With more than two million views and counting, “Hooters Waitress” is by far the most popular among this weekend’s SNL clips on YouTube.
As for whether that’s something to celebrated or scorned depends on who you ask.
For critics on the left, the sketch is the latest example of Saturday Night Live’s long history of objectifying young, attractive hosts. Meanwhile, for some on the right, it’s proof positive that wokeness is dead—for basically all the same reasons.
In the sketch, Sydney Sweeney plays a new server at the restaurant who pulls in tens of thousands of dollars in tips her first night, much to the chagrin of her more experienced (and less well endowed) co-workers.
The joke here was a running one this weekend on SNL, as it was a few weeks ago when fellow Euphoria hottie Jacob Elordi hosted the show: the world is your oyster when you’re drop dead gorgeous and/or you have certain physical features.
(In Elordi’s case, one sketch had the hot young actor play a hot young actor who speaks at an AA meeting where all of the women try to get him to relapse so that they can bed him.)
In a piece for Vanity Fair, Karen Valby wrote of Sweeney’s SNL performance, “I don’t actually know if she’s funny because all the show asked her to do was be young and beautiful.”
Another viewer posted to X, “SNL makes fun of Trump for being sexist and reducing women to their looks but that is what every single sketch has done to Sydney Sweeney to tonight and it’s a shame.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere on X the white supremacist author Ruchard Hanania re-posted a video of Sweeney wearing a low cut top on the show with the caption “Wokeness is dead,” to which one of his followers responded “Blue haired pronoun people in full panic mode.”
Cheering it all on is Hooters itself, with the restaurant chain posting a message of its own to Sweeney on X:
“Sydney, if you work one more shift before hanging up your orange shorts, we’ll donate the day’s proceeds to The V Foundation for Cancer Research.”
It’s not clear exactly what Sweeney would need to do in order for Hooters to donate to The V Foundation (a worthy cause), but that, it seems, is beside the point.
Neither Sweeney nor NBC have commented on the response to the sketch or the Hooters offer.
Old school, baby!