Every Sketch From the 51st Season Premiere of ‘SNL’ Ranked

For those who had grown used to the Saturday Night Live opening credits over the last few years, the introductory video sure felt choppy when the show’s 51^st season debuted on Oct. 4.  Perhaps a new intro will be shot in the coming weeks, but the premiere repurposed last season’s with the departing members edited out.

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Heidi Gardner’s glam scene was gone, Michael Longfellow wasn’t chastised for feeding an NYPD horse, Ego Nwodim wasn’t flossing atop the double-decker tourist bus Sarah Sherman drives into Times Square, Devon Walker had drifted away with his balloons and Emil Wakim was gone, too.

The five new cast members — Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Ben Marshall (of SNL’s Please Don’t Destroy filmmaking trio), Kam Patterson and Veronika Slowikowska — are all featured players, and so they were all sandwiched towards the end of the credits with Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline.

With the exception of Patterson and, to a lesser extent, Slowikowska the featured hires weren’t featured much, but, after so much speculation whether Lorne Michaels would retire after season 50, the new school year needed to start strong. And that meant relying on the show’s Murderers’ Row of Michael Che, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Marcello Hernandez, James Austin Johnson, Colin Jost, Sherman, Keenan Thompson and Bowen Yang,

Landing Bad Bunny in the afterglow of his hugely successful Puerto Rico residency, the announcement that he would headline next year’s Super Bowl halftime show — and the racist backlash that followed — was a timely move.  And Bad Bunny closing his monologue in Spanish (without English subtitles) was a deft message to his haters that his art transcends language and culture barriers — and that they’d better catch up. Certainly, SNL has come a long way from the ‘70s — when Garrett Morris, a Black actor, used to play Dominican Met Chico Escuela, whose English was limited to “Beisbol been berry, berry good to me.”

As for the sketches, it’s a new season, and the SNL comedy accelerator is still revving up. Here’s one critic’s ranking, from worst to best.

10. The Donor

A truly weird vignette, with little payoff, in which Sherman and Fineman ask Dismukes to be the sperm donor for the baby they plan to have. Bad Bunny (in a Bob’s Carpet hairpiece, and with an appreciation for the blackout ending of the Sopranos finale) offers to contribute, which prompts Thompson — sporting what looks like a black DoorDash symbol painted on his forehead — to volunteer as well. Cue “Don’t Stop Believin’” and clear the set!

9. Parent-Teacher Conference

Wouldn’t it be great to listen in to the initial meetings between the week’s SNL host and the show’s writers, where the latter must gauge how much ego-stroking needs to be laced into the sketches for cooperation to ensue? This sketch felt like that: Single DILF Bad Bunny is called to a conference with the principal (Dismukes) and a teacher (Padilla) over alarmingly violent drawings that his goth kid (Hernandez) has made depicting the latter. (“This is going to hapin to you,” reads one showing a decapitation in the making.)

But teach takes one look at papi and her anger turns to lust. That’s it. Really.

8. El Chavo Del Ocho

As Billboard’s Jessica Roiz wrote the night the sketch aired, El Chavo del Ocho “was more of a tribute [to] than a mockery” of one of the most popular Latin TV sitcoms of the 1970s. Mexican by origin and produced by Televisa, the show aired across Latin American and Spain. According to a 2012 Forbes article, it averaged 91 million daily viewers in syndication — 20 years after its last original episode aired — with reruns earning the media giant (now TelevisaUnivision) $1.7 billion at the time.

This sketch wasn’t satire — there’s none of the socio-political edge that made Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood a classic — more just a loving recreation. But it’s interesting to see Bad Bunny as Quico, the spoiled, mischievous kid who had the best toys in the neighborhood — a character written into the original show as an annoying antagonist, who became one of the most popular characters in the series. Is this an analogy for Bad Bunny’s place in pop culture right now? Or just the most fun he could have in an on-the-nose love letter to Latinos that ties into his current album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, where he reflects on his past and encourages the preservation of cultural identity?

