Who is Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: January 23, 2021

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Call tonight’s Saturday Night Live repeat by its name, an SNL rerun hosted by Timothée Chalamet!

The Saturday Night Live cast, writers and crew must have been exhausted from opening their 46th season with 6 straight live shows, followed by 3 more live shows after only 3 weeks off. The Emmy Award winning variety series worked hard to get in as many episodes as they felt they could to cover the Presidential debates, the election returns and Trump’s insanity, shenanigans, and tall tales after he was declared the loser.

Fortunately, tonight will be the last week of SNL reruns for awhile because the show’s mid-season January break is coming to an end. Starting next week, SNL will be live once again with all new episodes of Saturday Night Live. Check below for a complete list of the upcoming SNL hosts and musical guests.

Tonight’s show starring the 25 year old actor who was already an Academy Award nominee for 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name“, Timothée Chalamet, originally aired on Saturday, December 12, 2020. On this evening’s rerun, he was promoting the latest incarnation of the sci-fi movie “Dune” which co-stars Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem. It’s due in theaters (the ones still open) and On Demand on Friday, October 1st, 2021.

As the Trump Administration is making its way out the door and into obscurity, the SNL Cold Open on tonight’s repeat, gave us two new characters from the Trump White House. Better late than never, cast member Kate McKinnon does male-drag once again and appears as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and the Chief Medical Advisor to President Trump. Our new President, Joe Biden has asked Dr. Fauci who’s become the face of the Coronavirus, to stay on with his new Covid19 task force. And cast member Heidi Gardner plays another medical adviser to President Trump, Dr. Deborah Birx who was part of the Trump White House Coronavirus Team, and who (in real life) announced she’s retiring after Trump leaves DC. He has that effect on people.

SNL cast member Beck Bennett in the guise of news anchor Wolf Blitzer (“an indoor man with an outdoor name”) from CNN’s “The Situation Room” announces the arrival of the new Pfizer Covid19 vaccine and throws it to McKinnon and Gardner’s Fauci and Birx (“the American Gothic of the whole Coronavirus situation”) to tell the country more about the vaccine. Then. the pair of medical pin-ups give us the order in which the new vaccine will be distributed to the American public.

Fauci deals with women throwing their lingerie at him and a horrible first pitch at the Nationals home opener that still haunts him while Dr. Birx has her own humiliating moment that will not go away. If you drank bleach as a preventive measure against the virus because President Trump said to, then you already know what she’s talking about.

The Oscar nominee for “Call Me By Your Name” takes the stage for his SNL monologue and announces that he is a proud, born and raised New Yorker who still lives in the city and tonight’s host cannot hide his enthusiasm or his trademark Timothée Chalamet laugh. Even though Chalamet is 25 and hosting SNL for his first time, he’s got deep roots connected to Saturday Night Live that go back to the Dana Carvey and Chris Farley days of SNL. Give tonight’s SNL repeat a watch just to relive the infamous “Headwound Harry” sketch.

Timothée Chalamet sits down behind the piano which is becoming a very popular prop during SNL monologues lately and talks about having a real New York Christmas. It’s helps that the SNL stage at Studio 8-H is filled with holiday poinsettias. Our host has a little trouble holding in the laughter at his own monologue, but it’s just fun to see someone happy at this point in time. And who can resist that Timothée Chalamet smile!?

Christmas is going to be the theme throughout most of this repeat episode of Saturday Night Live. The first sketch tonight after the monologue is “A Rona Family Christmas.” It’s a holiday special with a perfect family, family of Coronavirus proteins that is. There’s some tension in the Rona house with their oldest molecule (Timothée Chalamet) who isn’t infecting people anymore, but this is a great place for the SNL writers to get all those Covid19 puns (and there’s a lot) out of their system by the end of the year.

Another Christmas sketch unwrapped on tonight’s SNL rerun is another edition of the Food Network reality show, the “Holiday Baking Championships” where amateur bakers compete by baking Christmas cakes that always end up being horrifying monstrosities. SNL has visited this premise so many times now that it’s hard to shock the audience and a lot of the lines in this sketch really fall flat.

Cast member Ego Nwodim gets to put her footprint on this repeat SNL episode tonight with a sketch where she plays the Grammy winning legend Dionne Warwick hosting “The Dionne Warwick Show.” The basis of this sketch is the wacky, yet very popular tweets that the actual Dionne Warwick has posted on Twitter in real life. Ego plays Dionne as being confused, ready to sing and very curious about her feud with Wendy Williams. Again, pulled from real life.

Host Timothée Chalamet plays another heartthrob, “singer and sensual fashion man.” Harry Styles. He’s joined by Dionne’s other guests including cast member Melissa Villaseñor as Billie Eilish and for you doppelgänger fans, featured player Chloe Fineman appears as Timothée Chalamet. Just watch, and don’t let it blow your mind.

