Martin Short Gets His Five-Timers Club Jacket on a Star-Studded Episode of Saturday Night Live

Last week, Saturday Night Live had its best episode of the season yet, under the guidance of former cast member and stand-up great Chris Rock. It was a back-to-basics episode for the show, one filled with straight characters and no-fuss punchlines that landed often and memorably. Rock was comfortable not commanding every sketch, instead acting like a perfect accessory to some of the show’s strongest voices, like Sarah Sherman, Ego Nwodim and the always-efficient Kenan Thompson.

But SNL rarely builds upon its own momentum these days. Season 50 has been a perfect example of that inconsistency, as good episodes (like the ones hosted by John Mulaney and Charli XCX) were followed by really bad episodes (like the ones hosted by Bill Burr and Paul Mescal). Needless to say, going into last night’s Christmas episode, my hopes were not very high. Before yesterday, Martin Short, who was a cast member himself in Season 10, had hosted the show a total of four times (twice by himself and twice with co-hosts), and he’s endured as royalty in Studio 8H—transcending his Jiminy Glick and Ed Grimley characters by being this over-the-top, melodramatic auteur in a mode of comedy rarely performed in this day and age. Truly, Short is one of the last living renaissance men in the very medium he helped revitalize in the 1980s. Forget what that horrible Slate article said about him last year.

If anyone was going to capitalize on Rock’s successes last week, it would certainly have to be Short, who’s proved, time and time again, that he is no slouch when it comes to returning to the very show that plucked him out of his SCTV cubby hole and into the not-ready-for-primetime limelight. Short’s brief tenure on SNL 40 years ago came when he was part of a cast tasked with patching up the massive head-wound Eddie Murphy’s departure had left on the then-Dick Ebersol-produced show. But the troupe Lorne Michaels employs now is much, much better.

Short’s appearance on the show last night put all of my doubts to rest, as he turned in another above-average trip to Studio 8H. Christmas episodes can be a tricky beast to contain. The holidays in New York City are historical because, truth be told, there is no better place to be in December than in the heart of the greatest city in the modern world—and SNL is a major player in that statement still being true in 2024. When I tune in to the last show of every calendar year, there’s a special kind of magic looming over the program and, whether the episode is good or bad, the goodnights always leave me with a feeling of hope as 2025 lingers close by.

Luckily, Short made sure that the last episode of 2024 was a good one—maybe the tightest 90 minutes of the season so far—by not doing too much heavy-lifting and letting the current cast somehow have all of their voices heard despite the all-star lineup of guest stars present. It felt like a true variety show, a revolving door of talent so packed that Short didn’t even appear in one of the episode’s marquee sketches. It was a Christmas episode that didn’t quite feel too overtly holiday-pilled until Hozier took the stage at 12:45 and sang the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” while fake snow fell at his feet. But how good was the final SNL of the year, really?

Well, as a wise cue card says…

“Live from New York…”

A Five-Timers Club sketch was inevitable last night but, rather than hijacking Martin Short’s monologue, the SNL writing crew decided to make the bit the entire cold open. That was the correct choice. I’ve been critical of the show’s use of guest stars this season, because it’s become so easy to belittle the cast by replacing them with bigger names for a louder applause. It can be a stifling decision to see carried out, but the Five-Timers Club has always been a premise that’s star-hungry more than it is anything else—a celebration of the Hollywood voices deemed funny enough to return to the show over and over again, or an “ingeniously lazy way to avoid writing a monologue,” according to Tom Hanks.

All the way back in 1990, when Hanks helped inaugurate the club in his monologue, the sketch featured one then-current cast member (Jon Lovitz) and a then-current writer (a young chap named Conan O’Brien). The magic of such a ruse is in the formula: assemble as many marquee names as you can and let their collective charm. That’s what happened last night, as we got to see Hanks, Paul Rudd, Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Melissa McCarthy, Emma Stone, John Mulaney, Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Wiig and Jimmy Fallon (not a Five-Timer; just there, for some reason) ordain the newly-minted Short into the club. The only current cast member was Bowen Yang, playing a waiter.

