ScarJo put a bow on the 50th season with the return of the season’s biggest breakout character, more of Bowen Yang’s identity outside the show, and surprise appearances by Mike Myers, Gina Gershon, and Emily Ratajkowski — plus, Trump breaks the fourth wall.
Scarlett Johansson returned to Studio 8H for her seventh time hosting Saturday Night Live, and this was a big one. It’s not just the season finale, but the finale of the fiftieth season, which is a landmark achievement for any show.
It’s also her first major return since the infamous “roast beef” joke from the 2024 Christmas “joke swap” episode that immediately went viral and had people wondering if Michael Che had gone too far in writing and having Scarlett’s real-life husband Colin Jost read that one live on the air.
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This episode featured both more and fewer guests than we expected. There were some very small roles for Gina Gershon and Emily Ratajkowski, while Mike Myers very randomly appeared as himself and took the lead role in a sketch.
Scarlett also portrayed herself as we revisited “Bowen’s Straight,” while elsewhere she took the Please Don’t Destroy boys for a first class flight. Another big return was Miss Eggy, who again stole the spotlight during “Weekend Update.”
But she, of course, couldn’t take it entirely away as the boys continued their “joke swap” tradition for this finale — and this time Scarlett came out in person to sit right next to Che as they read them.
How did it all play out? Did anyone make any big announcements about their future on the show? Well, we did hear that it was one person’s last show — but we’ll let you find out what that meant for yourself.
As usual, we’re ranking all the sketches from worst to first, including the Monologue, Cold Open, “Weekend Update” and any sketches that were cut for time but made their way online. We’ll skip the musical guests, because they’re not usually funny — unless Ashlee Simpson shows up. We wrap up with a look at the cast-member who had the strongest week.
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Mike Myers Ye-levator
Mike Myers was a pretty random casting choice, playing himself in this elevator sketch that starts with some fans enjoying seeing him and then becomes just him and Kenan Thompson’s Kanye West. They reminisced about the time Ye said George Bush didn’t like Black people while Mike Myers was just standing there — true story — and then danced around the Diddy trial. But throughout, we just kept needing something from from one or the other (or both) of them to really make this ketch pop. The simplicity of the premise was there, but they didn’t seem to have anything to say with either Mike Myers or Kanye West to make this make sense. Even the audience wasn’t quite sure what to think as it just kind of ended.
Intimacy Coordinators
Alas, this sketch wasn’t quite sure how to nail the ending, even though they had a perfect one already in place … they just kept going. The whole conceit of the piece being that Kenan Thompson just can’t comprehend how lesbian sex works, and yet works as an intimacy coordinator, was just perfect fodder for a sketch about filming said scene. There was lots of awkward similes and playfulness in the piece, which also being wildly invasive and completely unnecessary. But its peaks to true human curiosity. Kenan played it pretty much as Kenan does, with some overt silliness on top of charming creepy. All in all, it could have been stronger than it was, but it could also have been a complete disaster.
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Cold Open: Middle East Trip
We weren’t sure if or how SNL would acknowledge that this was the season finale of their landmark 50th season, but we didn’t have to wait too long as James Auston Johnson went there toward the end of the Cold Open. For the most part it was another ramble-thon as Donald Trump this time during his visit to the UAE talking about that $400 million plane gift. But then, he noted that he wasn’t going to be staying there much longer, and in fact, couldn’t stay in the sketch much longer.
He then literally threw a guy out of the seats in the front and sat surrounded by actual audience members to close his message, which was a mixture of Trump-ish humor, and thinly-veiled concern about what his real counterpart is doing and might do in this country before the show returns for its 51st season in the fall. The tone was a little unexpected, but captures some of the paranoia and uncertainty of the current times. Johnson was a little sloppier than usual in his delivery, but he always plays off little slip-ups well.
This was a more intimate way to open it, and there’s always something nice when SNL breaks the fourth wall and gets a little personal with the audience — especially on a milestone night like this one.
TV Takes
This was a fun one with Bowen Yang and Scarlett Johansson playing TV hosts interviewing the cast of a popular show with fluff questions for Marcello Hernandez’ boy toy character and brutally invasive, offensive, and impossible questions for all of the women in the cast. This is the kind of sketch that works because while it’s an exaggeration, it’s also based entirely in truth. Just watch any interview about how women can juggle being a wife and a career, or how much guilt she probably should feel being away from her kids for work, or why her strong career-driven personality makes her a shrewish, mean … well, you know. Comedy works best when it speaks truth to power, and this is definitely a reality check for anyone who interviews — well, anyone.
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Monologue: Scarlett Johansson
There was definitely a sweet sentimentality to this musical monologue which came to feature every single current cast member in an original song set to Billy Joel’s “monologue.” There were some jokes throughout, like Scarlett forgetting the new cast members’ names, Michael Longfellow appearing in four sketches this year, and Sarah Sherman supposedly leaving (she’s not, playing that she was shocked). What we did get, though, was a glimpse of some of the breakout cast members as those were the ones to get the shout-outs (except for Marcello Hernandez).
Mostly, though, it was a sincere tribute to 50 years of comedy and this cast, who helped us celebrate the achievement. We can’t even imagine how special it must feel to be up there tonight honoring television history.
New York News
“You used to call me on my cell phone.” The puns were definitely out of control in this parody of morning news shows that try to punch up fun news stories with playful wording. But the key word there is “fun,” as it definitely does not work when Scarlett Johansson’s evening newscaster filling in on the morning show tried her hand at some for serious and awful stories. It all made its way to Heidi Gardner, as a bereaved mother whose child is missing, using that opening line in the worst possible context.
