The Saturday Night Live episode closest to Christmas hasn’t always been hosted by show alumni. It still isn’t anything the show has made official or permanent, but Jimmy Fallon hosting a couple of Christmas shows in the early 2010s seems to have jump-started a tradition. Over the course of a dozen normal Christmas episodes starting with Fallon first taking that slot in December 2011—that 2021 mostly-canceled episode doesn’t count—three quarters of them have been hosted by people who used to work at SNL. One that wasn’t, the 2022 episode featuring Austin Butler, was preceded by an episode co-hosted by December fixture Martin Short.
That Austin Butler episode—actually the only Christmas episode not hosted by a former cast member since 2018!—also served as a mid-season farewell to longtime cast member Cecily Strong. I’m sure these types of things aren’t actually planned out particularly far in advance; the nature of the show seems to be to figure out what to do in that same one-week time frame. If anything, maybe some longer-lead booking choices influence some last-episode timing decisions by chance; that’s part of the SNL design, to have even the most beloved regulars somewhat subservient to the larger apparatus of the show. But having the surprise (in the sense of the news leaking out a few days before an Instagram-official day-of post) departure of Bowen Yang occasioned by the hosting of another singer-actor, one who’s actually friends with this particular longtime cast member, certainly feels like the well-planned version of something that rarely is.
And, in turn, the reality of a Christmas show hosted by Ariana Grande that doubled as a series wrap on Bowen Yang was far more of the former than the latter. Yang was an important part of the past seven-and-change seasons, both for visibility (as an Asian-American and openly gay cast member, neither of which yet qualify as a minor detail within what remains a relatively homogenous group) and for being, you know, really damn funny in a way that popped with his specific sensibility more or less from the beginning. (It didn’t hurt that he started as a writer, clearly knowing his version of the show’s voice before he appeared on camera.) Right now, at the time of his departure, he might be the best-known person in the cast outside of Kenan Thompson, which is a hell of a place to end his run.
At the same time, Yang wasn’t quite the screentime-dominating presence or decade-long stalwart of some of his immediate predecessors as de facto SNL stars. In retrospect, that makes him look like he had a great sense of when to step back, even though the reality of his precise screen-time levels is probably more luck of the draw and/or some prize sketches getting cut in a crowded cast, as he alluded in his lovely five-to-one farewell piece. Regardless of why, he got more of a two-farewells-and-some-extra-appearances goodbye than an every-sketch-farewell-tour goodbye—and again, whether by design or timing, tasteful restraint or standard SNL machinery, it felt just right.
For Yang, anyway. For Grande, the episode wasn’t quite at the level of her appearance last season, even as she proved how welcome she’ll continue to be on the show past what could now solidly be considered the Yang/Nwodim/Gardner era. This was very much a Christmas episode, which lent it some old-fashioned variety-show charm, and is also a charitable way of describing Cher’s fairly minimal work as a musical guest. For better or worse, almost every segment was holiday-themed, sometimes paying unexpected dividends.
The monologue, for example, was the most cleanly polished of the last few seasons (at least beyond those that were just pro comedians doing stand-up), with Grande singing a full-on parody of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” about her puzzlement over what to buy her cousin’s boyfriend as a gift. It was so precise and well-written, in fact, that the audience almost didn’t know what to make of it without long pauses for laughter. (Maybe the music just drowned it out, but it felt like they were responding to the melody more than the actual lyrical jokes.)
It felt like a hot crowd all night, though; I’m not sure if the show has produced as many audible “awwws” in a single episode as Yang’s farewell sketch did. You could hear sketches like the pitch-modulated Elf on the Shelf support group and the annual goring of a holiday classic (in this case Home Alone) play better in the studio than they might have in the living room. (To be fair, I’m spending the weekend in Delaware, which probably exacerbates the living-room factor on some ineffable level.) Not that they were all that bad; more cheap-seats predictable (and lacking in punchy endings) than truly dire, and more easy teamwork for Grande than showcase parts.
She was better-served, though, in a dance-class sketch that, as it opened, I assumed would be far worse than it actually was, helped immeasurably by allowing the people taking lessons from two bizarrely overzealous instructors. (Anyone reading this recap without watching the episode might be locked to learn that it was not, in fact, Bowen Yang playing the male instructor opposite Grande, but Marcello Hernández; Yang played their acolyte.)
And her facility with music paid off in Yang’s touching farewell sketch, featuring him slinging egg nog in a Delta Airlines lounge before breaking into a holiday duet with Grande. This had hints of both Strong’s “Blue Christmas”-soundtracked goodbye and Kate McKinnon’s barely-disguised (and visibly teary) Colleen Rafferty send-off. So maybe the rest of the episode had to play a little broad and easy, feeling like the show had to earn a little moment of bittersweet reflection and genuine emotion. Part of what makes the sight of Yang choking up is that imperfect SNL machine, running with all the relentlessness of time’s passage.
