Even if you don’t know much country music, you likely know how much the genre loves the trope of the weepy father at his daughter’s wedding. In the best sketch of last night’s Saturday Night Live, the father of the bride was played by the host, Shane Gillis, but he wasn’t reflecting on life’s heavy milestones. Instead, he was thinking about “all the cool shit I can put in her room.
Even by the standards of shocking Michael Jackson jokes, it was a shocking joke. “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong,” Michael Che, a co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” said during last night’s episode. “He was right to molest all those kids.” This was delivered with palpable surprise at the words coming out of his mouth, but Che kept going: “They were lucky. I would have paid him to do it.
His eyes filled with wonder and his voice imbued by humility, Victor Glover—poised with his Artemis II crewmates to complete a record-setting voyage around the moon—addressed the camera. He looked out the window, awestruck by his home planet looking back at him. “Being a man of faith,” he said solemnly, “this has certainly brought me closer to God.” And then: A Pringles can drifted into the frame.
“Oh come on, guys,” Glover said, exasperated.
Any fan of medical dramas would know the scene well. An elderly woman is being wheeled hurriedly into the emergency room; she collapsed, we’re told, at her birthday party. She has delayed breathing, her blood pressure is through the roof, and the doctors and nurses are catching one another up, trying to figure out the right course of action.
And then the head doctor, someone usually strong of chin, steps in. As expected, he instantly assesses the situation and knows exactly what to do.
On last night’s Saturday Night Live, we learned that time stops for nothing—not people and not language. Marcello Hernández, the cast member perhaps most likely to become SNL’s next breakout star, dropped by the “Weekend Update” desk to inform the Millennial co-anchor Colin Jost—and, by proxy, many Millennial audience members—of the slang terms favored by Gen Z. Hernández kicked off the segment by explaining the term chopped to “older folks” such as Jost.
In a sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live, the cast member Andrew Dismukes played a suburban husband who threw a successful dinner party. As he basked in the company of his friends, he proposed a sweet, well-intentioned idea.
“Guys,” he said.
Last night’s Saturday Night Live addressed the growing frustration with a technology that’s seemingly found its way into every American industry, even dishwashers. One of the first sketches of the night had Ashley Padilla as an elderly woman whose grandchildren went to visit her in a retirement center. As a surprise, her grandson (Marcello Hernández) had downloaded a program that used artificial intelligence to animate old photography, and had uploaded some of her treasured childhood photos.
Though 2025 has already seen retrospective documentaries, a prime-time special, and a Lorne Michaels biography marking the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, the show itself actually premiered on October 11, 1975—and last night’s episode, in a neat coincidence, happened exactly 50 years later.
On a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, the cast member Sarah Sherman dropped by the “Weekend Update” desk in character as the accountant Dawn Altman, the latest in her repertoire of high-strung weirdos. Altman was theoretically there to give one of the co-anchors, Colin Jost, some bad news about his tax returns.