Short is like Paul Simon in both height and membership technicality, as he, like Simon, actually hasn’t hosted the show by himself five times—last night marked his third solo hosting gig, and he’s taken the mantle twice with co-hosts (once with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase in 1986, and again with Martin in 2022). But that’s okay, because Martin Short is, just maybe, one of the most likable SNL personalities in the show’s history. He can have a pass just this once. Last night’s Five-Timers Club rehash felt like a true party rather than some “see who we can get to show up on short notice” bit that SNL sometimes leans heavily on when a name like Jonah Hill or Dwayne Johnson gets their jacket. No, this felt like an authentic get-together of people who deeply admire Short’s contributions to not just the show, but to comedy as a medium.

Thus, the nine-minute sketch hit me in all the feels, running the gamut on a who’s-who with some nostalgic, bankable lines and some quippy one-liners in the process. It was the second-longest cold open of the season (behind the premiere’s) yet it didn’t drag for even a moment. We get re-familiarized with that classic “you’re great, you’re great” secret handshake, a fantastic back-and-forth between Short and Fey (“You are one of the rarest things in Hollywood: a writer who’s attractive enough to be on camera” / “And you are one of the least rare things in Hollywood: a loud man”), McCarthy stumbling through a wall, Johansson shutting the door on her husband Colin Jost, Hanks admitting that he lied about having COVID in 2020, Wiig admitting to having an affair with both Short and Stone in 2023 and, my favorite, Short not being able to get his new Five-Timers Club jacket on properly. In a season where cold opens have been a consistent weak spot for a show missing its identity, last night’s introduction serves as a reminder that, even during SNL’s bleakest eras, it didn’t make it to 50 years on air by luck.

“You look mahvelous!”

I have rarely covered the host monologues this year, because none of them are really that special. John Mulaney’s was fun, and so was Nate Bargatze’s—but they’re stand-up comedians, of course the only stand-up comedian-esque part of the show is going to be their bread-and-butter. Short, on the other hand, is the salt of the earth. His flamboyant charm can turn any segment inside out, and his monologue was just a terrific six minutes of no-fuss, gut-busting theatricality. He makes fun of Matt Gaetz, speaks from the heart (and the cue cards) about Lorne Michaels (they’re good friends, like Elon Musk and Donald Trump but without the sexual tension), goes over his accomplishments (his induction into the Five-Timers Club and the impending season five premiere of Only Murders in the Building), and addresses why his dear friend (and Only Murders) co-star Steve Martin wasn’t present: “He had a conflict with me not wanting him to be here.” He and Martin co-hosted the show two years ago, but Short knows that it’s his stage now: “Hosting SNL is a lot like sex: It’s great with a partner but, sometimes, it’s fun to just knock one out by yourself.”

But the true soul of Short’s monologue is the musical number—a Christmas carol, if you will—that he sings about spreading cheer during the stressful, depressing holiday season. “Gather ‘round, youngsters,” Short says, “and Kenan!” He does what the show has done time and time again: a walk—or, in Short’s case, a stroll—through the backstage area of Studio 8H, singing about getting a “new prescription” (preferably something that won’t kill his erection) to combat the yuletide meanies. There are some really terrific one-liners from Short here, like “I have this recurring dream where I’m eating Armie Hammer—MAMA!” and “I want world peace but I need Preparation H!” He does a ketamine spritz and makes fun of Lorne (“I didn’t know Jack Daniels made cologne”) and, upon seeing Fallon, yells “GOD, I’M ATTRACTED TO YOU!” at the top of his lungs and macks on the Tonight Show host passionately. I was smiling from start to finish, watching a national treasure simply do his thing.

“Yipee! Jerry Rubin died last week.”

This may have been this season’s strongest Weekend Update yet, on account of Bowen Yang’s New Jersey drone character and Colin Jost and Michael Che’s annual joke swap. But the hosts had to make a few required pit stops first, touching on the year coming to a close after Diddy went to jail, Trump got re-elected and Elon Musk appointed himself “co-president.” “I don’t know what next year will hold,” Jost says, “but one thing’s for certain: We will see all three of those men at SNL’s 50th anniversary.” When a picture of Luigi Mangione appears on screen, the audience thunderously cheers and Jost snaps back at them: “Yeah… definitely woo! You’re wooing for justice, right?” Mangione was extradited to New York from Pennsylvania to face criminal charges but, in other news, the Bumble dating app “exploded.”

