These days, Saturday Night Live is at its best when it’s being unapologetically weird, like with “Space Pants” or the initial David S. Pumpkins sketch, and former writer John Mulaney appeared to be very conscious of that fact during his first-ever hosting gig on the show last night. The two best sketches from last night were delightfully bizarre, with one involving an elaborate Les Misérables homage about lobsters and the other focusing on the incestuous ramifications of a wacky body-swap sitcom. You can see “Diner Lobster” up above, and you can see “Sitcom Reboot” below.
This morning, Mulaney revealed on Instagram that he actually co-wrote both of these sketches years ago when he was still a regular writer on SNL, explaining that “Diner Lobster” was written by him and Colin Jost in 2010 and that “Sitcom Reboot” was written by him, Simon Rich, and Marika Sawyer in 2009. Neither sketch made it past the table read initially, but last night he was able to resurrect two ridiculous gags that had clearly been stuck in his head for nearly a decade.