The Best of ‘S.N.L.’: Season 49’s Most Memorable Moments

Season 49 of “Saturday Night Live” is barely in the history books, and everyone seems ready to turn the page to next season, when this long-running NBC sketch comedy series will tackle the 2024 presidential election and celebrate its golden anniversary.

But “S.N.L.” did much more than simply mark the time in its 49th season: It gave us some memorable monologues, catchy comic songs and preposterous commercial parodies; it found the best argument in favor of nepotism; and it tried, yet again, to find someone to impersonate President Joseph R. Biden on a regular basis. And, when no one was expecting it, it served up a sketch so silly that its own cast members profoundly lost it.

Join us now as we look back the best of the past season of “S.NL.”

Cold open of the season

With its premiere delayed by the Writers Guild of America strike, “S.N.L.” started its season only a few days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel — a topic that seemed far too fraught and tragic for the program to comment on, and surely not in the wheelhouse of its host, Pete Davidson, who is no one’s idea of an astute political comedian.

Yet “S.N.L.” and Davidson rose unexpectedly to the occasion, and the host addressed the topic at the start of the show, even before the customary monologue segment. Reminding the audience that his father, a firefighter, had been killed in the 9/11 attack on New York, Davidson said:

“I saw so many terrible pictures this week of children suffering, Israeli children and Palestinian children. And it took me back to a really horrible, horrible place. No one in this world deserves to suffer like that, especially not kids.”

Davidson added, “I’m going to do what I’ve always done in the face of tragedy, and that’s try to be funny. Remember, I said ‘try.’”

“If you’re at home, I’m as shocked as you are that I’m here,” the comedian Nate Bargatze told the audience when he hosted in October. The low-key standup quickly delivered on his “S.N.L.” perch, first with a dryly hilarious monologue (“I’m from the 1900s,” Bargatze declared. “And the world is so future now, and I feel in the way of it”), and then in this sketch which cast him in the improbable role of George Washington.

It’s a silly yet effective critique of America’s system of weights and measures: “Two thousand pounds shall be called a ton,” Bargatze tells his troops. What will 1,000 pounds be called? “Nothing, because we will have no word for it.” Adding a further dimension is a soldier played by Kenan Thompson, whose questions — “In this new country, what plans are there for men of color such as I?” — are awkwardly ignored.

A presidential election is a bit like the Super Bowl for “S.N.L.”, but it’s still anybody’s guess who will be on the show’s starting team for this fall’s contest.

Let’s assume there’s a slot for James Austin Johnson as former President Donald J. Trump— Johnson played the role sparingly this season, but his well-honed impersonation was put to good use in sketches like the January cold open where Trump roasted his Republican rivals right out of the nomination race. (An appearance by the real-life Nikki Haley a couple of weeks later did not appreciably help her chances.)

By our reckoning, Mikey Day became the 3,247th person to play President Biden on “S.N.L.” in only a handful of appearances this season: For example, an October cold open in which he precariously hung Halloween decorations around the Oval Office. Was it enough to secure him the role for next season? Perhaps, if no other random celebrity guest wants it.

Speaking of which: When Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, delivered her response to President Biden’s State of the Union address in a strangely breathless, ethereal voice, it set off a frenzy of speculation about who would inevitably play her on “S.N.L.” that weekend. Would the coveted part go to a current cast member like Chloe Fineman, or an alumna like Kristen Wiig?

With the clocking ticking down, we got our answer: Colin Jost’s wife — who happens to be the two-time Academy Award nominee and six-time “S.N.L.” host Scarlett Johansson. And Johansson capably came through in the role, capturing Britt’s eerie mannerisms and unnerving delivery. (“Like any mom,” Johansson said in the sketch, “I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking.”) Sometimes nepotism is the right answer after all.

The holiday-theme episode hosted by Kate McKinnon at the end of 2023 yielded not one but two musical sketches that are still ringing in our ears, for better or for worse.