Che takes a turn talking about Mangione, riffing on how he and Diddy are in the same prison and that “Christmas came early” for the disgraced producer. The Matt Gaetz jokes write themselves these days, as Che comments on the politician’s sexual misconduct reports being released but, luckily, his teenage girlfriend is “too young to read the news.” There are some good jabs at George Santos’s new podcast, Trump transferring his trust shares to his eldest son Don Jr. while Eric “was given some bubble wrap to play with.” An under-the-radar joke from last night’s Update was, without a doubt, Che’s take on Herschel Walker being appointed the United States’ ambassador to the Bahamas by Trump: “When told he would be an ambassador, Walker said, ‘Correction, I is ambassador.’” Also, props to Jost for making me laugh out loud when he said “Retire, bitch!” upon announcing the news that the moon might be 100 million years older than we previously thought.

Yang’s performance as “a drone discussing the mysterious drone sightings” is another bullet point in the comedian’s long-running CV of really ridiculous character portrayals that make me laugh every goddamn time—joining the ranks of the Titanic iceberg, Moo Deng, a proud and gay Oompa Loompa, Chen Biao and a spotted lanternfly. This is firmly Yang’s wheelhouse, and a proper reminder that, alongside Sarah Sherman, he is Update desk royalty. “All y’all hate me ‘cause I’m up,” Yang declares to the audience. “What is so threatening about random machines in the night sky? God, it’s like y’all have never been to Afghanistan before.” My favorite thing about Yang’s approach to characters like the ongoing “but make it gay” solution he brings to them.

The New Jersey drone has spunk and answers the question on everyone’s mind: Who the fuck is Bethenny Frankel? Well, apparently she’s going “Super Saiyan on TikTok” right now, talking about “orbs and plasmoids like she knows a damn thing.” Yang touches on everyone’s obsession with whether or not he’s “manned,” the hard-hitting truth that he prefers to sleep with helicopters because they’re like him but “larger and louder and took a lot of TV work.” He then drops a bombshell, confirming that he’s “dating the helicopter from Succession.” Before the bit is over, Yang goes deep into his Wicked bag and sings a ditty. It’s all very marvelous, grand and over-the-top—I enjoyed every second of it.

And this brings us to what most SNL fans were expecting last night: Jost and Che’s annual joke swap, the only thing keeping their tenure on Update valid. I won’t stop spreading my truth, that the two writers ought to pass the baton to new anchors sooner rather than later, but I’ve been saying that for at least three years and there’s been no change. Every December, during SNL’s Christmas episode, I find myself retreating from that opinion. The joke swap is a tradition well-honored and always amusing. It’s the same shtick every year, in which Che makes Jost say some racist shit and Jost makes Che lean into his own penchant for misogyny. It’s a formula that works because it’s just two friends trying to make each other as uncomfortable as possible in front of millions of viewers.

This year, Che has Jost read a joke about Kamala Harris’s support for slave reparations in a blaccent and repeat the phrases “shizz” and “I ain’t afraid of you mofos.” Che has to then respond to the news that women in touch with their body signals, like heart-rate and breathing, are more likely to have an orgasm, as opposed to the women he sleeps with, who “just hold their breath until it’s over.” Part of the joke swap’s charm hits when Che and Jost struggle to get through the material because they’re laughing so hard. That’s what happens when Che makes Jost recite a few jokes about his wife Scarlett Johansson, who is shown watching the segment elsewhere in the studio. Jost says that, now that his wife is 40 years old, he’s going to leave her, before explaining that they haven’t posted pictures of their child yet because he’s “Black as hell.”

Moana 2 is setting box-office records and, like Che’s good friend Jeffrey Epstein used to say, “there’s nothing like an island adventure with a teenage girl.” “I’m just kidding,” Che affirms, “I would never, ever sleep with a girl as dark as Moana.” Che says that Jay-Z is innocent and is adamant that he knows Hova wasn’t at Diddy’s parties because he himself was there. He then speaks to Diddy directly: “When it comes to the charges against you, I’ll say the same thing I always said at your parties: I will help get you off.”

But the best joke from the anchors’ swap comes with the news that Costco is taking its roast beef sandwich off their food court menu. “I be eating roast beef every night since my wife had the kid,” Jost, with pain in his eyes, says. “Nah, I’m just playing, baby. You know I don’t go downtown!” Another year, another joke swap ending with a resounding, stitch-popping conclusion. I may be tired of the Che-Jost combination at the desk, but I’ll never say no to a holiday tradition as ballsy as this one.

“Who’s the barber here?”

