SNL After Party (S51 E1 Air Date 10/4/25) - "He Goes to Strip Clubs and Yankees Games”
Host: Bad Bunny
Musical Guest: Doja Cat
Following a season-long 50th celebration and a tumultuous off-season, SNL is back with a lot of new faces and missing several familiar ones.
So, could the show live up to the party of the landmark 50th season, or has the show run out of steam?
We’ve dusted off the chairs and set up the bar.
Welcome back to the After Party!
Gone are Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim. Farewell Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker. Fare thee well, Emil Wakim, we hardly knew ye. And, Please Don’t Destroy, I think we’ll miss you most of all.
But, fear not! There are new faces. Well met stand-ups Tommy Brennan and Kam Patterson. How do you do actor Jeremy Culhane. Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall, welcome to the main cast. And Veronika Slowikowski, welcome to late night.
So, there are tons of changes going into this season. I guess the show is kind of hoping there is never a need to portray a woman of color in any sketches going forward. Seems unlikely that’s a good idea to me, but what do I know?
Anywho, on with the show.
Cold Open
Right out the gate, we get new cast member Jeremy Culhane doing a thankless set up of introducing Secretary of Defense (or War, depending on which nomenclature you are using) as he addressed military commanders this week. In a surprising development Colin Jost played Hegset, issuing insults to the military leaders. He said that the military is now like a frat party, in that it has a “no fat chicks” policy and that if you are a fat male, you “better be funny as hell”. He also heaped praise on President Trump, stating he has “a dump truck int he back you wouldn’t even believe.”
And then, of course, James Austin Johnson pops in as Trump. JAJ is on point as always. He goes meta for a moment to attack SNL noting that the show has 17 new cast members, but “they’ve got the Update guy doing the open…It’s sad to see something get old and confused and still demand your attention.”
Then Mikey Day dances on as a creepy FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
This was not a bad cold open. It was more of the same, but that’s to be expected for the first episode out of the gate. I’d say this was a solid enough start to the show.
Monologue
This is Bad Bunny’s second time hosting (though the Puerto Rican rapper/singer has performed as musical guest more often). Bad Bunny seems very game to play along with the fun, but his monologue didn’t have a lot going on. He came out in an outfit that appeared to be from the David Byrne collection, and discussed his recent residency in San Juan. He showed a clip of his “complex” choreography that got a laugh for how stupidly simple it was, and mined some humor from video of Jon Hamm enjoying himself at a show wearing a bucket hat and shorts (was he channeling Hunter S. Thompson?). Hamm was in the Studio 8H audience in the same outfit and got a second wave of laughs for showing up.
Bad Bunny discussed the fact that he will perform at the next Super Bowl halftime show, and then showed a seriously edited video that he claimed showed that even Fox News supported the choice to give him that spot.
Overall this was a mild monologue. There were a few good laughs and no serious problems. Overall, it was, well, just fine.
Jeopardy
Andrew Dismukes played the host (I guess Ken Jennings, though there was absolutely no attempt to imitate him, other than the wig). Kenan Thompson, Veronika Slowikowski and Bad Bunny played the contestants.
The whole bit for this sketch revolved around Bad Bunny not able to phrase the answer in the form of the question. This was not a particularly humor rich field. The sketch wrapped up with - and I kid you not - a bit in which the band The Who was the answer, and Bad Bunny inadvertently queried it correctly, thereby winning a million dollars.
This was not an auspicious early sketch, and neither Thompson nor Slowikowski were given anything to do.
ChatGPTio
This was a pre-taped commercial for ChatGPTio, an AI program in which your Latino uncle and his friend (Hernandez and Bad Bunny) give you advice. This bit dragged out far too long with a low laughs per minute ratio.
The Donor
Sarah Sherman and Chloe Fineman have brunch with their friend (Dismukes) and ask him to be the sperm donor so they can have a baby. He has to think about it, but while he does, Bad Bunny creepily offers to help out. He acknowledges he is unusual (“I think the Sopranos ending was perfect!”)
Kenan shows up as an even creepier guy and they just are odd.
At the end, Dismukes agrees to help out, and, as the strains of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ fade in, Bad Bunny’s son (Hernandez) appears and the screen goes black.
I don’t know, man….
Kpop Demon Hunters
For the second restaurant sketch in a row, Fineman and Sherman (again!) join Mikey Day and Bad Bunny for a brunch. Turns out that Bad Bunny is obsessed with the anime series “Kpop Demon Hunters”.
