The last time “Saturday Night Live” aired an episode following a Donald Trump presidential election win was on Nov. 12, 2016, when Dave Chappelle hosted. The cold open was a somber Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton singing “Hallelujah,” and the monologue and sketch that followed felt like perfectly pitched, smart responses to a shocking outcome.
For the first post-election episode of 2024, stand-up comic Bill Burr hosted, and the episode … was not that at all. The show tried a few different tacks, just a week after Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on the show, including a cold open that mocked Trump by having the entire cast pretend to support him and a Burr monologue that, depending on how you viewed it, was either wildly insensitive to dejected Harris supporters, particularly women, or provocatively ironic.
By the time “Weekend Update” came along, with two non-election related character bits that missed the mark, the sketches began to feel exhausted and rote, with bad premises and weak writing. It never recovered after that. If the show was aligning itself to the guest host’s sensibilities, you have to wonder with hindsight if scheduling Burr to host days after such a divisive election was the right choice. There were a few minor bright spots, including a “Good Will Hunting” parody and a promo for a “Sex Rock” CD, plus a few we’ll talk about below, but the rest were forgettable, unfunny or both.
Meanwhile, musical guest Mk.gee (a man and not a website) performed “Rockman” and “Alesis.” There was no Please Don’t Destroy video, as has been the case for every episode but one this season.
The show honored producer Quincy Jones, who died this week, with a title card before the closing goodbyes. He hosted the show in 1990.
You might think that “SNL” would come out guns blazing to denounce the Trump win, but instead this week’s cold open joked about the president-elect in a different way: with mock flattery.
Cast members faced the audience and recounted the results of the election before Kenan Thompson said, “This is why we at ‘SNL’ would like to say to Donald Trump… we have been with you all along!” Cast members including Ego Nwodim and Marcello Hernández joked that everyone in the cast voted for Trump. “Because we see ourselves in you. We look at you and think… ‘That’s me,’ ” Nwodim said.
Colin Jost even appeared to throw his “Weekend Update” co-star under the bus, saying, “I hate how the lamestream media — Michael Che — tries to spin it to make you look foolish.” He also spelled out Che’s last name to make it easier for Trump to remember.
A muscular, red bandanna wearing “hot, jacked” version of Trump was introduced by impressionist James Austin Johnson, who said as Trump, “They finally got the body right.” The sketch ended with Dana Carvey returning as fist-pumping, jumping Elon Musk, who said he’s running the country now, which will be like one of his rockets. “But there’s a slight chance it could blow up and everybody dies,” Musk said.
Is Bill Burr’s comedy meant to be taken at face value or is he doing a high-wire self-parody of the type of edgelord comedy that drew ire after a Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally? It was hard to tell from Burr’s monologue, which started with a story about getting the flu with a thrown-in ethnic slur: “You’re trying to figure out who gave it to you. You’re going through this Rolodex of people that coughed on you, sniffed near you, walked by an Asian or something.” Burr eventually got to election material, beginning by lecturing women: “OK, ladies, you’re 0-2 against this guy.” He suggested female candidates ditch the pantsuits, stop trying to have respect for themselves and “whore it up a little.” He suggested that “ugly women… I mean feminists” won’t want to hear this, but that candidates need to win over swing states by “making a farmer feel like he’s got a shot. Burr moved on to Trump, mocking his herky-jerky moves, which he said might have thwarted an assassination attempt, and chiding him for his appearance at a McDonald’s. “That’s the only time I’ve ever seen that guy truly happy,” Burr said.
The show was seemingly trying to have its cake and eat it too with Burr’s monologue. It was as if the writers were trying to create a sketch with a satirical premise that simultaneously delivered biting humor and offered commentary on the current political climate. However, by using the guise of irony, the monologue missed the mark entirely. Viewers were quick to point out Burr’s insensitive and inappropriate jokes, even when he attempted to frame them as being delivered in jest.
