Six-Time SNL Host Melissa McCarthy Is Low-Key Delightful

And Your Host..

Back for her sixth time as host, Melissa McCarthy raised everyone’s game. A sketch and improv lifer, McCarthy brings an effortless-looking ease to the art form, inhabiting each of the night’s many characters with a peerless confidence, whether doing some signature pratfalls or filling out gentler characterizations. As anybody who saw McCarthy’s Oscar-nominated lead in 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? knows, McCarthy carries a core of subtlety and sadness inside her signature boisterousness and boldness, a quality the best sketch comedians share. And sure, she’s made some big, dumb movies along the way, but what SNL-adjacent star hasn’t? McCarthy was terrific tonight.

Her monologue was a piece of lower-key physical shtick, whether it was McCarthy making unapologetically goofy faces while playing her “mouth horn,” taking a sudden avalanche of holiday stage snow, or doing a funny tug of war over her prop piano with an elf-dressed Marcello Hernandez. (The duo has a nice, ornery energy, leading to the irritated Melissa flopping over the piano bench and taking a key-cover to the fingers.) More of a warmup than a full-on tumbling showcase for the now 55-year-old McCarthy, it yet set the tone of all-in commitment to the bit to come.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey spoke about the sneaky heart that always popped up in her Second City improvisational casts’ sketches. Amidst all the bombast and the yes-and physical bits, Fey joked about piece after piece ending with a maudlin, “I love you dad.” McCarthy may have been a Groundling, but that same sentimental streak often informs even her most ALL CAPS characterizations, her characters’ exterior wild awkwardness hinting at the wounded weirdo inside.

Which brings us to the supermarket sketch, where McCarthy’s sheepish shopper responds to worker Jeremy Culhane’s innocent proffer of free cheese samples with such a sweetly controlled but clearly unbalanced longing that I started smiling and wincing from the jump. Under her boxy wig, McCarthy’s stammering oddball sets up the coming storm by telling the baffled Culhane that “nobody’s ever done anything like this for me before.” It could go any number of ways from there, and while McCarthy’s successive returns to thank, praise, tummy-bump, and eventually make out with the increasingly flustered Culhane aren’t exactly a surprise, McCarthy’s performance maintains a tone of sweetness that a coarser sketch would turn sour.

Certainly, McCarthy’s playing a weirdo—we gradually learn about an orphaned childhood and a foster mother who wouldn’t allow her to go to school—but even when she’s abruptly shoving another shopper’s baby-carrying cart out of the way to return to Culhane, you can’t help but at least feel for her. (Oh, she’s also got six unruly, somehow racist dogs chained outside the store’s front door, but when she tells Mikey Day’s manager to just let them go because “they’ve become burden to us” [her and the clueless Culhane], it’s just another piece in the lady-puzzle.) Going big can get tiresome, verging as that often does into “look at this freak” cruelty. Here, when McCarthy’s final smooch of gratitude sees the won-over and equally shy Culhane shout “Wait up!, and chase after her, it’s the “I love you dad” ending done very right.

The Worst: On a strong show, the gentle, deliberately low-tech charms of music video “Where Do Cousins Go?” suffered from being too whimsically slight. Buried late in the show, this was another stab at finding a place for Jane Wickline’s offbeat musical charms in the rundown, and I didn’t dislike its observational jingle about a hypothetical Cousin Planet where your only-on-holidays same-age relatives all retreat to the rest of the year. SNL too often crowds out piecers like this and performers like Wickline, so I’m not sorry this auto-tuned duet between Wickline and Veronika Slowkoska made the cut, as mom McCarthy (also the mayor of Cousin Planet) sings about the only two rules there being not to hook up with each other, and how rule number one is flexible‚ just use your discretion. (I actually liked this a smidge better than the 10-to-one sketch tonight, but the format wins sometimes.)

