Who is Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: May 22, 2021

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Check & Mate! Tonight, it’s the Saturday Night Live finale with the last new show of the season hosted by the star of “The Queen’s Gambit”, Anya Taylor-Joy!

Now let the speculation begin! After tonight’s curtain call and goodbyes, we can start guessing which Saturday Night Live cast members will stay and which will leave (either by free will or by Lorne Michaels pink slip) to venture out into the next step of their comedy careers. It’s especially tense for those new featured players each season who must be wondering if they did enough during their rookie year to be brought back in the fall for another round of shows.

After all, we did see a lot more of Bowen Yang than we did of Lauren Holt this season. Bowen might have bought himself a second season just with that gay iceberg bit on Weekend Update alone. Some cast members like Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson have already started solid film careers. Some are shining on television outside of SNL like Aidy Bryant who just released the third and final season of “Shrill” on Hulu and Kenan Thompson and Chris Redd who have already earned a second season of their NBC sitcom “Kenan.” We’ll eventually know everything about SNL‘s upcoming 47th season by the end of September.

Looking back, we weren’t sure what this season of SNL would look like when it started, but the cast, writers, producers and crew made it through the social distancing, Covid screening and quarantining to give us 20 episodes of Saturday Night Live to enjoy this season. And out of those 20 shows (with tonight being #20), SNL was hosted by 10 actors, 7 comedians and comedic actors, 2 singers and 1 inventor / entrepreneur. And also of those 20 hosts, 14 of them were hosting newbies who emceed the show for the very first time during SNL – Season 46.

Tonight’s host, Anya Taylor-Joy falls into that last category. She makes her SNL debut tonight by hosting the SNL – Season 46 Finale. This is just one more credit she’s earned during the past year. It’s been a year where she’s won a Golden Globe for the Netflix series, “The Queen’s Gambit” which was also awarded the Golden Globe for “Best Limited Series or Television Film.”

On “The Queen’s Gambit”, Anya Taylor-Joy plays Beth Harmon who is an orphan living in the 1950’s who is also a chess prodigy. The mini-series takes us through Beth’s life into the 1960’s where she’s playing in chess tournaments around the world, all while dealing with a drug problem and alcoholism. It would be surprising if Saturday Night Live didn’t do some sort of “Queen’s Gambit” parody either in a sketch or an SNL Short tonight.

In the past year, Anya Taylor-Joy also starred in the comic book movie, “The New Mutants” as Illyana Rasputin. Her superhero codename is Magik, who’s a Marvel Comics mutant and sorceress with the ability to teleport. And it’s another thing for the SNL writers to parody.

Anya Taylor-Joy is also known to movie fans for playing Casey Cooke in two of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Eastrail 177” trilogy of movies. She starred in “Split” (2016) and “Glass” (2019) along with James McAvoy, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis. Her character Casey was one of the kidnap victims who survived being captured by Kevin Wendell Crumb (McAvoy) otherwise known as “The Horde” who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder and has 23 known personalities. Maybe we’ll see more on tonight’s SNL Finale.

Saturday Night Live might also take time tonight to honor two great icons of comedy who passed away this week. Both Charles Grodin and Paul Mooney played large parts in the history of SNL. One is known for being such a bad SNL host that he was never asked back again and the other is responsible for one of the most iconic comedy sketches in television history.

According to comedy legend, Charles Grodin was banned from ever hosting Saturday Night Live again after his first disastrous appearance. He hosted during SNL – Season 3 on October 29, 1977 with the original Saturday Night Live cast of “Not Ready For Prime Time Players.”

The problem allegedly came from Grodin skipping rehearsals the week he hosted, screwing up his lines, ad-libbing in sketches which infuriated SNL EP Lorne Michaels and ruining a sketch featuring John Belushi’s “Samurai” character by making comments all throughout it. Charles Grodin was also accused of forgetting that SNL was a live show.

We can’t confirm that Charles Grodin was truly banned from ever hosting again after that catastrophe in 1977. The whole thing could have been a work, but one thing was for sure, and that’s the fact that Charles Grodin never hosted Saturday Night Live again during his career.

However, the night wasn’t a complete loss. The musical guest that night back in October, 1977 was Paul Simon. And in a memorable sketch, Charles Grodin insisted on doing a duet with Paul Simon while wearing a red Art Garfunkel wig and sitting on a stool beside Simon. After an exasperated Paul Simon angrily walks off stage, Grodin continued singing until the real-life Art Garfunkel walked on stage surprising everyone in an SNL moment people watching could never forget.

Paul Mooney, who also died this week after a groundbreaking career that influenced so many of the giants of comedy, was also known for a landmark SNL moment. Richard Pryor hosted Saturday Night Live during its very first season on December 13, 1975. The week that Pryor hosted SNL, he agreed to do it, but also insisted on his frequent collaborator Paul Mooney being hired by the show as a writer.

That week, Mooney became responsible for one of the most important SNL sketches ever. Paul Mooney wrote the now famous “Racist Word Association Interview” sketch. That’s what it’s known as now, but it’s also been called the “Word Association” sketch and the “Dead Honky” sketch over the years. The performance features cast member Chevy Chase playing a job interviewer with host Richard Pryor as the job applicant. They play a round of “Word Association” in the sketch and the words quickly escalate into a back-and-forth of both Black racial slurs and White racial slurs. That sketch written by Paul Mooney ranks at #10 on Rolling Stone’s “50 Greatest Saturday Night Live Sketches of All Time.”

Besides those tributes, there’s plenty of other things in the news and entertainment headlines that might find their way on to the show tonight either in sketches, shorts or most likely, Weekend Update.

The things anchormen Colin Jost and Michael Che might comment on include Ellen cancelling her own show before it got cancelled for her (“Kate McKinnon! Report to wardrobe!”), NY Governor Andrew Cuomo signing a $5 million book deal to write his Covid memoirs, the NBA Playoffs, the much talked-about dish of the “Bennifer” reunion with Ben Affleck & Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden test-driving the new electric Ford F-150 truck, a zebra at Disney’s Animal Kingdom giving birth in front of the park guests, and ABC’s reboot of “The Wonder Years” which in this version will be centered around a Black family living in Alabama in the 60’s.

The promos for tonight’s SNL Finale are prominently featured below this article for you to enjoy. That’s just in case, you can’t wait for tonight’s last new Saturday Night Live of the season to begin and you need in on the comedy immediately. Host Anya Taylor-Joy is joined by this evening’s musical guest Lil Nas X and cast member Chris Redd who had another great season and has been gangbusters with the laughs ever since he was promoted to being a full repertory player at SNL.

First, we find out that Chris Redd is really struggling to say goodbye at the end of SNL – Season 46. There’s also some debate on whether the Saturday Night Live cast and crew have “saved the best for last” with tonight’s show. And unfortunately for Chris Redd, this evening’s host and musical guest are still socially distancing.

The Golden Globe winning star of “The Queen’s Gambit” Anya Taylor-Joy hosts the season finale of Saturday Night Live with musical guest, the fabulous Grammy, Billboard Music, Teen Choice and Country Music Association Award winning (yeah, we were stunned with that last one too), Lil Nas X, tonight at 11pm et on NBC! And the really nice part is that this evening’s show is live coast-to-coast, so we can all watch it together whether you’re in New York City, New York or Pismo Beach, California.

Have a great summer SNL!

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Ernie Tripper

Ernie Tripper