Since its inception nearly 50 years ago, Saturday Night Live has spoofed thousands of celebrities, politicians, and pop culture moments. So it only makes sense that, like The Simpsons, SNL would also end up “predicting” some future events.
Looking back at some of the wildly specific things the show has foretold over the years, one might think a few SNL writers actually have secret psychic powers (or at least a really good crystal ball).
From the triple-bladed razor to Kanye West stealing Taylor Swift’s winning VMA moment, here are seven times SNL has accurately predicted the future.
Kanye West Interrupting the VMAs
The rapper who now goes by Ye sparked controversy at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when he interrupted Taylor Swift as she accepted the Best Female Video award, rushing the stage and declaring, “I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!”
As it turns out, SNL’s writers actually pitched Ye an eerily similar sketch two year earlier—in 2007.
“We pitched him a sketch wherein he would interrupt award show speeches, saying they had made a mistake and he should have won,” Seth Meyers, who spent more than 10 years on SNL before taking over as host of Late Night, revealed during his opening monologue when he hosted SNL in 2018. “And Kanye said, ‘That’s hilarious because I’d do that.’ Which is good self-awareness.”
Topless Martha Stewart
In 1996, SNL rang in the holidays with one of the jolliest commercial parodies of all time. “Martha Stewart’s Home For The Holidays: Topless Christmas Special” saw Ana Gasteyer—who was then in her first season—portraying Stewart as she does Christmas crafts while topless, with a black bar censoring her chest. In 2022, a then-81-year-old Stewart went topless for a Green Mountain Coffee commercial, appearing in just an apron.
The sketch is widely considered to be Gasteyer’s breakout impression. “My first sense of success on the show was ‘Martha Stewart’s Topless Christmas,’” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2021. “When I wrote that sketch and when it played, I remember being like, ‘Oh I might not get fired.'”
Disney Live-Action Remake Mania
From Beauty and the Beast to The Little Mermaid to even Lilo & Stitch, Disney has gone all in on live-action remakes in recent years. In 2015, SNL spoofed the concept before it really became a trend when the show aired a parody of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson starring in a gritty, live-action Bambi remake. In 2020, Disney announced that a live-action Bambi flick was indeed in the works. However, the remake’s future remains uncertain amidst director Sarah Polley exiting the project in March 2024.
Jimmy Fallon Hosting SNL in 2011
In a 1998 holiday sketch, a lost Alec Baldwin received some sage advice from the Ghosts of SNL Hosts Present and Future—John Goodman and Jimmy Fallon—who helped him learn the “true meaning of hosting SNL.”
In the sketch, Fallon—who was 22 years old at the time, and just a few months into his first season at SNL—explains how he is set to “become a huge star in the future, and I host the show in the year 2011.” Later in the sketch the date of his future hosting gig is even mentioned—December 12, 2011. Had someone bothered to look at a calendar at the time, they would have known that date fell on a Monday. That one detail notwithstanding, on the actual Saturday of that week, December 17, 2011, Fallon—who was the host of Late Night by that point—did indeed end up hosting SNL for real.
A Very Specific Detail About the Obamacare Website Crash
On October 1, 2013, Obamacare’s opening day was plagued by website crashes as millions of people tried to enroll at once, overwhelming the system. Less than a week after the debacle, SNL aired a sketch starring Kate McKinnon as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who holds a press conference to address the site “crashing and freezing and shutting down and stalling and not working and breaking and sucking.”
At one point, McKinnon’s Sebelius proudly states that “millions of Americans are visiting HealthCare.gov, which is great news. Unfortunately the site was only designed to handle six users at a time.” While it was an absurd line written simply to be funny, it turned out to be a pretty accurate assessment: of the millions of Americans who visited the site on the day of its launch, only six people were able to enroll.
Sofía Vergara Joining the Despicable Me Franchise
In 2015, SNL aired a sketch where Sofía Vergara (portrayed by Cecily Strong) does a screen test for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but mistakenly believes she’s auditioning for the Minions movie instead. Vergara later went on to join the Despicable Me franchise, voicing supervillain Valentina in the 2024 sequel Despicable Me 4.
Three-Bladed Razors
During SNL‘s very first episode in 1975—back when it was still called NBC’s Saturday Night—the show aired a fake commercial advertising the Triple-Trac, a razor with three blades. The fake ad served as a spoof of the new double-bladed Gillette Trac II razor (as seen in the commercial above), and the concept of a razor with more than one blade was seen as rather ridiculous at the time. In 1998 however, Gillette really did come out with a three-bladed razor, the Mach3.
