MARTIN SHORT/HOZIER - 12.21.2024

The 50th season's Christmas episode offered plenty of holiday cheer, fake snow and ELEVEN cameos.

Dec 23, 2024

Welcome back to Sunday Morning Live!!! I’ve been a bit MIA for the past two episodes dealing with finals season at Georgetown and a little birthday vacation, but we are SO back for the holiday episode - albeit a bit late (call it Monday Morning Live). But I promise, there’s a good reason for the delay.

I was actually in studio for the live taping of SNL this weekend! My friend won the ticket lottery, so I’m currently up in NYC, still trying to catch up on sleep after the late nights and busy weekend. To make up for being late, I have some added insights in this week’s edition from getting to see the show happen in person.

I had the honor of standing on the iconic Studio 8H stage!

Let’s take a look at this week’s episode!

Cold Open

Last night marked Martin Short’s fifth time hosting. As a result, he was finally welcomed into the Five Timers Club in a cold open filled with major cameos! Tom Hanks opened the sketch, declaring himself as the creator of the club, after inventing the concept to avoid writing a monologue when he hosted back in 1990. Paul Rudd, Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Wiig, John Mulaney, Melissa McCarthy, Emma Stone, and Jimmy Fallon also joined in on the celebration. What a stacked sketch!

My favorite part is when they went down the line to share their secrets, because you can “be completely honest” in the Five Timers Club. Paul Rudd admitted that Ant-Man has terrible powers, Tina Fey confessed to flying drones over New Jersey, and Tom Hanks said he never had COVID-19 in 2020.

The energy in studio was incredible, with the crowd getting wilder each time a new person appeared. It was so awesome to see so many SNL greats in the room together to celebrate Short.

Monologue

Martin Short reflected further on hosting the show for the fifth time in his monologue, before bringing up the absence of Steve Martin, who he often works with and has hosted alongside in the past. “He would have been here tonight, but he had a conflict with me not wanting him to be here,” Short joked.

Cast members Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson, Ego Nwodim, Bowen Yang and Heidi Gardner then joined Short onstage, asking him to sing a song to get them into the holiday spirit. This led to a chaotic musical number that took place throughout the SNL studio and backstage, complete with background dancers and a moment where Short kisses Jimmy Fallon in front of Lorne Michaels.

Noteworthy Sketches

“Christmas Airport Parade”

In my favorite sketch of the night, Bowen Yang and Ego Nwodim played two TSA Agents hosting a parade of the types of travelers you’ll see at the airport this holiday season. Its a longer, interview-style sketch that typically might be used as a cold open, since it features the majority of the cast and used several sets, but as this episode already had the Five Timers opening, it worked perfectly as in its mid-episode slot.

There’s so much in this sketch that I really enjoyed, from Martin Short gatekeeping the Delta Sky Club lounge to Tom Hanks reprising his role as Captain Sully, and Melissa McCarthy playing a gate agent who mispronounces gate names in a way thats reminiscent of those inappropriate news report sketches.

“Parking Lot Altercation”

Another one of my favorite sketches was “Parking Lot Altercation.” I immediately recognized this as a sequel to the “Traffic Altercation” sketch from Quinta Brunson’s Season 48 episode, which coincidentally I also attended. Once again, the sketch featured Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman as a father-daughter duo, but this time they get into an argument with Martin Short over a parking spot. The gimmick is that every insult they yell at each other is mimicked with odd and elaborate hand signals. Melissa McCarthy appeared as Short’s wife to join in on the action, bringing a new level of craziness to the sketch.

“Sábado Gigante Christmas Special”

A lot of people that know me, know that Paul Rudd is one of my favorite actors. I actually wrote in my SNL lottery entry email that he is the dream host that I would like to see. Well, dreams kind of came true as Rudd appeared in several sketches in this week’s episode while I was in-studio. He actually starred in this one, which was a sequel to the Sábado Gigante sketch from the Nate Bargatze episode. The premise is the same: a non-Spanish speaker is randomly selected to play on a Spanish language game show with wacky characters and extreme prizes.

There’s been a lot of conversation online about how Martin Short had limited screen time throughout the episode, partially because of how many cameos there were. Short is not in this sketch at all, with Paul Rudd taking the lead and Dana Carvey also making an appearance. Although its a fair question, I felt that Rudd’s goofy, go-with-the-flow character style was the perfect match for this sketch.

Weekend Update

“A Drone Discusses the Mysterious Drone Sightings”

SNL addressed the drone mania happening in New Jersey by having Bowen Yang appear as one to explain the surge in mysterious drone sightings. Yang always does a hilarious job tackling the wackiest inanimate characters. The best part of this segment is when he breaks out into a drone-inspired rendition of Wicked’s “Defying Gravity.”