A group of firefighters at a Boston station are gathered for a meeting with a mental-health specialist (Heidi Gardner) who is showing the group a series of Rorschach test images. While some of the men see things in the black-and-white images, Ralphie (Burr) keeps seeing full-color images of Disney characters in compromising positions. One of them is Mike Wazowski from “Monsters Inc.” in wedding lingerie and high heels. Another features a topless Elsa from “Frozen” and Olaf running away with her bra. Snoopy and Charlie Brown, Master Chief from “Halo,” the dead wife from “Up” and Bandit, the dad dog from “Bluey,” end up in the mix. This is a very dumb premise, but the commitment to the bit works, especially the incredibly specific details that Ralphie knows about so many animated characters.
Two pickleball players (Devon Walker and Andrew Dismukes) decide to call their dads and see how they’re doing. The fathers (Thompson and Burr) deflect, with one of them only wanting to discuss the Philadelphia Eagles and the other diverting the conversation to his son’s car. It turns out both dads are going through some stuff and are willing to talk about it through metaphors about their sports team or cars. “Last week, the Eagles fell in the shower,” Thompson says, “I thought, ‘This might be where the Eagles die.’ ” It’s a funny and surprisingly touching piece.
Thompson appeared on “Weekend Update” as Willie, the most optimistic guy Michael Che knows, but it was Nwodim who made the bigger impression as “A Woman Who Can’t Find Something in Her Purse.” The giant purse contains a dead goldfish in a bag, a gun, a smaller night purse and an uncounted Pennsylvania ballot. What was she trying to find? Nothing, really, she says: “It helps you get your point across when you need to storm off when you’re mad.”
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MORE FROM THE L.A. TIMES By Anne McCarthy
Hosting the post-election episode of “Saturday Night Live,” Bill Burr opened his monologue with a laugh: “Nice to be here on such a fun week. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t watch politics. We’re gonna keep it light.”
But it wasn’t long before he addressed the elephant in the room.
“All right ladies, you’re 0 and 2 on this guy,” Burr said, referring to Donald Trump’s victories over both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. “But you learn more from your losses than your wins. Let’s get into the game tape.”
“Ladies, enough with the pantsuit. OK? It’s not working! Stop trying to have respect for yourselves,” he joked, referring to Harris’ and Clinton’s wardrobes.
“You don’t win the office on policy; you gotta whore it up a little! I’m not saying go full Hooters,” he said. “But find the happy medium between Applebee’s and your dad didn’t stick around. All right? You all know how to get a free drink.”
Burr expressed relief that the election is over. “I’m so psyched that this election is over. Took forever. Everybody knew who they were voting for four years ago.” Referencing the extreme differences between Harris and Trump, Burr said, “Let’s see, what does the orange bigot have to say?”
“The guy is a lunatic,” continued Burr. “That’s not a sane human being,” he said, and referenced the assassination attempt at a Trump rally. “I think the number one reason Trump survived [the assassination attempt] is he’s got all those herky jerky movements he does.”
Burr also recalled Trump’s much-publicized McDonald’s appearance, saying, “That’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him.” The comedian compared it to “When the Grinch came down the hill bringing the toys back and his heart grew bigger.”
Burr also shared that he’d just gotten over the flu. “Whenever you have the flu or COVID, you always lay in bed and try to figure out who gave it you. … I know who gave it to me. I sat next to a shoeless cowboy on an airplane. All I’m thinking is the next pandemic is growing in the bottom of his feet.”
Burr said with a smirk, “I looked at the guy and I’m thinking, ‘God made that guy. And he keeps making that guy. One mouth-breathing moron after another. Yet we still go to church on Sunday and we praise him.’”
“When is the constructive criticism coming?” asked Burr. “When’s the next Gandhi? I’m old school. I still do the vaccine thing. It’s a weird thing, though. If you get it, you side with the evil pharmaceutical companies, and if you don’t, you’ve aligned with people who don’t wear shoes on an airplane.”
Burr previously hosted “Saturday Night Live” in October 2020 with musical guest Jack White. The past two post-election episodes, which came just days after Trump was elected in 2016 and Biden in 2020, were hosted by Dave Chappelle.
Tonight’s musical guest is Mk.gee, who makes his “SNL” debut on the episode.
