he’s transitioning into.

Usually, this recurring game show sketch is a vehicle for exposing social faux-pas, the way many of us might know who The Rizzler is, but not the names of our friends’ spouses. This one, however, takes devastating aim at a certain kind of liberal’s insufferable superiority complex. Mulaney breezes through early rounds of the game, but can’t remember the name of Tim Kaine, who appears in a cameo — even though Kaine was a candidate in yet another election Mulaney supposedly described as “the most important in American history.” Later questions twist the knife even further, delving into white-guy hypocrisy around Black Lives Matter. All in all, it feels like the 2024 equivalent of SNL’s spot-on “The Bubble” sketch had it aired before the 2016 election rather than serving as remarkable 20/20 hindsight.

Part of what puts Mulaney in the running for the most consistently great SNL host of all time is the promise that he’s always going to bring one of these with him. It’s another well-observed, imaginatively staged musical tribute to New York City’s idiosyncratic quirks, the most energetic one in years. When will Mulaney and SNL run out of New York easter eggs to harvest or recognizable show tunes? This iteration, which brings back former cast member and close Mulaney friend Pete Davidson, suggests maybe never.

Hard to imagine, after 21 years as a cast member, that Kenan Thompson still has any classic celebrity impressions left to debut. His Little Richard likely wouldn’t be such a wonderful discovery, however, without an amazing premise built around it. This tribute to the ill-fitting celebrity guest spots on sitcoms of yore rises to incredible heights of lunacy and requires not a lick of prior knowledge about Little Richard to pull laughs from viewers.

What an unfortunate name real-life New York assemblyman Harvey Epstein bears, but at least he seems to be taking this sketch mocking it in stride.

• Michael Longfellow took over the role of What’s That Name host from Bill Hader this week, and it felt like one of the best in-sketch uses of his dripping-with-disdain delivery yet.

• Beppo the Chimp just might be the hero America needs at this polarized moment.

• Chappell Roan had the crowd singing the chorus of “Pink Pony Club” with her during an amped-up performance before debuting brand-new queer cowgirl anthem “The Giver” later on. This is what the French call iconique.

• During Weekend Update, Michael Che addressed Trump’s bizarre microphone pantomime as only he can, describing the former president as “trying to suck his way to freedom.”

• Another banger of a desk piece from Heidi Gardner, this time as a politically ambiguous Reba McEntire. In most weeks, this would almost certainly rank as one of the top five bits from the show, it just happened to arrive during an unusually stacked episode.

• Nearly stealing Update away from Gardner, however, is Marcello Hernández and Jane Wickline as The Couple You Can’t Believe Are Together, whom I would place money on appearing again before the end of the season.

• During the Port Authority Duane Reade musical number, there is a bit of wordplay business around the jug of milk. Pete Davidson says it’s organic, but a close-up reveals that it actually says “organ.” If you look a little lower on the container, though, there’s more wordplay — this isn’t skim or 2%, but rather “hole” milk.

• Bowen Yang and Chappell Roan looked adorably chummy during the good-byes.