What was on
Kenan’s “Black Santa” courtroom riff took a little while to warm up, but it was weirdly worth it: a defiantly strange sketch that got a lot of mileage out of another song parody (amusingly described as a Christmas song, but actually just Cher, and not the terrible Christmas single she was apparently booked to sing), Kenan’s goofball energy, and Grande playing her judge role absolutely straight for several minutes just to sell her ridiculously credulous reaction to a burglar/pervert’s claim that he could also be Santa Claus.
Grande was also a lynchpin of the holiday-duet sketch, because she and James Austin Johnson were actually able to cover a wide and convincing range for the impression-parade format, rather than the one-line niche gimmickry that’s come to define them in recent years. (Not to speak ill of the departed, but it’s telling that Yang didn’t bust out his Charli XCX “impression” one more time here.)
What was off
The only sketch that sank below “funny enough but too easy” was the Love Is Blind reunion taking place after a finale where one member of the couple is revealed to be “the literal Grinch”; the premise, the production complete with scarily accurate makeup, and the performances were all there. The laughs, however, never really arrived, and everything just sat there.
Also: I’ll say it. Apart from the return of Aidy Bryant to revive the trend-forecaster characters she and Yang did toward the end of her run on the show (and as her own little farewell moment back in 2022), Weekend Update was a particularly lopsided mess. A short supply of actual jokes and an over-representation of jokes that are more cutesy best-friends potshots at Che and/or Jost rather than anything in the actual world can both be salvaged. But it’s a little alarming when the near-universally beloved Holiday Joke Swap fell flat. It didn’t work for me because of what seemed to be a genuine on-air twist: Che apparently got Jost to agree not to do a joke swap this year, then sprung the bit on his co-anchor anyway, leaving Jost with a bunch of jokes designed to humiliate him and no real recourse.
This should have been a great escalation. The Joke Swap bit has a lot of value for building some genuine unpredictability into the live show; it’s not quite improvised, but Che and Jost, to their credit, nudge it in that direction. But unlike his terrific April Fool’s prank (where he got the audience to stay stony silent for a bunch of Jost’s opening jokes), this variation just felt kind of… bullying? I know that’s a ridiculous way to describe anything bad happening to Colin Jost short of him being physically held upside down and shaken until money rains from his pockets. But Che’s joke style on these swaps is so predictable, and it’s been done so many times, that tricking Jost into doing more of the same feels akin to a frat prank rather than a really inspired bit of comedy—especially when the segment had so few actual news jokes.
Most valuable player
Spiritually, it’s Yang, for his great work over the years. Actually, though, it was… Ariana Grande?! She held the show together with a degree of professionalism that’s out of reach for probably 80% of the people who host. 95% if you don’t include alumni.
Next time
How hard do you think Finn Wolfhard’s people lobbied for him to pull double duty as host and musical guest? Also, it’s kind of surprising in retrospect that, unless I’m forgetting someone, he’s basically the first Stranger Things cast member to parlay that into a hosting gig since David Harbour.
Stray observations
- • Kam Patterson’s Update bit as a twelve-year-old who alternately acts far younger and far older than his age when addressing (and threatening) Santa was kind of weak, I thought. Patterson has an appealing energy but this being Yang’s farewell only puts in mind how he, Gardner, and Nwodim all killed Update pieces at a level that provides an unfair but unavoidable comparison point for half-baked characters like this. Update increasingly feels like a problem area at the show.
- • As a Jane Wickline fan, I loved her quick and canny bit of self-parody playing herself mixed into the NBC holiday duet special. I trust every single commenter on the internet agrees with me and therefore do not need to hear from any of them!
- • Given how accustomed we’ve grown to seeing former cast members on the show at Christmas, it’s pretty weird to go back into the 2000s and check out how randomly selected those hosts feel by comparison: Ellen DeGeneres! Elijah Wood! Al Gore! Weirdly, the holiday fixtures for that decade, not always on the final pre-Christmas episode but sometime in December, were Robert De Niro and (yeesh) James Franco, though never jointly hosting to promote the DVD release of City By The Sea.
- • Happy holidays and see you guys in ’26! Who will be the first alumnus to show up next year? John Mulaney again? Or did Yang quit to become the first cast member to come back and host in the same season that he left? If no one else from that category besides Amy Poehler hosts in Season 51, it’ll be the least alumni-heavy lineup since Season 35, which was the last time just one ex-cast-or-writer figure hosted.
Jesse Hassenger is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