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The Business of Entertainment By Natalie Oganesyan
In his second time hosting Saturday Night Live, in a post-election episode no less, Bill Burr is sure to generate online conversation once more for his off-color opening monologue jokes, in which he called for women politicians to “whore it up a little” when campaigning for office.
“It’s nice to be here on such a fun week,” the comic began innocuously.
“All right ladies, you’re 0 and 2 against this guy, but you learn more from your losses than your wins,” Burr joked. “So let’s get into the game tape: All right, ladies, enough with the pantsuit, OK? It’s not working; stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office on policy, you gotta whore it up a little bit. I’m not saying go full Hooters but find a happy medium between Applebee’s and your dad didn’t stick around. You all know how to get a free drink. And I know a lot of ugly women, feminists I mean, don’t want to hear this message, but just tease them a little bit. Make a farmer feel like he’s got a shot.”
Burr continued, commenting on the results of the 2024 presidential election, which saw Donald Trump defeat Kamala Harris, saying: “I am so psyched this stupid election is over. It took forever. Like everybody knew who they were voting for four years ago and then they just drag it through a year and a half of this stuff. Like who was sitting there watching the debate still not decided? Two of the most polar opposite people ever. It’s like, ‘Let’s see, what does the orange bigot have to say? Hmm, how about the real estate agent who speaks through her nose? This is so difficult, they overlap, I just can’t make up my mind.'”
The Emmy-nominated actor said he was surprised Trump didn’t win months ago: “When I was a kid, if you were running for president and you got shot and you didn’t die, that was the end of the election.” Burr posited that the GOP candidate survived due to the “herky jerky movements that he does,” calling him a “lunatic” and “not a sane human being” for immediately standing up in the aftermath.
Elsewhere during the monologue, Burr re-hashed a joke directed at Asian people: “Whenever you have the flu or Covid, you always lay in bed and try to figure out who gave it to you, just going through this rolodex of people that coughed on you, sniffled near you, walked by an Asian or something. You try to fight it, you’re like, ‘They say on the internet that’s where all the disease comes from.'”
He continued, “I know who gave it to me. I sat next to a shoeless cowboy on an airplane, guy had no socks or shoes on the whole flight. The whole flight I’m sitting there looking at his dirty Jesus feet and all I’m thinking is the next pandemic is growing in the bottom of his feet … God made that guy and he keeps making that guy. One mouth-breathing moron after another … When is the constructive criticism coming? Like dude, when’s the last time you made a Gandhi, somebody empathetic?”
Afterward, Burr seemed to touch on the anti-vax movement, saying it’s a “weird” phenomenon. If people get vaccines they’re siding with the “evil pharmaceutical companies,” but should they forgo them, they’re “aligned with people that don’t wear shoes on the airplane.”
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Burr said women were ‘0 and 2’ after Trump’s latest election victory
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Burr hosted Saturday’s (November 9) episode of the long-running NBC sketch series days after Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
“All right ladies, you’re 0 and 2 on this guy,” Burr said, referring to Trump’s victories over Hillary Clinton (in 2016) and Harris. “But you learn more from your losses than your wins. Let’s get into the game tape.”
“Ladies, enough with the pantsuit. OK? It’s not working! Stop trying to have respect for yourselves,” he joked.
“You don’t win the office on policy; you gotta whore it up a little! I’m not saying go full Hooters,” he said. “But find the happy medium between Applebee’s and your dad didn’t stick around. All right? You all know how to get a free drink.”
Burr continued: “I know a lot of ugly women – I mean feminists – don’t want to hear this message. But just tease ‘em a little bit! Make a farmer feel like he has a shot. Swing a state over a little bit!”
On Twitter/X, SNL fans were quick to call the comedian out over his choice of jokes.
“Bill burr calling feminists ‘ugly women’ on the first snl after the election has radicalized me in a level i couldn’t possibly comprehend when i thought i had been radicalized to the highest degree earlier this week,” one person wrote.
Another added: “bill burr just said on saturday night live that women need to ‘w**** it up’ to win the white house and then proceeded to tell a classic ‘feminists are ugly’ joke.
“guess we ARE going back.”
