This weekend, “Saturday Night Live” welcomed Martin Short as the 27th member of its storied Five-Timers Club: guest hosts who have helmed the show at least five times. The concept was first introduced to the series by Tom Hanks all the way back in 1990 and has become a recurring opening sketch since. Hanks himself (who has hosted the show 10 times to date) returned to introduce Short’s ceremony, but he was far from the only celebrity on set. In fact, this was the largest collection of Fiver-Timers Club members yet.
Other guests that dropped in: Jimmy Fallon, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey, Melissa McCarthy, Emma Stone, Paul Rudd, Scarlett Johansson, John Mulaney, and Alec Baldwin. It’s not easy to get this many stars in one place, so perhaps they were all back in New York for the holidays anyway. (Johansson is married to Weekend Update desk anchor Colin Jost, who tried to join her in the exclusive club but was denied entrance. No plus-ones in the Five-Timers Club.)
Five-Timers Club sketches have a tendency to be a bit of an audience scream-fest as one celebrity after another makes an entrance, and this was no exception. There was also naturally some chaos and line-tripping due to the number of players on set and what was likely a minimal amount of rehearsal time. Still, there’s something quite endearing about Short struggling and ultimately failing to get both arms into his Five-Timers Club jacket.
Scarlett Johansson returned to witness the Christmas Joke Swap
Since Johansson was already at 30 Rockefeller Plaza anyway, she returned for Colin Jost and Michael Che’s Christmas Joke Swap, in which the two anchors each write jokes that the other is forced to read from the teleprompter. In keeping with Che’s tradition of trying to make Jost’s jokes as racist as possible, he started with the gambit that Jost had to read every joke in a “Black voice.” (The meaning of that was left up to his interpretation.)
Jost tried his best to avoid this, but it wasn’t easy since his script was regularly punctuated with exclamations of “shiiiiizzzzz!” and “I’m ain’t afraid of you mofos.” Things escalated even further when Jost was forced to say, with his wife watching, that her turning 40 meant “I’m about to get up outta there.”
At least he has a few weeks to recover, since “Saturday Night Live” is taking a break over the holidays and returning on January 18, 2025.