I didn’t have SNL turning “Sábado Gigante” into a recurring sketch, but here we are. I really do enjoy the show letting Marcello Hernandez just do what he wants sometimes, and him delivering a full five-minute sketch in Spanish is certainly at the top of the list. “Sábado Gigante” is an easy concept to master—all you need is an American (in this case, it’s Paul Rudd) who doesn’t speak Spanish and some rather large hats.

The real Sábado Gigante has been off the air for almost a decade, so Hernandez’s impression as the great Chilean host Don Francisco feels like a capsule of nostalgia for a very specific subset of SNL’s audience—and, honestly, I am perfectly content with that. Wakim reprises his Dracula sidekick get-up, while Ashley Padilla and Chloe Fineman aid Francisco’s amusement—oh, and that black-cloaked, mysterious figure playing the trumpet is back and still just as funny. I couldn’t tell you what the hell happens during these five minutes, other than that Rudd lucks himself into a new hispanic family. It can be frustrating having to buy into a sketch you can’t understand unless you speak the language it’s run on, but I’ve learned, as someone who doesn’t speak Spanish, to just sit back and enjoy the chaos. Hernandez is at his best in circumstances like this—the least any of us can do is buy into him going all-in on a niche ready to explode.

“In a word? Chaos.”

If you want to figure out a way to get all of those big-name Hollywood faces into a sketch together, “Christmas Airport Parade” is a refreshing way to do it without leaning on the “audition outtakes” formula, where everyone in the cast does a mediocre impression of a really niche celebrity. “Christmas Airport Parade” is textbook SNL, in that it runs on the performances of a bunch of characters in a tight window. Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim and Martin Short are hosting a CIBO Xpress-sponsored parade at Gate 78 in Terminal C, and introduce us to all of the familiar faces at the airport—like the nervous flyer whose edible kicked in too early (Andrew Dismukes), a woman who’s saving her stinky meal for the flight (Sarah Sherman), a woman looking for Delta’s VIP lounge (Jane Wickline), a TSA agent who says the same thing 12 different ways (Kenan Thompson) and the woman who accidentally sat down on a motorized suitcase (Kristen Wiig).

There’s also Paul Rudd playing himself (and getting spit on my Short), a white woman who’s somehow going to make the flight about herself (Chloe Fineman), the XpresSpa masseuses (Michael Longfellow, Ashley Padilla, Devon Walker), a woman who wants to join the mile club and her boyfriend who does not (Emil Wakim, Heidi Gardner), a gate agent who’s having trouble with the names of passengers (Melissa McCarthy), Captain Sully Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and passengers who just arrived from Turkey after getting a bunch of operations done. It’s one of those sketches that, miraculously, isn’t a trainwreck—likely because every cast member is getting a chance to just do a bit they really like. If anything, it shows the range of this season’s ensemble without pushing any one player to the limit. Sometimes, you need a sketch this inoffensive to really flex the chemistry.

“You are weak like H.R. Pickens!”

The best pre-recorded sketches are, in my opinion, the ones where you can sense that the story is building up to a great and shocking twist or punchline. I felt that way about “An Act of Kindness,” as we watch a rich woman (Heidi Gardner) treating a homeless man (Kenan Thompson) to a Christmas Eve full of lavish gifts, like a new suit, watch, haircut and an envelope with enough money to get him back on his feet. The plot begins to boil once they get to dinner, where Gardner’s husband (Mikey Day) angrily calls her wondering where she’s at—because, after all, it is Christmas Eve and her entire family is at the house. It’s 9:30 PM and she’s been gone all day, reciprocating kindness to a man who showed her some of his own.

The problem with “An Act of Kindness,” however, is that its payoff is pretty underwhelming. The homeless man turns out to be a swindler who stole from the department store, and he believes that Gardner wants to sleep with him, on account of her suggestion that he take the money and get a hotel room. Thompson leaves, retrieving Gardner’s car from the valet and then promptly stealing it. “If only I had listened to…,” Gardner says, before the screen cuts to an abrasive FOX NEWS logo brandishing the slogan “Stay Smart. Stay Rich.” Cue a tired joke about saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” I look forward to seeing which likely-better sketch got cut in favor of this one as the week goes on.

“It’s always something.”

