SNL After Party (S50 E20 Air Date 5/10/25) - "He's Got The Midas Touch, But For Bad Things"
Host: Walton Goggins
Musical Guest: Arcade Fire
Are we Justified in having high expectations for Goggins as host? Or will those hopes wither like a delicate White Lotus?
Let’s check out the Fallout in this week’s After Party.
Cold Open
This starts by looking like the traditional cast members and their moms bit for mother’s day, but it is promptly interrupted by James Austin Johnson’s Trump who is “invading every aspect of your life.”
Cecily Strong pops in with a cameo as Jeanine Pirro, the former FOX personality who is now the DA for Washington, D.C.
Strong is joined by Colin Jost as embattled Secretary of Defense and another former FOX talking head, Pete Hegseth.
Strong and Jost emphasize the alleged love of drink the two have, and a hilarious spit-take-athon ensues.
It is undeniably funny, but part of me kinda wishes they had foregone the current events and Trump stuff and done the traditional Mother’s Day thing instead.
Tis the world in which we live, I suppose.
Monologue
Walton Goggins, best know to most viewers for his recent White Lotus turn, is affable during his monologue. He discusses becoming a sex symbol in his 50’s, and goes through some half-complementary/half-insulting headlines about him, such as “Hollywood’s Newest Heartthrob is a Greasy Little Man Whom No One Saw Coming.”
The Alabama native then brings up his mom to do some line dancing.
It’s sweet and cute.
The Second Amendment
As the Constitutional Convention wraps up the wording for the First Amendment, Goggins’ as delegate Matt (last name “Don’t You Worry About it”) suggests that the Second Amendment should be “guns”.
Goggins’ character is much funnier in execution than it seems on paper, and the whole sketch is very funny based on Goggins’ energy and everyone else’s reaction to it.
It ends all weird and abrupt, but a solid sketch nonetheless.
Tiny Baby Shoe
Well, at least they gave Jane Wickline something to do.
This is pre-taped musical bit about a woman (Wickline) who finds a baby shoe at the zoo and sings about trying to find the baby it belongs to.
The twist is it belongs to Goggins who has little baby feet.
It’s a weird, overproduced bit that relies on the little appendage thing that Kristen Wiig made great hay with in the Maharelle Sisters sketches.
This one doesn’t really gel, despite a cameo by Goggins’ White Lotus co-star, Sam Rockwell.
Mothers’ Day Brunch
Sarah Sherman and Heidi Gardner are two moms being taken to brunch by their sons (Mikey Day and Andrew Dismukes).
Goggins is their waiter who inappropriately flirts with the moms (the “two mature goddesses dripping in Talbots”). The sons are outraged while the moms love it.
There’s no real arc to the sketch, and that is the one joke, but it gets laughs as it plays out, and it definitely lets Day do his exasperated guy thing to full effect.
Service Dogs
In this high concept sketch, a theater audience is filled with service dogs in training. Goggins and Gardner struggle as the leads of the Tennessee Williamsesque Southern Gothic play as the real dogs in the sketch wander off and otherwise cause distraction.
One of the trainers (Dismukes) apologizes as “This is the first time they’ve been to a bad play.”
Look, if you like dogs in sketches, this one will strike all the right chords. And Goggins and Gardner are great in the terrible play.
Weekend Update
The news itself was uneven this week. We got jokes about the new Pope and criticism of his supposed wokeness. “How woke can a 69 year old man from Chicago be?”
There was discussion of Trump reopening Alcatraz, which he described as “Horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable and weak” with Che adding that those are the “nicknames for his five children.”
Jost notes that the Navy lost another F18 this week, leading him to repeat an Osama Bin Laden joke from last week’s show.
There are three desk guests this week. Marcello Hernandez is The Movie Guy, a repeat character who knows nothing about upcoming movies. This one has run out of steam.
Gardner is Diane, the mom who has only read about New York in Facebook posts. She is vaguely racist and overtly alarmist.
But, the best of the bunch is Day as a tariff expert who just walked through a spider web. The physicality and manic energy in this bit is alone worth the price of admission.
Deathly Diner
Well, this sketch brought the proceedings to a grinding halt.
A family Goggin and Ashley Padilla (and two kids) are visiting the Deathly Diner at a theme park. Diner employees Bowen Yang and Ego Nwodim try to frighten them by warning them that everthing may be their last. This dinner may be their last. This water may be their last, and so on.
The joke is that the Diner isn’t good at scaring people.
I truly hope this sketch was the last time we see this diner.
Boss’s Bathroom
Writer Dan Builla’s Midnight Matinee feature returns. This time, Dismukes is having dinner with his boss and his boss’s wife (Goggins and Sarah Sherman) at their home. He excuses himself to use the restroom, and notices a Squatty Potty.
This leads to a surreal series of hallucinatory thoughts about what happens in the bathroom. Somehow it leads to claymation dinosaurs and talking worm-like creatures.
This is more weird than funny. A lot more weird.
The Goodbye Wave
Best Sketch: I almost don’t want to pick this because it wasn’t much of a sketch per se, but Day’s guy who ran into a spider’s web is such a bolt of hilarious energy that I can’t resist.
Worst Sketch: Deathly Diner. It goes nowhere, and does not serve up any real laughs.
Random Notes:
-Was Chloe FIneman in this week’s show?
-Arcade Fire remains delightful. Art school rock is a genre that just keeps giving.
- There was no mention of the Aimee Lou Wood tooth-gate controversy. I wonder if the writers were showing restraint or if Goggins refused to deal with that?
-I am genuinely shocked we did not get a Da Bears sketch about the Pope. JAJ mentioned it in the cold open, but in this 50th season of nostalgia, it was a real stunner that we did not get a reunion of the super fans.
-The goodbye lasted a long time this week. Feels like a sketch got cut at the last minute.
This episode started strong enough, but kind of sputtered as it went along. Goggins was used well for the most part, and is clearly capable of bringing the funny.
There were just too many half-baked sketches this week.
I’d like to see Goggins return for another try. As long as he steers clear of the Deathly Diner, maybe it will be a better time.
Grade: C-
As always, we grade SNL episodes in comparison to other SNL episodes. Not TV in general.
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