“Christmas Joke Swap 2024”

The holiday season brings one of my favorite SNL traditions, joke swap. For the past few years, Weekend Update hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che have ended each December by writing offensive jokes for each other to read and react to live on television. Che often leans into racially insensitive material to embarrass Jost and this year’s joke swap did not hold back, as Jost was tasked to read each punchline in “black voice.” However, the best part was Jost having to read jokes about his wife Scarlett Johansson while the camera pointed to her for her live reactions.

Also, a fun fact for those that wonder if the two hosts are faking their shock or not, I’ve seen a few people say that the jokes were slightly different during the show’s dress rehearsal - so several elements, like the ScarJo cam, were legit surprises.

Musical Guest

Hozier kicked off with a performance of his first number-one single in the United States, “Too Sweet,” before bringing Celtic rock vibes to the holiday episode with a cover of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”

“Too Sweet”

“Fairytale of New York”

Attending the Show

To close out, I just wanna share what it’s like to attend a taping of SNL! This was actually my eighth time attending the show (slightly crazy, I know). While I was a student at NYU, me and my friends who also loved SNL took advantage of the fact that we lived just three subway stops away from 30 Rock and regularly participated in the standby line. While it seems like a complicated process, we were 7/7, never denied entry.

But attending the show last night was different. We were actual invited guests! Every year, in the month of August, SNL opens a ticketing lottery where you can send in an email requesting tickets to a show. The catch? You can’t select which show you get tickets to, so you have to sit by your email from September through May in hopes you are randomly chosen. That, plus the fact that the lottery is so competitive that the odds of winning are extremely, extremely low.

I’m not against doing the SNL standby line, especially because it feels like the most straightforward and controlled way to get tickets to a show that you want to attend. But after graduating college, I didn’t really intend to do the process again. It really was just a silly thing you do with your friends in your early 20s when you have no real responsibility.

Deep down, however, I wanted to attend the show again, as its the 50th season and the last episode I attended was back in April 2023. Me and my friend both entered the lottery back in August, and it’s funny because we actually both mentioned Martin Short in our entry emails (I had attended the episode where Short hosted alongside Steve Martin in 2022, and its one of my favorites to-date). We’re also both huge fans of Hozier, so imagine my excitement when my friend Gaby called and told me she won the lottery! It was so insane, we were going to attend the holiday episode in SNL’s commemorative 50th season. It was huge news!

The difference between attending SNL through the standby versus through lottery, is that obviously, you have a real, confirmed ticket. Standby tickets are given out when lottery winners don’t show. The experience attending with confirmed tickets is also completely different.

For lottery tickets, you show up at the grand staircase (this is also where you check-in for other NBC show tapings, like The Tonight Show or Late Night with Seth Meyers). Then you’re ushered into the Peacock Lounge, where free drinks, a live DJ and photo ops await you! There’s actually a staircase that leads into the rotunda room where the lounge is. That’s where the standby people wait to learn their fate. Whenever me and my friends stood in that staircase, we would hear the sounds of the elusive, exclusive lottery winner lounge and wish we could be in there instead. Finally, we got to experience it! We got free drinks, took a ton of pictures at the photo booth, and took in all the different SNL memories being shown on screens all over the walls. The DJ was also a lot of fun, helping to get everyone super excited for the night.

As for the show itself, we were one of the lucky few to end up seated on the floor! The majority of the studio’s audience seating is in a balcony overlooking all of the sets, so we were stoked to be selected to sit on the ground level for the very first time, directly in the midst of all the action. We got to walk through the bottom entrance, which felt like experiencing a unique part of history. What I love about attending Saturday Night Live is getting to see all of the different production aspects that help pull the show together. There’s truly so many moving parts and it’s so cool to see the whole picture. But sitting on the floor, it felt like we weren’t just watching everything happen, we were in the midst of it. Cameras swooped around and over our heads, cue cards were held up behind us, we were surrounded by sets, every star was close enough to touch (Tom Hanks actually came up to my friend and gave her a high-five) and Lorne Michaels often stood right next to, or behind us as he monitored the show’s production. Its truly a fast-paced production and it was an honor to see how the production crew puts together all the magic live. The studio was beautifully decorated for the holiday season, with poinsettias, Christmas trees and holiday lights. It all definitely felt like a once-in-a-lifetime moment, especially with it being the 50th season’s holiday episode. At multiple points throughout the evening, I thought to myself, “It can’t get better than this,” only to be proven wrong again and again. We ended the night by being invited to step onto the iconic Studio 8H stage, where so many legends have stood, to take photos - something that’s reserved only for special guests. It was truly an incredible opportunity! I will never forget the night.