A few days before her debut as a featured player on this 51st season of Saturday Night Live, Veronika Slowikowska was over on TikTok doing a Cameron Winter parody. Last night, to cap off after a breakthrough year for the Geese frontman, the show unveiled its first impression of him. James Austin Johnson, not Slowikowska, had the honors though. He and fellow Bob Dylan head Winter actually both performed at Newport Folk Festival over the summer so maybe he’d been practicing since then.
That inevitable but still surprising moment came during the Christmas episode hosted by Ariana Grande. In a pretaped Peacock’s Random Duet Christmas Spectacular short inspired by David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s iconic “The Little Drummer Boy,” Johnson’s Cameron Winter was paired with a poorly flipping Benson Boone. It also had Katy Perry (Grande, in a astronaut uniform) with Bob Dylan (Johnson again — he’s played Dylan on the show before), Bruce Springsteen (Andrew Dismukes also reprising an impression he almost did twice) with Bad Bunny (Marcello Hernández), Kate Bush (Sarah Sherman) with Yoko Ono (Bowen Yang) (their “Silent Night” was set to “Wuthering Heights”), a not-blind Stevie Wonder (Kenan Thompson) and Boone (a stunt double I think), Björk (Chloe Fineman) with Post Malone (Slowikowska), Lil Jon (Kam Patterson) with “SNL‘s Jane Wickline” (Jane Wickline), and Andrea Bocelli (Johnson) and Celine Dion (Grande). You’ll note the Geese gag did not get any laughs from the studio audience. Maybe still too niche, but I think this is a situation like Chappell Roan or the aforementioned Mr. Boone where they get parodied on SNL right before getting booked as musical guests.
Watch the duets sketch below, then if you wanna know what happened on last night’s show unrelated to Geese you can keep reading.
It was Bowen Yang’s final episode of Saturday Night Live after six and half years as a cast member. It’s fitting then that the host was Yang’s Wicked costar Ariana Grande. (“thank you to ari for sending me off in the dreamiest way i could imagine,” Yang wrote on Instagram on Saturday.) It was Grande’s third time hosting (she last hosted in October 2024) and fifth appearance overall including as musical guest. Musical guest Cher marked a return too. She previously performed on SNL in 1987, which was a long time ago, however Stevie Nicks had a longer span between her two performances (the second of which was last year’s aforementioned Grande episode). Cher did cameo in a 1992 episode’s Weekend Update, though, and appeared on both SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special earlier this year. On Friday the Recording Academy announced Cher will get a Lifetime Achievement Grammy at the Special Merit Awards Ceremony next month.
The cold open saw Johnson’s Donald Trump talking about renaming the Kennedy Center to “the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts No Homo,” which I had to double check wasn’t the actual new name. He also made an Indigo Girls joke about how the “the economy is fine, getting closer to fine.”
In her monologue Grande sang an “All I Want For Christmas Is You” parody that I need to point out had the same concept as a sketch from Netflix’s A Nonsense Christmas With Sabrina Carpenter last fall.
She played a dismembered elf in an Elf On The Shelf support group.
She played Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in a gory, pre-taped Home Alone parody that I’m sure Sarah Squirm loved. Bowen Yang played younger cousin Fuller (Kieran Culkin in the movie), Colin Jost played older brother Buzz.
She played an dance instructor alongside Marcello Hernández in a sketch where she broke a lot and made an RFK Jr. joke.
She played a trial judge in which defendant Kenan Thompson’s character’s sang about believing in a Black Santa Claus to the tune of Cher’s “Believe.”
She played a Love Is Blind contestant who matches with the Grinch (Mikey Day). We learn the Grinch does not have a penis, but can get pregnant. Cohost Nick Lachey, played by Dismukes, said at the end his band 98° got turned down by Sphere so they’re playing the Cube in Cincinnati (which is just a regular building).
Yang’s tearful farewell-metaphor sketch saw him as an eggnog-making Delta Sky Club employee who is retiring. He sang Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home For Christmas” with Ariana Grande as his wife, and Cher played his boss.
For her performances, Cher sang “DJ Play A Christmas Song” and “Run Rudolph Run,” the latter introduced by Grande in her castrato costume from when she hosted last year. I could embed them, but I know you’re not gonna watch them.
There were two cut-for-time sketches, both commercial parodies, that are online in dress rehearsal versions. One was for an espresso martini aka “girlie meth” safe room (it had a quick Taylor Swift sight gag), the other advertised Rob & Pop’s last-minute Christmas tree shop.
The only music-related stuff from Weekend Update was a joke about Michael Jackson’s appearance in the latest Epstein files dump and a rundown of “singing trends” from Yang and former castmate Aidy Bryant. She made a surprise return so the two could reprise those characters on his last show. It was not music-related, but we also got the annual Colin Jost/Michael Che joke swap (which was not a swap this year).
I could not determine whether the Update graphics department used any AI slop, but there was a lot of discourse about that after last week’s.
Before goodnights, there was a bumper honoring the late Rob Reiner, who hosted the series’ third episode fifty years ago. Here were this week’s promos, which included a Moonstruck slap.
It was also announced that the next new episode, Jan. 17, will have Finn Wolfhard as first-time host and fellow actor/musician A$AP Rocky as first-time musical guest, the day after his new album DON’T BE DUMB allegedly drops. Rocky previously made a cameo in a digital short with Childish Gambino on SNL; Wolfhard hasn’t appeared at all, but he did play a page in the movie SNL 1975. Speaking of digital shorts, “Lazy Sunday” premiered 20 years ago this week…