This one is painful to watch as Bad Bunny seems to struggle with the cue cards a little. Ultimately, Bowen Yang appears as a demon from the show, and the (I guess) actual singers behind the Kpop Demon Hunters appear and sing a song, thereby defeating the demon. Or something like that. The whole business was just goofy and not well executed.
Weekend Update
Despite intense off-season speculation to the contrary, Colin and Che returned to the Update desk. Stories included the government shutdown, ICE being on standby for the Super Bowl due to Bad Bunny’s show (“to catch all those migrant farm workers who can afford Super Bowl tickets.”) and a bit where Jennier Coolidge read some lines from a Trump speech. (Oddly entertaining).
Elon Musk’s worth hitting $500 million received a notice, along with a “Shout out to Tylenol.”
New cast member Kim Patterson made a desk appearance as himself, purportedly to talk about Diddy’s conviction this week. Instead, he noted that as an African-American stand-up comic, he felt the show was holding him back by not letting him use a racial slur. When he was told he needed to hold off, he asked if this wasn’t “what Jimmy Kimmel fought for.” Patterson had a good deal of charm and presence. And, while this debut bit was not a gut buster, it will be interesting to see how the show uses his talents going forward.
The second desk bit had Bowen Yang as Dobbie the house elf from the Harry Potter universe. He was defending J.K. Rowling, I think. The bit went off the rails when Dobbie had a wardrobe malfunction that it took Yang a while to notice. (Nothing salacious, just the top of his rag shirt came undone). Yang really hammed it up for this appearance, and his energy livened it up.
Inventing Spanish
In what was a painfully obvious attempt to recreate the Nate Bargatze historical sketches, Bad Bunny portrayed the king of the Iberians explaining the creation of the Spanish language, with an assist from Hernandez.
The sketch focused on gendered nouns mainly, pointing out that the ocean is a boy, because it is often fun, but will sometimes just kill you for no reason.
In even more cameo fun, Benicio Del Toro pops in with more weird rules such as “What if the letter ‘R’ lasted a long time?”
This sketch was a very pale reflection of Washington’s Dream, and never really gathered any steam.
Parent/Teacher Conference
In this school sketch, Hernandez has been accused of drawing threatening pictures of his teacher (Ashley Padilla). When Bad Bunny arrives as Hernandez’s father, Padilla is smitten and basically flirts with him while excusing the objectively hostile pictures.
This sketch was not good or funny, but Padilla is again proving she is a terrific actress. She will be a solid Heidi Gardner replacement, even if Gardner really shouldn’t have been replaced at this stage. (She was let go, but Jane Wickline is still there? Makes no sense).
El Chavo Del Ocho
Okay, it helps to know that this sketch is based on a Mexican sitcom that ran for several years in the seventies. I did a bit of a dive into this, and the show was weird. Adults played kids, and the whole thing was odd.
In the sketch, Hernandez played the kid, and it must be noted that the other cast members did a great job of replicating the characters and broad and poorly executed physical comedy of the original show.
The sketch itself was very odd, but one has to admire the commitment to a bit that relies on a reference that a lot of American probably won’t get. And, there’s a gratuitous Jon Hamm cameo to boot!
The Goodbye Wave
Best Sketch
Well, this is a really hard call. Not because it’s tough to narrow it down to the best, but because it’s difficult to anoint any sketch this week as being particularly good. I guess I’ll go with El Chavo just for its moxie and on-point parody.
Worst Sketch
This is also a tough one, but this time it IS because its tough to narrow this week’s show down to one worst sketch. I guess I’ll go with Kpop Demon Hunters because it was just such a mess that really didn’t pay off.
Random Notes
Doja Cat’s two numbers included a Knight Rider mashup, and a song in which she sat in a giant flower.
Even though he’s in the cast, based on his air time this week, Ben Marshall may have been better off as part of Please Don’t Destroy
The cast is definitely too big at this stage. The newbies had little to do overall, and even some returning members were invisible (Jane Wickline, for example).
Here’s an episode of the real El Chave del 8. There’s tons of them on YouTube.
Look, there are a lot of new parts affixed to Season 51, and some reliable cast members aren’t there to carry the weight of some of the sketches. So, we do need to give this a little time before the annual hew and cry of SNL being dead. It was not a promising start, but the show did go on.
Episode Grade: D+
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