Even <em>SNL</em> Is All About the Vibes

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, the premiere of the comedy juggernaut’s 50th season, started with a battle of vibes. The lengthy cold open ping-ponged between campaign rallies for the two main presidential candidates, turning first to Vice President Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph). “Well, well, well. Look who fell out of that coconut tree,” Rudolph said at the top of her speech, referencing the viral meme that buoyed Harris’s candidacy after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July. The actor continued with a nod to the comedic persona that she’d first developed for the politician half a decade ago. “Your fun aunt has returned,” Rudolph said. “The ‘funt’ has been rebooted. 2 Funt 2 Furious.”

Back when Harris was best known as Biden’s 2020 running mate, Rudolph’s decision to play the politician—a former prosecutor—as a free spirit tapped into an unexpected dimension of her character. By now, SNL viewers are familiar with the “funt” antics, in part because Harris herself has leaned into them. Rudolph’s latest rendition of the VP acknowledged Harris’s newfound prominence on the political and cultural stage, and the shift in how many Americans now seem to view her—and what they want to see more of. “My campaign is like the Sabrina Carpenter song ‘Espresso,’” Rudolph’s Harris said early in the sketch. “The lyrics are vague, but the vibe slaps.”

Harris’s speech was the first of many moments when SNL emphasized the strangeness of the current political environment, in which intangible “vibes” are perhaps the single most valuable currency. Throughout the premiere, the show did point to some concrete policy differences between its political characters—Rudolph’s Harris led into her “Espresso” joke with a reassurance that she would protect reproductive rights—but it spent more time depicting their opposing demeanors. “If we win together, we can end the dramala. And the traumala,” Harris promised. “And go relax in our pajamalas.” Meanwhile, the show portrayed former President Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, as seemingly more animated by ambient racial resentment than by a desire for peace or any specific plans for the country. “They say that me blaming the Democrats for inciting violence is the pot calling the kettle Black,” he said over at his rally, skewering Trump’s real-life obsession with Harris’s racial background (and his apparent inability to understand that biracial people exist). “But, frankly, I didn’t know the kettle was Black until very recently. I thought the kettle was Indian, but then he decided to turn Black.”

SNL’s mood-based satire extended to its treatment of the vice-presidential nominees. In his debut as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, the guest actor Jim Gaffigan riffed on a rhetorical slogan Walz popularized over the summer. “Trump and Vance are weird, all right? They want the government to control what you do in your bedroom and what books you read,” he said, as Rudolph’s Harris nodded behind him. Gaffigan infused Walz’s well-known earnestness with a more raucous, high energy, otherwise leaning into the governor’s folksy demeanor more than subverting it: “In Minnesota, we have a saying: Mind your damn business. We also have another saying in Minnesota: My nuts froze to the park bench.” In contrast to Rudolph’s Harris happily ceding the floor to her VP pick, Johnson’s Trump more reluctantly called up his running mate, J. D. Vance (played by an amusingly cast Bowen Yang). SNL framed the GOP gathering as lackluster compared with the Democrats’ (almost) hip soiree, a choice that the show also underscored in a later skit led by Yang.

On “The Talk Talk Show With Charli XCX,” Yang played the British pop singer whose early Harris endorsement helped propel the vice president to meme-driven popularity among younger voters. The retro-feeling skit, in which Sarah Sherman played the Australian musician Troye Sivan, featured Yang’s Charli XCX interviewing three unlikely guests: the famed Swiss nightlife maven Susanne Bartsch (played by a criminally underutilized Jean Smart, the night’s host), the CNN news anchor Kaitlan Collins (Chloe Fineman), and the congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (Ego Nwodim). Instead of taking advantage of her access to one of Washington’s more recognizable political journalists, Yang’s Charli XCX put all of her hard-hitting questions to Smart’s Bartsch, skipping over Fineman’s Collins. And she used her time with Nwodim’s Crockett to largely mine for potential discourse bait. “I have a song on my album called ‘Mean Girls,’ and you went viral this summer for what you called Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Yang’s Charli said, referencing a verbal spat between the two politicians during a House committee meeting back in May. “I want to hear you pop off on everything, so this is ‘Jasmine Crockett’s Mean-Girl Cam.’” The segment tasked Crockett with offering blistering political commentary in a pithy, quotable fashion. Asked about gerrymandering, she called it out for being a “crazy-shape, crooked bitch.” Something, Crockett implied, just feels wrong about it: “Why is that county shaped like a tapeworm with a hat on?”

“Weekend Update” best crystallized the show’s approach to satirizing our current moment: ambience-led, with doses of sharper insight when convenient. Yang took the spotlight while channeling a figure that’s become surprisingly relevant to political conversation. Appearing as the viral pygmy hippo Moo Deng, Yang played his character as an overwhelmed young starlet in the vein of the pop musician Chappell Roan, who’s been publicly wrestling with the weight of fame in recent months. Roan’s anxieties stem in part from how both her zealous fans and commentators across the political spectrum have reacted to recent videos in which she’s expressed reservations about endorsing Harris. Yang’s exasperated, Roan-coded Moo Deng was a wild contrast to Devon Walker’s braggadocian portrayal of the embattled New York City mayor, Eric Adams. Where Moo Deng begged for privacy and emphasized her youth, SNL’s Adams stopped by “Weekend Update” to brag about being the “first mayor to get out of the office and into the VIP” section of nightclubs. Part of what landed the mayor in hot water, the segment suggested, is his obsession with “bringing swagger back to the city.” The most damning thing Walker’s Adams says starts as a positive self-assessment: “What was once a swagless dump is now a swag-tropolis.” After a beat, he added that his tenure has also left New York “with significantly more crime than before.” As it turns out, vibes aren’t actually everything. SNL, at moments, seemed to recognize that. Politicians probably should too.