The Rest: For big, bold Melissa McCarthy action, the UPS sketch was the ticket. Sure, McCarthy’s slouching, HR-summoned driver does most of her biggest moves on caught-on-doorbell camera remote, but her in-office physical comedy bits allow McCarthy to show off the laughs she can get without leaving her rolling chair. As with the supermarket sketch, the premise isn’t going to make any unexpected turns, as her driver takes out her ire on a particular house with a series of escalating and inappropriate rage-pranks. (Simple package-tossing leads to crotch-flossing with a cashmere sweater leads to porch-pooping and tossing a captured bat through the open window.) But back in the office, the caught-on-film driver maintains a slippery deniability thanks to a series of would-be abrupt exits, the old, “pretend to faint” gambit, and eventually the attempted swallow of the customer’s notarized complaint, McCarthy finding a single, underplayed note to play throughout. Nabbed and desperate, McCarthy’s driver doggedly plays out her inevitable dismissal with a bluff determination, mixing and matching strategies even in the face of certain (and deserved) defeat. When, paper soggily in mouth, she goes limp with another faint attempt and allows Mikey Day’s supervisor to futilely spin her around in an attempt to retrieve the thing, it’s the sort of balletic silliness you hope for when Melissa’s in town.

When your sketch sports a combination of Melissa McCarthy + big bowls of messy food, you think you know where it’s going. And while I’m never one to stand in the way of McCarthy going crazy with the props, I was again pleasantly surprised that the genteel suburban game of wine mom truth or dare went in a different direction. As she, Jane Wickline, Chloe Fineman, Ashley Padilla, and Sarah Sherman’s sleepover chaperones’ game segued seamlessly from innocuous neighborhood chatter to equally unruffled dares to explore their same-sex curiosities, the joke kept on landing thanks to everyone’s commitment. Even as the dares go from simple make outs to consensual sex-choking on the front lawn, the wife and moms’ chipper small talk superficiality never wavers, inviting all manner of tickling interpretations. As ever, I’m grateful when an SNL sketch doesn’t force one character to over-explain a premise, and we’re left to wonder happily at the possibilities stemming from this sunny exercise in the days and nights to come.

A party of a different sort similarly worked for me, as host Adrew Dismukes responds to the understandable reluctance of his happy guests to commit to an every Sunday dinner engagement with a ramping series of absurdly petulant outbursts. Dismukes is the go-to for this sort of social awkwardness scenario, his baby face the perfect disguise for whatever inner obsession is lurking. Here, we watch his host’s initial blurted enthusiasm glaze over in abashed desperation as he slowly ascends the staircase in front of McCarthy’s forbearing wife and his confused guests, only to emerge toting a bindle and his kicked-over “dress-up box” filled with feather boas. We learn about Dismukes’ history of similar showy escapes, as when an accidental “I love you” to the pizza delivery guy saw him trying to ride the rails, while his rallying attempt to corral everyone into an every-morning 6 a.m. breakfast spurs him to chug from a waiting can of gasoline.

A Dismukes sketch is always a win for me, with here his would-be departing hubby giving his wife an incongruously accented “I don’t belong in this world, sugah,” before spinning a future where he has to mercy-shoot the hulking manchild companion he picks up on his lonely flight from his latest faux pas. McCarthy, left to underplay again, confides that she’s sort of glad to be rid of the overly dramatic guy before he returns for a hug because the neighbor’s scary dog was outside. I love a huge belly-laugh physical sketch as much as the next guy, but when a sketch so ably pairs weirdness with comic restraint, it’s often even funnier.

Weekend Update Update

As with the cold open and a lot of SNL satire these days, the sheer act of repeating the things said and done by the Trump regime serves as joke enough. Which isn’t to say that Jost and Che aren’t occasionally rousing themselves from their self-impressed tandem pose to take a few decent whacks. Donald Trump forcing FIFA to create a farcical peace prize on the verge of the US-based World Cup saw Jost focusing on the whole “gnarled hands dragging Earth into hell” vibe of the trophy. Form and function right there. Che followed up by noting the very real threat of Trump and Stephen Miller’s ICE gestapo yanking everyone with brown skin out of World Cup qualifying crowds to help the perpetually disappointing US men’s team, for good measure, and so on.

