John Mulaney hosts best ‘SNL’ of the season as Kamala Harris comes face to face with her doppelganger

Thanks to John Mulaney, we just got what’s easily the best episode of SNL’s fiftieth season.

No shade on what Nate Bargatze and Ariana Grande did as hosts, but Mulaney is a higher tier on SNL host. It helps that this was his sixth time in the role. It also helps that he was previously a writer on SNL. And it also helps that this episode kicked off with the buzz from Kamala Harris showing up during the cold open.

News that Harris had flown to New York for SNL broke before Mulaney’s episode began. My hunch was that she would appear during the cold open, but I wasn’t sure if that would be the case. Hillary Clinton played a bartender during her cameo a few seasons ago. Sarah Palin appeared during Weekend Update once. Barack Obama played himself and pulled off an Obama mask to reveal that he was cameoing in the early days of the 2008 race.

A presidential candidate or nominee appearing on SNL isn’t new. It just didn’t happen in the last cycle, I’m guessing due to a combination of the pandemic and SNL being wary of bringing a candidate in after Donald Trump hosted on Nov. 7, 2015.

In recent history, SNL saw John McCain host the Oct. 19, 2002, episode (this was years after he lost the Republican nomination to George W. Bush and years before he would run against Obama in 2008) before having cameos on May 17, 2008, and Nov. 1, 2008. The 2008 cycle also saw Obama have a cameo on Nov. 3, 2007, Clinton have a cameo on March 1, 2008, and Palin appear during the Oct. 18, 2008. (This was the one where a heavily pregnant Amy Poehler performed “Sarah Palin Rap.”) Clinton would return for a cameo on Oct. 3, 2015, just over a month before Trump infamously hosted the show.

For this episode’s Harris cameo, SNL returned to a familiar premise. (So familiar, that the New York Post accused SNL of — checks notes — ripping off their own bit. Obviously a bunch of SNL historians over there.) Remember a few episodes ago when Chloe Fineman and Ariana Grande played Jennifer Coolidge looking in the mirror? (And then Dana Carvey showed up and ruined it.) Well, SNL ran that bit back out during the cold open, giving us Maya Rudolph playing Harris against the real Harris playing herself in the mirror.

I’m not sure what else the show could’ve done with the Harris cameo. Maybe she didn’t have enough time to lock down her Beyoncé impression.

COLD OPEN

2024 Pre-Election Cold Open

Before the Kamala Harris cameo in the cold open we got what was possibly/likely/hopefully the final outing for the celebrity ringers that Lorne Michaels brought in to play the big political names for this season.

We can all finally admit that this strategy was a dud, right? We don’t have to keep pretending that it was a massive stroke of genius anymore.

The celebrity cameos for the 2024 presidential election — Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris, Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff, Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz and Dana Carvey as Joe Biden — wound up adding little to the show. The best outcome was that we got “Sushi Glory Hole” thanks to Samberg. The worst outcome was that we got Carvey saying “no joke” for the six thousandth time this week. And my respect to Gaffigan for collecting an SNL check with a portrayal that left zero mark on the season.

The most bizarre part of how SNL tackled the 2024 election players was Michaels’ choice to skip doing anything with JD Vance. At all. I’d say the show abandoned the impression, but it never even started. I’m all for Bowen Yang getting a shot at the portrayal, but the show saw all the headlines surrounding the Republican VP nominee and said, “Nah, pass.”

• “Where the hell am I? This place reeks”: James Austin Johnson’s version of Trump continues to be the gold standard for SNL. It’s late in the game now, but I wish the show had allowed Johnson to move the character beyond mostly saying things that the actual Trump has said. At least Johnson is infinitely better at doing that than Alec Baldwin was.
• This is CNN: SNL has loved using Chloe Fineman’s Kaitlan Collins this season.

THE MONOLOGUE

This was John Mulaney’s sixth time hosting SNL, and there really aren’t any surprises at this point. Like he did his first five times hosting — and like pretty much every other comedian in the history of the show — Mulaney used his monologue to do some standup.