Who is Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: December 29, 2018

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Saturday Night Live’s mid-season winter break continues with a repeat SNL hosted by the latest member of the Five-Timers Club, Jonah Hill!

Season 44 is halfway over for Saturday Night Live and the cast and crew are taking a well-deserved winter’s break. One of the the highlights of SNL‘s half-season so far is another host earning membership in the Five-Timers Club, which is an honor granted to hosts who have taken the stage to star in 5 episodes of Saturday Night Live. Jonah Hill earned that honor on November 3, 2018 and Saturday Night Live will be re-airing that episode tonight at 11:30pm on NBC. Jonah Hill’s induction into the SNL Five-Timers Club was all part of his monologue segment on tonight’s rerun Saturday Night Live. Jonah gets welcomed into the club with a great group of cameos including Five-Timers Club members Tina Fey, Drew Barrymore and Candice Bergen who all womansplain to Jonah what membership in the Five-Timers Club means in the new #MeToo era.

However, tonight’s repeat episode of Saturday Night Live will be remembered moments other than Jonah Hill joining the Five-Timers Club. Overshadowing the host being inducted into SNL‘s most prestigious club, was cast member Pete Davidson and the drama that both his personal life and his comedy caused during the week of November 3rd. When this episode of Saturday Night Live originally aired, it caused an eruption of not one, but two Pete Davidson controversies. The first started with a promo for this SNL episode starring Jonah Hill. Back when this episode was being promoted, the breakup of SNL‘s Pete Davidson and pop music superstar Ariana Grande was still pretty fresh. Their engagement had only recently been called off and it happened while the show was on its first Season 44 break in October, 2018 . In a promo for this episode, (the first show since the marriage was called off,) which you can watch below along with the Jonah Hill’s other SNL promos, Pete Davidson makes a joke at Ariana Grande’s expense when he asks this particular week’s musical guest Maggie Rogers to marry him. She rejects his proposal and Pete answers back with the response, “O for 3.” Grande didn’t appreciate the joke and called Davidson out on it. On tonight’s segment of Weekend Update, you’ll see Pete try to make it right and put this personal quarrel to rest.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean Pete Davidson escaped from all his controversies. Also on Weekend Update, Pete Davidson does a round of his “First Impressions” segment, where he makes fun of the appearances of people in the news. This was a mid-term elections version of “First Impressions” and one of the politicians selected to be a Pete Davidson punchline was then-Texas Congressional candidate and former United States Navy SEAL officer Dan Crenshaw, who now wears an eye patch due to losing an eye in Afghanistan when he was caught up in the detonation of an improvised explosive device. Davidson compared Crenshaw’s look to a “hit man in a porno movie.” This caused a major shitstorm for SNL with people even calling for NBC to fire executive producer and SNL creator Lorne Michaels. The very next week, Lieutenant Commander and Congressman-Elect Crenshaw did a surprise appearance on Weekend Update with Pete Davidson so that Davidson could apologize in person. The apology seemed bizarre and out of character for the no-holds-barred comedy variety series and was covered by our own Debra Kessler in a piece called, “Should SNL Have Apologized to Dan Crenshaw?” It will be very interesting to see if Pete Davidson’s original segment insulting Crenshaw will even be included in tonight’s replay of Weekend Update?

As for the rest of the show, the SNL – Cold Open on tonight’s repeat features a parody episode of “The Ingraham Angle” hosted by Fox News host / taunter of school shooting survivors Laura Ingraham played expertly by cast member Kate McKinnon along with cast member Cecily Strong as Fox News magistrate Judge Jeanine Pirro and cast member Kenan Thompson as former Sheriff of Milwaukee County and Trump supporter, David Clarke. The three faux Fox News personalities talk about the caravan of refugee families that Donald Trump pretended was going to destroy our country if it made it to our borders in the lead up to mid-term election day. Despite no Alec Baldwin to play the President, the cold open tonight is a breath of fresh air while still being 100% Trump-centric.