I’m pretty tough on this Update team. Too often, Che and Jost treat the current crisis—constitutional and otherwise—as just further opportunity to do some business-as-usual wiseassery and move on to the silly stuff. But the simple act of forcing, say, the Epstein files back into the forefront with an edited clip of Kevin McCallister asking Donald Trump the way to Jeffrey Epstein’s suite is the sort of cheap shot I can get behind. (Pissing off the right people is as good a joke raison d’être as there is, especially toward a White House that traffics in juvenile trolling among other things.) So go ahead, Che—flash that pic of a smiling Kristi Noem “watching the end of Marley and Me.” These ghouls deserve it.

Ben Marshall got his Update piece, here parlaying his natural ginger paleness into new character Redhead Who Just Went on Vacation. Marshall’s been struggling to make his mark away from his Please Don’t Destroy pals, and while this one never achieves liftoff, Marshall does go after the characterization with more performing confidence than usual. The jokes about his sunstroke (complete with torso-baring bikini line) and him cooking a frozen dinner on his sunburnt flesh aren’t world-beaters, but he does have a funny run where he keeps hitting a bell on the dinner box to punctuate his lines. It’s little touches like that that give me hope.

Recurring Sketch Report

I’m putting Sarah Sherman’s panicked, scrabbling Update raccoon in the repeater category owing to its echoes of her panicked, scrabbling Update squirrel from last season. Honestly, if you want a panicked rodent/procyonid to do weird stuff next to Colin Jost, Sarah Sherman’s your gal. As with last time, Sherman’s appearance was based on a real “slow news day” fluff piece (sorry), this time about a thirsty trash panda who got bombed while wrecking up a liquor store. Cue Sherman in full fur suit, alarming little paw-hands still clutching a bottle of hooch as she regales the amused and occasionally alarmed host with tales of her boozy raid, the joys of poop-eating, and a rabies fake out. The usual undercurrent of Jost-bashing pops up in Sherman’s desk-humping performance (although Jost gives as good as he gets this time), and there’s a controlled silliness to the whole affair that I found pretty irresistible.

Another spiritual sequel entry is filmed piece “A Helping Hand” which digs into the same terrifying underbelly of a holiday good deed vibe as 2021’s “Lonely Christmas.” This time, McCarthy is the lonely elderly neighbor whose heartfelt responses to her bullied little neighbor boy shoveling her walk get increasingly, hilariously dark. Marcello’s snowman-bashing bully is found trussed up in his underpants in the snow, a chest-target and a sled filled with snowballs signaling a course of vengeance. A snowball pelting finds a gift-wrapped handgun on the terrified kid’s porch. And mockery from a bus stop crush results in a pair of sex workers (and their no-nonsense pimp) showing up at the 12-year-old’s door. Played without words to a lilting, feel-good holiday song, this was another McCarthy sketch marked by a welcome tonal control. McCarthy’s granny-style psycho never wavers in her tear-welling admiration for her young benefactor, even as she finally hides out inside another snowman on the kid’s lawn while the police question the boy’s dad about the old woman who’s just been found to have let her dead mother rot into the family sofa for the past six years. Nice little twist at the end cements the idea that everyone’s just waiting to find that one borderline psychotic loved one for the holidays.

Political Comedy Report

Here’s to long-suffering James Austin Johnson who went through the usual Trump-ification process (and those jowls aren’t getting any smaller) for about a minute of typically on-point impersonation, but the cold open tonight was another surprisingly strong turn from Colin Jost as Pete Hegseth. As the United States continues to murder foreign civilians without due process in the waters off Venezuela thanks to the Trump regime’s racist “kill ’em all” approach to international diplomacy, Jost’s bullying, blustering, beer-chugging Hegseth is barely a caricature at this point. While the blackout drunk accused rapist with a chestful of white supremacist tats and a Fox News resume continues to transform the Pentagon into a propaganda-spewing “no fatties, no gays, no chicks” war crime clubhouse, its all the game Jost can do to try and keep up. And he does.

