Saturday Night Live paid tribute to Patrick Stewart in the closing moments of this week’s Inde Navarrette-hosted episode, honoring the late Star Trek actor with an on-air In Memoriam card and a clip of Stewart’s most memorable SNL moment.
Stewart, who died Wednesday at age 86, only hosted once, but his February 5, 1994 episode would ultimately have a much longer afterlife.
Appearing with musical guest Salt-N-Pepa just months before Star Trek: The Next Generation aired its series finale, Stewart opened the show with a monologue built around his supposed expertise as a hardcore Star Trek fan—expertise that quickly proved unreliable.
Elsewhere in the episode, Stewart played the proprietor of an adults-only bakery in the memorable “Sexy Cakes” sketch and turned up in Mike Myers’ recurring “All Things Scottish” as a therapist named Phil McCracken.
Stewart himself was not fond of his performance that night.
Writing about the experience in his 2023 memoir Making It So, the classically trained actor recalled finding the live sketch-comedy environment intensely stressful, noting that he “wasn’t as loose then as I am now.” He considered his opening monologue among the worst in the show’s history and wrote that he never really connected with the cast.
He made an exception for his sketch with Myers, whose Scottish shopkeeper’s cry of “If it’s not Scottish, it’s craaap!” apparently followed Stewart home: He wrote that he and wife Sunny Ozell continued using the line with each other years later.
But Stewart believed his most enduring contribution to SNL came not in a sketch at all, but in his unusually enthusiastic introduction of Salt-N-Pepa.
John Mulaney turned the moment into a celebrated stand-up bit decades later, first in his Kid Gorgeous at Radio City special and again while hosting SNL in 2018. Mulaney imagined Stewart backstage moments earlier, preparing to introduce “Salt alone” before receiving the welcome news that Pepa had arrived.
Stewart was apparently delighted by his unlikely, Mulaney-aided place in SNL lore. During the show’s 50th anniversary weekend in February 2025, he posted a video wearing a Salt-N-Pepa T-shirt and recreating the introduction himself. “Ladies and gentlemen, IYKYK,” he wrote. “Happy #SNL50!”
Leading into its tribute to Stewart tonight, SNL replayed his Salt-N-Pepa introduction.
Stewart died at his Los Angeles home Wednesday following what his representative described as a “brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