We enjoyed Emil Wakim’s very silly musical intros and outros on this one as they were just random enough to be funny, and just awful enough to be great. Add to that another stellar acting performance from Ashley Padilla, and these two newcomers are doing everything they can to lobby for a spot in next season’s cast. Certainly, we feel Ashley’s done enough as she’s already becoming a reliable sketch performer, which usually takes cast members 2-3 seasons.
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Victorian Ladies at Lunch
And the award for what the hell was I just watching goes to this 10-to-1 sketch that wrapped the night. Were Victorian meals this wretched? Surely not. And yet, it was an absolute hoot watching Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, Scarlett Johansson, and Heidi Gardner actually try to ingest some of the awful dishes Andrew Dismukes was describing. We’re not sure what sleep-deprived and addled madness led to this sketch, but we applaud its utter madness, and the utter commitment of the cast to just go there. This is how you wrap 50 years? Well… why not!
Date Night
This was a fantastic bilingual sketch, taking full advantage of Marcello Hernandez in the cast and Bad Bunny as the musical guest to pull him into this story of two Hispanic men dating American women who are absolutely “crazy.” The conversation in Spanish between the two men, lamenting their respective women, while the women think their men are defending their honor over a table, was brilliantly put together. The only thing that didn’t quite work was the inclusion of James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes as two guys watching the “telenovela.” Bunny got the best of Marcello in this one, with Marcello’s eyes saying it all!
Please Don’t Destroy: Newark Vacation
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Ripped from the headlines, this sketch was all over the place in the best possible way. What could have been an epic rap about flying first class with Scarlett Johansson instead became concern about landing in Newark — considering the lost planes and general chaos that airport has been experiencing. Throw in Bad Bunny as the only air traffic controller (on his first day, natch), complete with a musical number of its own, and this was a kind of schizophrenic sketch we could get behind. We never knew where it was going to go next, but it still managed to tell a coherent story from start to finish … with laughs.
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Bowen’s Still Straight
The name says it all as this sketch revisits the classic pretaped piece where Bowen Yang is not just straight, but kind of a douchey womanizing tool, too. This time, it’s Scarlett Johansson who becomes enamored with his machismo, though she’s not the only woman on the show this week to fall under his spell. As always, it’s a hoot to see how over the top Bowen takes his tough guy arrogance and then realize that there are actually meatheads out there that act just like this.
Weekend Update
The audience was fired up right away, as if expecting the year-end joke swap at the top of the segment. Once they settled down, they got the usual array of political jokes from Colin Jost and Michael Che, including takedowns of Trump’s Middle East visit, the $400 luxury jet gift — and how he’ll repay the favor — white South African refugees, and even RFK swimming in a bacteria-ridden swamp There were some funny barbs about J.D. Vance wanting to visit the new pope, and the Menendez brothers getting resentenced, but this material wasn’t as strong. Something tells us they were working harder on a later portion.
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It kind of came out of nowhere, but we were still laughing and smiling along as Ego Nwodim brought “Miss Eggy” back to lament about airline food, instead of the serious airline issues going on in Newark. We love that she again did material about food, worked in some dirty jokes about her “man,” and continued to play with audience participation in a way that left the audience entirely unsure what she wanted. The character is so ridiculous, but in short bursts, she’s a blast.
A short non-political segment featured jokes about brain damage, Dick’s Sporting Goods buying out Foot Locker, a woman defecating on porches, and Che getting his first real audience groan with his response to reports people feeling tired could be suffering ministrokes: “I always get sleepy after a stroke.”
And then we got to the highlight of “Update,” and of course you know they had to bring Scarlett Johansson out so that she could confront Michael Che directly about his roast beef joke during the Christmas episode joke swap. Elsewhere, Colin Jost told Lorne Michaels to just “retire bitch,” while declaring he’s not a “Nick Kerr lover,” and Che revealed how much he owes Jost and how exciting it is to see a white woman’s drink unattended.
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PLAYER OF THE WEEK
There were a lot of fun moments for the cast this week, even as they had to jockey for position opposite Bad Bunny and even Mike Myers. Kenan Thompson, as always, keeps it reliable, while the ladies of this cast are really finding their own energy and voice on the show.
In fact, the ladies definitely had the strongest night, with Heidi Gardner, Sarah Sherman, and Ego Nwodim all bringing some great moments to the fore. In the end, though, we could not resist the return of Miss Eggy. Before she’d even made her “Update” return midway through the show, we were already looking at her as our possible winner this week.
She was great as Marcello Hernandez’s unhinged girlfriend, and then playing a whole different kind of bad in the latest Bowen’s Straight gag piece. Add in her standout performance in the “TV Tattle” piece when she heard she might have lost her job, and Miss Eggy was just one highlight in a night full of them.
We got no word of any definitive cast departures, which could have just been a choice not to overshadow the milestone 50th season finale for the show itself, with Scarlett giving Lorne Michaels a nice shoutout at the end for the achievement.
It’s hard to imagine, though, that everyone will return. While it’s impossible to say which long-term cast members might get the boot, when we look at the newer faces, we do find ourselves a bit worried about Jane Wickline, who struggled to show herself a bit. Sarah Sherman had a slow start, too, and has become an essential piece of the puzzle, so maybe they’ll give her some lead.
We’re also worried about Devon Walker, who seems to be fading more and more into the wallpaper in his third season. Aside from the newcomers — and some of them are starting to show who they are — he’s the only cast member who still doesn’t have a clear identity on the show. After three seasons, will he still be given more time to find it? We’re not so sure.
Saturday Night Live will be back in the fall for Season 51!