A third added: “Bill Burr calling feminists ‘ugly’ and blaming Asians for spreading diseases isn’t funny.”
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Elsewhere in his monologue, Burr joked about getting over the flu recently. “Whenever you have the flu, like Covid, you know you always lay in bed. You try to figure out who gave it to you, just going through this Rolodex of people that coughed on you, sniffled near you, walked by an Asian or something.”
A 2021 study found that anti-Asian hate speech surged by 1,662 percent during the pandemic as conspiracy theories about the virus’ origin were rife.
At the beginning of Saturday’s episode, the full SNL cast sarcastically praised Trump’s victory and debuted a new version of the former president – “hot, jacked Trump” – to avoid being put on his “enemies list.”
Saturday Night Live airs on NBC on Saturdays at 11:30pm EST and on Peacock the following day.
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Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in It’s minor in the scheme of the genuine pain and suffering that will likely result from the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but it’s nonetheless notable in this popular-culture context: Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday made me actively dread this week’s episode of a show that, under normal circumstances, I happily anticipate like an easy-to-please 12-year-old in 1992. The same thing happened in 2016, of course, with this TV show and, to my recollection, no other; mostly, good TV (or maybe especially mediocre or bad TV) helps temporarily numb the shock and stomach-churn of a current event. Thinking about my all-time favorite shows, it’s hard to imagine imagine an election, no matter how seemingly catastrophic, causing genuine, specific trepidation about watching a new weekly installment of Freaks & Geeks, Seinfeld, or even something more nominally contemporary in its angst (at the time, anyway), like Girls.
Saturday Night Live, meanwhile, is uniquely positioned to make its own newsworthy hay of current events – and also its own cringeworthy hell when those events don’t seem particularly compatible with cheap laughs. It’s an extreme example of how the political and satirical worlds have shifted over the past few decades – the most extreme example of how the normie reaction of “can’t wait to see this on SNL!” – sometimes on weeks or even seasons when the show isn’t airing – has flipped into (some) fans’ fervent hope that the show will hit literally anything else. Or that it would just disappear the weekend after a major national screw-up. Hardcore Last Week Tonight fans don’t feel that way, do they?
Regardless, these are the unfortunate circumstances that might lead someone to, say, not even hate that admittedly shudder-inducing McKinnon-as-Clinton dead-serious “Hallelujah” opening from the post-election episode in 2016. Anyone could name the reasons this didn’t work, and I wouldn’t disagree; I’d only say that I felt a kind of relief (albeit temporary) that it wasn’t some dumb sketch about Trump putting gold toilets in the White House – that anyone at the show might admit that, actually, they were feeling pretty shitty, too.
Of course, it’s hard to play that same note again, especially without a McKinnon figure in the cast who might be assumed to have some leeway with the audience. (Even setting aside the poor reputation that opening has now, the show already spoofed its own self-seriousness later that same season anyway.) Instead, the show opted for something similarly direct, but with actual jokes: A portion of the cast appearing as themselves, performing fake groveling about how much they’ve always been Trump fans and will support him all the way. The sarcasm directed at Trump and Elon Musk (capably impersonated by a still-lingering Dana Carvey) didn’t quite land; without the mask of an impression-driven sketch, it’s easier to think about how, hey, actually, this show did some real-life groveling toward both of these guys when they each appeared as welcomed guests. The knowing laughs about how everyone really feels don’t quite materialize, even if one can’t really blame Ego Nwodim, Bowen Yang, or Sarah Sherman, et. al, for their employer’s decisions (some of which were made before some of these cast members were even working there).
The cold open, which usually doesn’t warrant this much discussion, pointed to a broader shift in how the show would deal with the latest election disaster: Not quite ignoring it, but not quite mustering the vigor to mount some perceived comic counter-attack or find some unexpected angle. That was certainly the tone of host Bill Burr’s monologue, which fake-pivoted away from politics to “keeping it light,” then pivoted back to some election material that felt terribly outdated, as much of it would have even a month or two ago, then moved away from the topic once more. It felt like a whole lot of maneuvering, considering Burr seemed to have been booked as the Dave Chappelle Emeritus, a blunt-spoken comic willing to speak some possibly-uncomfortable truths, regardless of election results. If that was really the reason he was there, it doesn’t seem like anyone told him. (Or maybe he had a different set of expectations, having previously hosted in the run-up to the 2020 contest.)
