“Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”
Fans of Saturday Night Live will hear those words once again as NBC’s iconic comedy show premiered its newest season at the beginning of October. The show kicked off its 48th season with actor Miles Teller as the host and featured Kendrick Lamar as musical guest.
The show helped launch so many comedians’ careers , such as Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Pete Davidson, and Seth Meyers, just to name a few alums. The show will feature some old faces such as Michael Che, Colin Jost, Mikey Day, and Cecily Strong. Joining this 48th Season are four new cast members named Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow, and Devon Walker.
The announcement of new members was announced on Sept. 15, which comes after the departure of cast members like Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson, Kyle Mooney, Melissa Villasenor, Alex Moffat, Chris Reed, and Aristotle Athari. As a fan of the show, I was a bit sad to hear that two of the funniest comedians on the show, Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson (Staten Island represent!), were no longer going to be seen in skits every Saturday.
New SNL cast member Molly Kearney is a stand-up comedian from Chicago who played Fern in Amazon Prime Video’s A League of Their Own. Michael Longfellow is a stand-up comedian from Los Angeles who has appeared on Conan and the recent “Netflix Is a Joke” comedy festival.
Devon Walker is not only a New York–based comedian but also named one of Vulture’s Comedians You Should and Will Know for 2022. The final cast member to join is Marcello Hernandez, who has over 340,000 followers for “Just for Laughs New Face” on TikTok.
Just this past Saturday, Oct. 8, Irish actor and film director Brendan Gleeson was invited as a host while Willow performed. My favorite skit in that episode was the one that mimicked the original viral video posted by the YouTube sensation, the Try Guys. The skit poked fun at the Ned Fulmer cheating scandal that made headlines that week.
Instead of making fun of Fulmer, the skit targeted the other Try Guys members Eugene Lee Yang, Zach Kornfeld and Keith Habersberger, who each appeared to show the three stages of grief: angry, sad, and disappointment throughout the original video, which announced Fulmer’s departure from the team.
A silly skit that aired that episode was titled “Eyes.” In the skit, a woman played by Sarah Sherman disrupts a meeting because her co-workers did not comment on her new eyes, which were wide googly eyes that looked ridiculous, as you can imagine.
Colin Jost & Michael Che were back again for this “Weekend Update” segment, and they went through the biggest news that occurred throughout the week like Dr. Oz’s experiments that killed over 300 dogs, the Florida governor explaining why the state’s residents didn’t want to leave their homes because of the recent storm, and a British pilot that drew an outline of Queen Elizabeth in the sky over the country.
Last week they cracked a few jokes along the way as they covered topics such as Hefty introducing pumpkin spice-scented trash bags, a building in San Francisco that appears to have a floating glass cube, and the Empire State Building lighting up in blue and white in honor of Aaron Judge’s 62nd home run of the season. Personally, this is one of my favorite segments and I always enjoy seeing the Weekend Update anchors deliver their cues while trying not to laugh.
Later in this episode, Willow performed her songs “curious/ furious” and “ur a stranger,” which was the perfect way to end the second episode of this season of Saturday Night Live.
The upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live airs this Saturday, Oct. 15 and will have rapper Megan Thee Stallion as both the host and musical guest.