Now some may jest that Colin Jost channeling a privileged white dude isn’t a huge stretch, but I have to say the Update anchor steps out from the desk with a performing confidence that works for this barely-exaggerated version of the real-life cartoon of toxic assholery that is our current Defense Secretary. With an agenda ranging from peevishly whitewashing all non-whiteness (and straight-ness, and male-ness) from everything from official websites to military bases and ships to straight-up indiscriminate maritime murder of brown people, Hegseth’s portrayal of simpleminded, stunted, strutting war-monkey is pretty much beyond mockery at this point. But since we live in such a place, SNL is stuck with trying to out-do idiot reality. Jost’s Hegseth berates reporters daring to question his rampage, leaving out the fact that all legitimate news sources that would ask such questions were drummed out of the Pentagon briefings in favor of ass-kissing propaganda outlets willing to sign a loyalty pledge. Still, as is proven literally every day, the approved response to actual journalists is to ape the half-witted insults of a remedial seventh-grader, so Hegseth sneering about one reporter’s “gay newspaper” isn’t much of a stretch. That accused underage sex trafficker and disgraced former rising GOP star Matt Gaetz (Sarah Sherman in alarming prosthetics) is now a welcome Pentagon reporter says plenty, but Sherman’s beaming creepiness at least brings up that whole sex creep business once more. And if JAJ’s Trump, roused effortfully to shakily stick up for his embattled DefSec, can only restate his self-interested conditional support before dozing off again, that too is at least the barely embroidered, deeply disgraceful reality.

Call it a game plan or simply the result of elevating the most venal, ridiculous monsters in the land to highest office, but the Trump era (especially this second go-’round) makes it tough for comic entities like Saturday Night Live. I’m critical of the show’s usual toothlessness in the face of active assaults on [gestures widely] everything good and decent, but credit where it’s due—at least cold opens like this one serve to show just how closely moron reality and broadly caricatured evil overlap in 2025 America.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

This was the Melissa McCarthy show, as is to be expected. But the six-timer all-star was ably supported throughout with an almost full-squad effort.

Jost in sketches wasn’t something I expected at this point in his SNL career, but the rise of entitled, upward-failing white mediocrities in the Trump administration is just too good a fit. (I realize how that sounds and don’t mean that Colin Jost is the sort of entitled, upward-failing white dude Update nemeses like Che and Sarah Sherman tease him as. It’s just that when you’ve got an expensive tube of pasty white in your paint box, you use it.)

Jeremy Culhane had a solid little turn in the best sketch of the night, which is worth a shout-out. I keep getting Bobby Moynihan vibes from the new guy, and that’s a compliment.

Ashely Padilla didn’t have huge roles tonight, but she just pops in anything she’s in. Her reporter’s unexpected, vehement “I’m trying!” responding to Jost’s Hegseth telling her to find a husband got a surprise laugh, which is just the sort of color she can bring.

Give Dismukes his five minutes each week to do his thing.

Jane Wickline got her first true sketch of the season, which bodes better for her. No such luck for Kam Patterson, sadly.

10-To-Oneland Report

Having Bowen Yang and Melissa McCarthy kvetch through their collection of indoor holiday decorations in matching balding wigs and Yonkers accents should be funnier than this. None of the props are as funny as intended, Tommy Brennan’s reporter with the would-be funny name is limp, and while there are few amusing touches (the couple is angrier about Brennan referring to Yonkers as a town than about being misgendered), this one just putters through the final few minutes.

Stray Observations

Tonight’s RIP title card went out to former SNL producer and talent coordinator Craig Kellem, who was there at the beginning, and who died this week at 82. One anecdote from Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s book Saturday Night recalls when hardass NBC exec Dave Tebet pointed to hippie-ish Kellem’s naked, sandal-clad feet as the sort of fashion don’t to avoid when costuming first-ever host George Carlin.

I was prepared to be pissed that the show didn’t address the Trump regime using a childishly hacked-up SNL promo featuring Marcello Hernandez to prop up their ethnic cleansing campaign, but it might be that Marcello didn’t want to further put himself into very real harm’s way.

Props to former host Sabrina Carpenter for taking on the Trump troll machine. Oh, and the author of those Franklin the Turtle books.

“Let’s just say if I had a drink for every Venezuelan we killed, I’d really like that number of drinks.”

Just’s joke about the dentist chair found in Epstein’s retreat (all his girlfriends still had braces) was still not as cold as the chills that went up my body when I saw the thing.

Episode Grade: A Refreshing B-Plus heading into the final three episodes of 2025.

Next week: He’s a Mastermind and his Knives are decidedly Out as Josh O’Connor hosts alongside musical guest Lily Allen.