The rest of the show did and did not ease that general queasiness. Weekend Update had one of its funnier outings in a while; Michael Che’s over-it, checked-out vibe is perversely funnier when he’s addressing potentially lasting damage to the country, glass in hand, because it forces him to appear to kinda-sorta care about something, albeit in a disaffected way. (Disaffection has long been a go-to Update anchor strategy, but later-period Che can’t always make it work for him, because he’s surely free to leave after a decade at the desk.) Not exactly catharsis, not exactly a slog.
Apart from a mention here or there, the rest of the sketches – twice as many live pieces as last week, and as the similarly sketch-light first outing from Burr – ignored politics, largely for the best. What was most fun about this weird assortment of sketches was the range of formats, perhaps cooked up as a series of distractions: No talk shows, no game shows, and some concepts that were genuinely ambitious in their logistics, like the sketch about two guys calling their emotionally repressed dads. It didn’t reveal much about those relationships, nor was the live integration of two different split-screen phone calls all that graceful, yet there was something unexpectedly sweet and observational about it, despite and/or because of its refusal to get into election-season divides that often form between parent and child. (Maybe they’re still figuring out a way into the idea that Gen Z harbors more Trump supporters than many thought possible.)
Look, too, at that odd little musical number about bald men, and how it was set up by Mikey Day and Sarah Sherman playing a couple on a date, musing that nothing odd had happened with each other or the waiters – all but underlining the shticky out-to-eat set-ups of so many SNL sketches (including one that aired about 10 minutes later!), and nonetheless introducing the litany of singing bald men who made up the rest of the restaurant setting. It was all oddly wholesome, especially with a self-styled agent of abrasion like Burr in the mix.
Is that enough to work as an agreeable distraction from something the show itself must bring up as soon as it starts? I don’t know; is anything? SNL in 2024 isn’t exactly occupying the cutting edge of topical humor – and isn’t exactly offering pure sketch-comedy comfort food, either, given its oft-refreshing lack of a “main” star or endlessly repeated catchphrases. This week, it was put in the awkward position of trying to be both of those things regardless. As a reflection of the post-election blues somewhere around half the country must be feeling at the moment, it works surprisingly well: In the midst of shock or depression, here are two disparate assignments you didn’t ask for that nonetheless must be completed on some level, possibly while wondering what you could have done to avoid this situation entirely. In this impossible realm, the show did a better job than many.
Besides the two aforementioned sketches, the inkblot sketch with Burr as a fireman who can see disturbingly detailed cartoon-character fan art and the father-son discussion about Snake Skin, the latest Andrew Dismukes/James Austin Johnson musical collaboration both made good use of Burr’s plainspoken persona. Neither of them really got to the next level from their inspired premises, but again, points for structural variety: the inkblot bit used actual illustrations to show exactly what Burr was seeing, and the Snake Skin bit cut between “normal” dialogue and remnants of an old-fashioned call-now ad for the band’s greatest hits.
I have some affection for watching a sketch just outright bomb, and while the support-group bit with Bowen Yang throwing a fit over his seemingly surmountable problems (malfunctioning Tubi account; faltering cell battery) hauled out some absurd laughs in the clutch, it also featured the one-two punch of a few laugh lines getting absolutely zero audience response, and a couple of cast members nearly cracking up anyway. By comparison, Ashley Padilla’s showcase (?) as a wife who can’t write a joke about four beautiful dogs, no matter how hard she tries, seemed downright innovative, even though it didn’t really “work” in the conventional sense.
This felt like even more of a team effort than usual, but the variety of sketches did show off the stealth versatility of Andrew Dismukes, who’s not exactly a chameleon, but managed to play pretty different roles tonight. Plus, whenever he does songs with James Austin Johnson, I’m delighted.
It’s been repeatedly over 70 degrees in New York City, so why can’t Charli XCX give us one last gasp of brat summer?
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