7. Jeopardy! With Bad Bunny

Game shows have long been a go-to format — as well a crutch — for SNL, and Jeopardy! is almost certainly the most used show. This sketch, which featured Bad Bunny as a contestant who knew the answers but was incapable of phrasing them in the “Who is,” “What is” Jeopardy-speak, milked a few  laughs — but oh for the day when Will Ferrell played Alex Trebek, hosting Norm Macdonald as Burt Reynolds (a.k.a “Turd Ferguson”), Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery and Jimmy Fallon as French Stewart from Third Rock From The Sun.

6. KPop Demon Hunters

If pop-culture relevancy — and SNL’s proficiency at capitalizing on it — was the bar here, this sketch would be at the top. It’s funny because of the Bad Bunny character’s myopic obsession with Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, replete with anime-style internal dialogue. Doesn’t matter that one of his Bunny’s characters friends reveal in the skit that ended up on the flight manifest for a trip to Jeffrey Epstein’s “Pedo Island” or that another character wrote the ad campaign for Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle “Good Genes” ad.

It’s all a setup to bring in Yang as Jinu, the demon leader of Saja Boys. (“Oh, my god. Do you have a gun?” one of the women asks. “Even worse, I have a voice,” replies Jinu before singing a snippet of “Soda Pop.”) That, of course, ushers in a performance of “Golden” by the real-life artists (EJAE, Rei Ami and Audrey Nuna) who provided the singing voices of HUNTR/X, ahead of their live debut together on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this week. Lorne wins!

5. ChatGPTío

Hernandez’s confidence is goddamn irresistible. He looks happy AF no matter which (usually loud) character he indulges. In this sketch, he’s the guyabera-wearing tío — uncle — ready to dispense brutally honest advice without a side of chatbot word salad. (He’s also “40% louder,” as the TV ad spoof says.) “What!” he roars when he’s summoned by Slowiskowska in her kitchen to ask, “How do I make vegan banana bread?” “You don’t!” is his reply. He’s also good with the dating advice, once things get past the ice-breaking point. If you get her home, he counsels Culhane, who won the featured performer cameo contest in this episode, take a “Halls cough drop” for when “you’re going downtown.” Does that count as product placement?

4. Inventing Spanish

The structure of this bit is similar to the brilliant “Washington’s Dream” sketch — written by Day, Streeter Seidell and Auguste White — that Nate Bargatze knocked out of the park when he debuted on SNL in October 2023. In that case, a momentous occasion — Washington addressing his troops at Valley Forge — became a discourse on weights and measures and avoidance of the slavery issue. (“And the slaves, sir. What of them?” “You asked about the temperature?” “I did not.”)

Here, Iberians gather in 900 A.D. to develop a common language — Spanish — to unite the country. “What if we made it harder to learn?” poses the leader, Bad Bunny, who tells the assembled he had “an amazing idea: every word is a boy or a girl” — an IRL hurdle that makes learning Spanish as a second language almost as hard as learning the rules of English.

The ocean, “el oceano” is a boy, because, as Hernandez, playing translator-for-the-common-folk, explains, “It’s fun but sometimes, for no reason, it kill you.”  On the other hand, the Bible, “la Biblia,” is a girl, partly because (as Hernandez says), “Everything you want to do, it say, ‘No!’”

After the sibilant dialect of Barcelonan in attendance (Day) is corrected — permanently — Hernandez introduces his “cousin,” a walk-on by Benicio Del Toro, to introduce a few more rules “that you will only need to remember for school but will be totally useless in real life.”

There is the formal and informal use of “you and you,” Del Toro says, without getting into the tú vs. usted conundrum. Then, “What if the letter ‘r’ lasted a long time,” Del Toro says, resulting in a lot of extended ‘r’ rolling among the participants. Then, “One last thing,” Del Toro says. “Not related to anything. I think we should take a nap in the middle of the day.”

“I think that’s enough progress for today,” says Hernandez. “Whoever  doesn’t die of disease in the night, I will see you in the morning.”

3. Kam Patterson on Weekend Update

Shortlly after SNL announced the addition of Patterson to the cast, his comedy alma mater, Tony Hinchcliffe’s Kill Tony podcast, began speculating on whether the 26-year-old comic would become the NBC show’s next Shane Gillis. On the podcast, another KT regular, William Montgomery said, “Like is he going to get fired the first episode or the second episode, when he screams the N-word for no reason.”