First, with guest appearances from Wiig and Maya Rudolph, McKinnon and Bowen Yang brought to life the concept of an ABBA Christmas record, on which seemingly every Yuletide classic is re-conceived to take place on a dance floor and be about characters who are 17 years old. Do you see what we see? It’s Wiig and Rudolph singing a song called “Frostitita” directly into each other’s faces.

Rudolph and Wiig were back (along with the beloved “S.N.L.” writer Paula Pell and the week’s musical guest, Billie Eilish) for a musical ode to the strong, wise women who devote their lives to the sacred place where they grow a necessary product of everyday life. You know it better as “Tampon Farm.”

Back when it aired in the December episode hosted by Emma Stone, this ingenious sketch imagining what might have gone down at the 1969 recording sessions for Mama Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a pleasant pop single that movies have since transformed into an eerie premonition of imminent death — didn’t even end up in our recap the following day. (Maybe we were thrown off by the “Fully Naked in New York” music video from earlier in the night.)

Well, the joke is on us, because between Stone’s committed performance as a wild-haired, chain-smoking music producer, and Chloe Troast’s dead-on recreation of Elliot’s vocals, it was probably one of the best sketches of the season. Ladies, please accept our apologies for the oversight.

(Not so) fond farewell of the season

George Santos was, shall we say, not an ideal fit for the House of Representatives, where he was expelled in December after lying about his personal history and being indicted on charges that accused him of defrauding his donors and other criminal schemes.

Still, he was a perfect match for Yang, who played Santos to the hilt in various appearances on Weekend Update and in opening sketches. So it was a bit bittersweet when Yang bid goodbye, at least for now, to the character in the episode hosted by Stone. After his expulsion and losing his congressional seat, Yang said, “I’m just regular, old Professor Major General Reverend Astronaut Santos, protector of the realm, princess of Genovia.”

But nothing lasts forever in American politics, so don’t worry. Or, perhaps, do worry.

The fake talk show is a time-honored “S.N.L.” tradition — a lineage that goes all the way back to the days of “Consumer Probe,” continuing through the golden age of “Fernando’s Hideaway,” “Church Chat” and “Wayne’s World,” and into more contemporary offerings like “Bronx Beat.”

This format continues to bear new fruit in segments like “Immigrant Dad Talk Show,” from the April episode hosted by Ramy Youssef. Youssef and Marcello Hernández play its two lawn chair-reclining moderators, who bond over their mutual appreciation for America and their disappointment with their sons.

“My son loves Brooklyn,” Youssef says with disdain. “He says, ‘Baba, I want to live in the worst place, in the best place.’” It’s paternal savagery delivered with love — we think.

If you saw “Madame Web,” first of all, we’re sorry, and second of all, you know that Dakota Johnson has a unique gift for taking any moment in a scene and doing something unexpected with it.

In this filmed segment from the episode she hosted in January, Johnson and Day play the middle-aged parents of a son (Andrew Dismukes) who sits down to watch the home movie of the day his father found out he’d be a daddy — and it’s an old episode of them feuding over a paternity test on a 1990s-era Maury Povich-style talk show. It’s a concept sold perfectly by the moment, around the 1:55 mark, where Johnson reacts to her youthful antics with a gentle, guilt-free, “who me?” shrug.

The idea of a public interview being thrown off by an audience member who looks like a cartoon character isn’t that inherently hilarious — you probably didn’t even remember that “S.N.L.” did a sketch with that exact premise back in 2018, with Day playing a bystander who’s a dead ringer for Bart Simpson.

But you’re unlikely to forget this now-canonical sketch from the April episode hosted by Ryan Gosling, in which he and Day played studio guests who so perfectly resembled the animated doofuses Beavis and Butt-Head that Heidi Gardner broke character — and broke down in a spasm of laughter. Gardner later said she was worried her on-air outburst would be regarded as unprofessional but, judging by the more than 15 million views the sketch has racked up on YouTube, we’re going to say audiences forgave her.