Saturday Night Live cast member James Austin Johnson has passed another milestone. The fifth-year SNLer has now appeared in 300 sketches.
That’s according to Jon Schneider and Mike Murray of LateNighter’s podcast partner, The Saturday Night Network, which tracks sketch appearances across the show’s history.
His appearance in tonight’s “Dance Class” sketch was the one that put him over the top.
Johnson is the 60th cast member overall to pass the 300-sketch threshold, an honor he shares with seven other current SNL cast members: Michael Che, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Colin Jost, Bowen Yang, and (of course) Kenan Thompson, whose 23 seasons on the show put him at the top of the list with more than 1,800 sketch appearances.
Johnson first joined SNL in 2021, making his debut in the Oct. 2 episode with his Joe Biden impression. From the start, he’s been closely tied to the show’s political comedy—particularly as its resident Donald Trump impressionist after Alec Baldwin stepped aside at the end of Trump’s first presidency.
That role has made Johnson a regular presence in cold opens. In fact, he’s appeared in a whopping 64 of them during his time on the show, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the episodes he’s been in. This season alone, Johnson has shown up in eight of the first nine cold opens, playing Trump in seven of those sketches.
But Johnson’s run hasn’t been defined by Trump alone. He’s also become a familiar face in game shows, commercial parodies, and sketches built around authority figures with a twist—from folksy narrators to slightly unhinged experts—along with multiple versions of Biden, including his softer, whispered take on the president.