Patterson was clearly addressing that chatter when he appeared on Weekend Update and begged Jost to let him just get it over with. “It’s been said a few times on this show. Roll the clip!” Patterson said, eliciting Jost’s trademark panicked laugh and a response that said footage was not going to be shown.

Patterson subsequently pointed out that Che dropped the word during a 2016 Weekend Update discussion of Colin Kaepernick refusing to kneel for the National Anthem in 2016.  (“Yeah, but I’m grown,” Che, who’s been with the show since 2013 replied, suggesting that the greenhorn on his set had yet to make his bones.)

After Jost told Patterson, “I just think you bring more to the table than that,” the SNL plebe said his act did include some “characters”: “The guy who played Kramer, Paula Deen and the ghost of Hulk Hogan” — white celebrities caught using the N-word. His impression of Hogan’s specter: “Boo, brother! Except, I would say —”

Jost stopped him again with that laugh, and Patterson relented, but not before comparing the situation to Jurassic Park. “You can put up all the fences you want,” he said. “but the dinosaurs are still gonna get out.”

For those who aren’t SNL historians, one of the clips Patterson could have rolled was the 1975 “Word Association” sketch — considered one of the most iconic moments of the show’s history — in which Chevy Chase plays an employer, Richard Pryor a job applicant, and the job interview consists of word association that becomes progressively more racially charged. Chase runs through a string of epithets which prompt Pryor to reply “honky,” but when he gets to the N-word itself, Pryor, his face twitching with rage, replies: “dead honky.”

2. Pete Hegseth Cold Open

If what’s actually happening in our government weren’t so heartbreaking, it would be a laugh riot, and SNL’s writers regularly clear the fences with Johnson — the best Donald Trump impersonator in the show’s history — satirizing the week in Washington. There was a lot to cover in this sketch, which made it more of a triple than a home run, but it was still a win.

Jost left the Weekend Update desk for a rare sketch performance as bro-hugging “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth. And while his punchable face is too friendly and aware to do a dead-on impersonation, he delivered on the former Fox News host’s weird-ass speech about the military’s fitness, before hundreds of generals called to a last-minute meeting at Quantico.

Jost-as-Hegseth’s mandate for our armed forces was to meet the standard set by President Trump: “Six-foot-six, a buck 75, A-cup — perky, with a dump truck in the back you wouldn’t believe.”

That meant, he concluded: “No fat chicks. And if you’re a fat dude, goddammit, you better be funny as hell,” adding, “In summary, just hot, shredded, hairless men who are definitely not gay.”

Enter Johnson, who brought major cringe, comparing Trump Rx to the hims hair-loss and “boner pills” prescription home delivery service and getting some rumbles of disapproval when he said, “We love the Saudis because they love to saw-deeze journalists in half.”

1. Dobby the House Elf on J.K. Rowling

In an interview with People, Yang said Michaels asked him to stay with the show, telling him, “There’s more for you to do. I need you.” Yang’s appearance on Weekend Update as Dobby, the abused house elf from the Harry Potter saga, was one more example of him fulfilling that promise.

Appearing at the end of the segment, Yang sent up the week’s news that Potter creator J.K. Rowling refused to forgive Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the saga, for dragging her over her oft-expressed opposition to the trans community. When co-anchor Che asked the elf why he seemed frightened, Yang replied “Why would Dobby be scared, sir? Dobby’s just about to publicly weigh in on trans people, that’s all.”

After accidentally admitting that Rowling was his “master,” Dobby began to “self-punish” by banging his head — quite realistically — on the Update desk, which resulted in one side of his tunic accidentally falling off. “Dobby’s come undone!” Yang cried without breaking character. The case for the defense: “Master Rowling has done so much for Dobby and inclusion in general,” Yang said, adding “Remember when Dumbledore was gay after the books came out? And when Hermione was Black, only on Broadway? And when [Hogwarts witch] Cho Chang was — was Cho Chang Asian? Dobby can’t remember if the character named Cho Chang was Asian or not.”

Yang said he also came with a message from Rowling: “Master sent Dobby to go on the telly and define once and for all what a woman is sir.”  The answer: “Women have vaginas and women’s bathrooms are for women only and girls and ghosts of girls.” In keeping with the Seinfeld ethos, there were no lessons and no hugs, just more self-punishment: Dobby banging his head against a camera lens and calling himself “millennial cringe.”

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