If you weren’t aware that Martin Short was hosting Saturday Night Live last night, you might have had a difficult time figuring that out. It’s not that Short wasn’t in sketches—he was, using his natural flair for showmanship as he sang about getting medicated for the holidays. It’s just that a lot of other celebrities were also there. Lots and lots of them: Melissa McCarthy, Tom Hanks, Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Rudd.
The evening felt like SNL flexing its muscles as it heads into its 50th anniversary celebration in February, a testament to its might as an entertainment superpower—and the episode capped a fall season during which guest spots have grown from fun cameos to essential elements of the show. Yet this episode’s glut also felt like a criminal underuse of Short, who, after all these years, still gets relegated to sidekick status.
The cold open set the tone. It began with Hanks sitting regally in a robe and explaining the concept of the show’s “five-timers club,” the somewhat hollow honor that is bestowed (along with a robe emblazoned with the number 5) on those who have hosted five times. After Rudd joined Hanks, Short arrived on the clubroom set to cheers, but the applause for his big moment was quickly drowned out by hosannas for the parade of others that followed. In addition to the aforementioned stars came Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Emma Stone, John Mulaney, and Jimmy Fallon.
The sketch emphasized just how much the current iteration of SNL relies on famous faces. Fey turned to Short and said, “First things first, we need to make sure you’re really ready to be a five-timer. Quick: Name three current cast members.” Short paused and then shot off the correct answer: “No idea.”
That self-lacerating gag turned out to be more than a punch line for the episode. Sure, a couple of cast members had breakthrough moments—Bowen Yang killed on “Weekend Update” playing a sassy drone; Marcello Hernandez reprised his fast-talking Sábado Gigante host Don Francisco—but through the night the cameos (such as Rudd playing the Spanish-language game show’s bewildered English-speaking guest) were what sustained the sketches’ momentum.
For another example, just when you thought “Parking Lot Altercation,” in which Short and Mikey Day played Christmas shoppers warring about a parking spot with over-the-top miming gestures, was wearing thin, McCarthy appeared as Short’s aggressive wife. Wearing a wig with a Kate Gosselin haircut, she spit what appeared to be iced coffee on Day’s car window and rubbed her breasts in the residue. Chloe Fineman, playing Day’s bratty daughter, couldn’t help but break.
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Later, “Christmas Airport Parade” was just that: a procession of special guests. Yang and Ego Nwodim played enthusiastic TSA agents introducing all of the oddball characters who populate Newark airport during the holidays, but the biggest audience whoops came when Rudd showed up as himself, McCarthy played a gate agent who lewdly mispronounced passenger names, and Hanks reprised his role from Clint Eastwood’s Sully as the “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Clever observations about how people behave while traveling were overshadowed by the blinding lights of Hollywood.
Even “Weekend Update” benefited from the added star power. Michael Che and Colin Jost’s annual ritual of mutual humiliation, in which each co-host reads jokes the other one wrote sight unseen, was amped up with reaction shots from Jost’s famous wife, Johansson, who watched in horror from backstage as Che made him recite jokes at the couple’s expense in a corny “Black voice.”
SNL has been relying on cast alumni and high-wattage friends of the show a lot this season. Election coverage brought out Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg as Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, respectively. And Dana Carvey can’t seem to leave the studio, even though the series isn’t relying on his Joe Biden impression anymore. He was there last night, too, just being wacky in the Sábado Gigante sketch.
On one hand, this celebrity cornucopia feels a little lazy. Rudd and Johansson get automatic cheers that can sub in for earned laughter or applause. On the other, bringing them all out is smart business, serving as a reminder of the show’s brand loyalty and staying power in the run-up to a banner year it hopes can also translate to big-time ratings.
And yet the overuse of this crutch was frustrating last night, most of all because Short suffered for it. In the final sketch of the night, “Peanuts Christmas,” he played a flamboyant director who had no time for the goofy dancing of Charles M. Schulz’s characters. It was a late reminder of Short’s irrepressible dynamism on stage. Short and Yang made a great team shaming the Peanuts children. If only we had gotten to see more of that.