“Parking Lot Altercation” is likely going to be a sketch that continues to grow on me as time goes on. The writers introduced it last year when Quinta Brunson came to host, but it gets a much needed upgraded here. It’s got just the right amount of absurdity that I look for in a post-monologue sketch, as Mikey Day and Martin Short get in a shouting match with each other after they both try to park in the same spot. This sketch works because it takes a nightmare situation (a confrontation in a public space) and mocks it expertly. The joke is that Day and Short are yelling at each other with their windows rolled up, forcing themselves to get their insults across by using a scream-sign language hybrid. It’s really good physical comedy, and I think Day is probably the only cast member who could pull an idea like this one off so well. Chloe Fineman is there, too, as Day’s daughter whose sign language attempts turn into overtly sexual mannerisms that only stoke the flames of Short’s grievances.

There comes a point where the sketch starts to lose steam, but Melissa McCarthy quickly saves the day by turning her lauded Sean Spicer impression into a parking lot Karen who happens to be married to Short. She shows up, sporting a haircut you can probably imagine without having me describe it to you, and begins serving up hand motions to support her husband, taking a sip of her coffee, spitting it at the passenger side window and then smearing it all over by rubbing her breasts up against the glass. An underrated part of the gag is that she’s wearing an American flag T-shirt. When Fineman breaks, I’m already in stitches.

“Your very precious lunch hour…”

“Peanuts Christmas” isn’t a 10-to-1 that anyone will remember come Season 50’s end, but it was still pretty funny. Watching the entire cast dancing cartoonishly to Vince Guaraldi’s theme song is splendid, thanks to Schroeder (Dismukes) pounding away on his tiny blue piano and Pigpen (Day) plucking away at his cardboard bass. Enter Drake Tuttle (Short), a local community theater legend hired to direct the school’s pageant and ready to critique their performance of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The titular character is absent because he’s dead… to Drake, that is! Yang plays a choreographer named Lestat who used to date Drake, and the two queens out through the “it’s complicated” of it all. “Can you believe he’s a top?” Drake muses, gagging his former beau. “This guy knows what I’m talking about!” he continues, pointing at Schroeder. Lestat tests the troupe’s modern hip-hop dance skills while Drake believes that Pigpen’s name is actually “Pig Penis” and calls him the filthiest child he’s ever seen, directing the young, fly-infested boy to “locate the shower in that hoarder house” he lives and clean himself up.

Linus and his blanket get called out, but Drake insists that he and Lestat will do their best to “accommodate any and all cast members who are on the spectrum.” But the real star of this sketch is the guitar-playing Snoopy (Kenan Thompson). “Are you a boy dog or a girl dog?” Drake asks. “Snoopy look like a bitch to you?” he replies. But the line of the night comes after that, in response to Drake asking Snoopy if he’s been “fixed”: “Nah, man, ‘cause I ain’t broken.” “Peanuts Christmas” feels like a less abrasive younger sibling to “You’re a Rat Bastard, Charlie Brown,” which, coincidentally, Short also starred in 12 years ago. It’s amazing how quickly a few really punchy lines can save an otherwise boring post-Update chapter of an episode.

Not Ready For Primetime Power Rankings

1. Bowen Yang
What does playing a choreographer (who’s a top, by the way, can you believe it?), a drone flying over New Jersey, a waiter at the Five-Timers Club, and an airport parade host get you? The top spot in this week’s power rankings! Yang was superb last night, managing to be the most memorable voice in an episode overrun with a bunch of comedians trying to get a word in.

2. Kenan Thompson
Kenan has found his way into the power rankings two weeks in a row, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. He’s finally making his presence in this cast known, rather than just being the biggest name in the opening credits sequence. Even though “An Act of Kindness” flopped, his appearances in “Peanuts Christmas” and “Christmas Airport Parade” were quick and great.

3. Mikey Day
I have to give some props to Mikey Day, who played a great Pigpen in the “Peanuts Christmas” sketch. But his real shining moment last night came in the first sketch, “Parking Lot Altercation.” It was a brilliant display of physical comedy, and a reminder that, on his best nights, Day is still one of SNL‘s most bankable players.

Goodnights

I’d like to give a shoutout to Hozier, who, instead of playing one of his own songs at 12:45 AM, paid tribute to the late Shane MacGowen by performing a cover of the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” It was a beautiful way to ring in the holiday season, and Hozier’s take on the all-time great Christmas tune was impassioned and full of the very same beauty that has makes it so everlasting to begin with.

SNL is off for the holidays, set to return sometime in January. And that’s the way it is! Goodnight.