Sketches on tonight’s SNL encore episode include the return of one of Jonah Hill’s most popular SNL characters from his previous hosting gigs, Adam Grossman, the precocious and kvetching curmudgeon of a 6 year old who enjoys dining at Benihana’s. Surprisingly, if you listen tonight, little Adam Grossman’s comeback doesn’t get the ovation from the studio audience that the cast and the host expected and it seems to effect the sketch. Although, Jonah is back in form as the first grader who in tonight’s show is having a Benihana’s feast with his nanny played by cast member Leslie Jones and who has his 6 year old mind blown when he encounters a same-sex couple at the Japanese restaurant played by cast members Kenan Thompson and Mikey Day.

On the bizarre side of tonight’s repeat, there’s a sketch called “Teacher Fell Down” featuring Kate McKinnon as a teacher who falls down on the classroom floor in front of her class and tries to turn it into a philosophy lesson to the students who don’t understand why she just won’t get back up on her feet. It’s so weird, if you’re going DVR this episode, this would be a good spot to hit that FF button. On the other hand, if you can stick with it, the sketch gets so ridiculous, it does begin to get funny.

Plus, there’s a sketch tonight for any SNL fans who love sketches with live, cute animals. No, it’s not the beloved Kate McKinnon recurring sketch “Whiskers R We“, this sketch is called “Dog Infomercial.” Jonah Hill and Cecily Strong play a couple we’re going to assume are from Long Island, NY and have opened a business called “Pug Wigs.” The entire extended family brings out pug puppies wearing wigs designed to look like some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Most of the pugs refuse to look at the camera, (except for the Tina Turner pug who will weird you out) and the cast struggles to keep it together with the adorable doggies stealing the scene.

SNL – Digital Shorts continue to become a larger part of the show each week and there’s three of them to enjoy tonight. This episode aired just three days before the national mid-term elections so it’s little wonder why there’s so much material regarding the 2018 vote on tonight’s repeat show. The first SNL – Digital Short is called simply “Mid-Term Ad” and features every day Democratic voters encouraging a “Blue Wave” on Tuesday, but their hopefulness begins to succumb to a lot of doubt and severe trepidation by the end of the spot. The next short is for a Broadway show called, “Divided We Stand” featuring an all white cast over-simplifying the problems in the country and dumbing every major issue down with over-the-top Broadway musical numbers. And the final SNL – Digital Short of the night features cast member Aidy Bryant back as White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a parody ad for a new sleep aid called “HuckaPM” which explains how SHS can possibly sleep at night after a long day of lying to press and to the entire country on behalf of the President.

We mentioned Pete Davidson’s Weekend Update segment earlier and as for the rest of WU, there’s a lot of commentary on the mid-term elections, including President Trump’s plan to scare GOP voters to the polls by sending troops to the Mexican border to stop Caravan Bogeyman on its way to the United States. Colin Jost’s commentary includes a classic line at VP Mike Pence’s expense while Michael Che talks about people including himself who don’t vote and how theirs shouldn’t count as much as others. Weekend Update also covers topics including Oprah out campaigning, the 50 Cent – Ja Rule feud, Megyn Kelly fired from the Today Show for discussing blackface, the new Philadelphia Flyers mascot “Gritty”, gay penguins, a Colombian nun turned porn star and a man shot in the back by his own dog. Besides Pete, other correspondents visiting the Weekend Update news desk include young adult fiction reviewer Brittany, who is “Every Teen Girl Murder Suspect on ‘Law & Order‘” played by Melissa Villaseñor and the return of a one SNL‘s most popular recurring Weekend Update characters, Boston Red Sox legend David “Big Papi” Ortiz to talk about the Sox winning the World Series.

In the promos for tonight’s repeat SNL hosted by new Five-Timer Jonah Hill, we have the promo with Jonah and musical guest Maggie Rogers that caused Pete Davidson so much grief with his former fiance Ariana Grande. We’re actually surprised this hasn’t been pulled off YouTube yet. That’s followed by a promo featuring cast member Kyle Mooney breaking out “Robot Jonah Hill” to cover for the host. And then finally, a montage promo quickly looking back at Jonah Hill’s previous four appearances on Saturday Night Live.

Jonah Hill hosts an encore presentation of Saturday Night Live tonight with musical guest Maggie Rogers at 11:30pm on NBC.

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Ernie Tripper
Ernie Tripper