“The Dionne Warwick Show” sketch happened to fall on the real Dionne Warwick’s birthday. But don’t think that the singing legend was offended by it. Just the opposite. The real world’s Dionne Warwick loved it and she even tweeted “This was a hilarious birthday gift. Thank you, @nbcsnl.” As for Ego Nwodim’s impersonation of her, Dionne had words of praise, tweeting, “You did a wonderful job, baby. You are a star.” If I was Ego Nwodim, they’d still be trying to revive me after I fainted from hearing that Dionne Warwick thinks I’m a star!

There’s a sketch that appears later in the night, and there’s a reason for that, called  “Rap Roundtable” which features featured player Punkie Johnson doing an admirable Queen Latifah impression, the real life Questlove and cast member Pete Davidson and host Timothée Chalamet as rap duo GuapLord and $mokeCheddahThaAssGetta who are a hit on SoundCloud. Stay till the end to watch Questlove do “what we all wanted to do.”

The final sketch of the night is something to either make Trump supporters think or cry. From Newsmax, the “news” agency which propagates all of Donald Trump’s false stories about winning the election, comes “Sportsmax“, a sports network for New York Jets fans. Just like fake election stories claiming Trump got more votes than Biden, “Sportsmax” has the fake stories to prove that the Jets weren’t winless this season.

Viewers Note: This episode of SNL originally aired on Saturday, December 12, 2020 and the NY Jets didn’t get their first win until over a week later on Sunday, December 20th.

The first of the SNL Shorts on tonight’s show is a parody of those “Lexus – December to Remember Sales Event” TV ads. It’s almost an exact replica including the new car in the driveway with the giant bow on top of it. However, this Lexus commercial is a little more realistic when it comes to the reaction of the wife whose husband just blew a wad of serious cash on a new luxury automobile as a Christmas surprise.

There’s also an SNL Short on tonight’s repeat that makes you remember why you fell in love with Saturday Night Live in the first place. It provides the silliness that Saturday Night Live has always been best at and it just takes you into a different reality with no apologies. The short is called “Tiny Horse.” It also shows you why Timothée Chalamet could have been a boy band member instead of an Academy Award nominated actor.

Chalamet acts and sings in this short about a rural family forced to sell their farm after not being able to pay the bills. The SNL host is the eldest son and now has to say goodbye to the farm animals including his favorite, a very, very tiny horse. He realizes he has to set “Tiny Horse” free and they’ll never see each other again. As Timothée Chalamet sings, we get to see what Tiny Horse’s life will be like off the farm. This sketch goes into the SNL Absurd Sketch Hall of Fame and can take a place of honor right next to “David S. Pumpkins” (Tom Hanks) and The Harkin Brothers Band (featuring Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph) singing “Summertime In Fayetteville.” Watch for a cameo by a former SNL cast member who now hosts the Tonight Show. That’s all the clues you’re getting.

SNL Anchormen Colin Jost and Michael Che open tonight’s repeat edition of Weekend Update with their lead story about the U.S. Supreme Court dismissing two lawsuits brought by Donald J. Trump that claimed malfeasance in the 2020 Presidential Election when the only malfeasance going on was Trump and his phony lawsuits.

Colin Jost said the dismissals were the “first rulings by the Supreme Court that were just the eye roll emoji.” 🙄 Jost continued talking about how the media gets it wrong each time they declare that Trump’s chances at stealing the election are over and how he’s still grifting donations from his supporters.

Michael Che reports on Republicans in Texas trying to get the election results in favor of Biden in other states thrown out in court. Che says, it’s “a plan so crazy, only Texas would try to execute it.” Che then comments on how doctors are worried about getting the black population to take the new Coronavirus vaccine.

Jost stays with the vaccine story to report on President-Elect Joe Biden’s plan for “100 million shots in 100 days” as part of his distribution plan. He also talks about how the Trump administration turned down the opportunity to obtain 100 million doses of the vaccine from its parent company Pfizer.

Other stories covered by the Weekend Update news duo this week include Attorney General Bill Barr possibly resigning (Spoiler Alert! He does), Jay-Z’s new line of cannabis products, VP Mike Pence’s Space Force announcement, lions at the Barcelona Zoo being diagnosed with Covid19, President-Elect Biden’s HUD nominee, Harrison Ford doing a new “Indiana Jones” movie, 900 Dairy Queen customers paying-it-forward, and a woman giving birth using an embryo which was frozen for 27 years.

Cast member Kate McKinnon returns to the Weekend Update desk in this repeat SNL in character as medical expert Dr. Wayne Wenowdis. The good doctor is on Update to discuss the FDA voting to give emergency approval to the Pzfizer Covid19 vaccine. Kate and Colin have trouble getting through this character without laughing, but then “We-know-this.” Colin even gets the vaccine on the air and Dr. Wenowdis ends up dropping the act completely.

Also stopping by Weekend Update is cast member Melissa Villaseñor who is so crazy talented when it comes to impressions. Melissa is on Weekend Update to talk about her favorite Christmas music. She’s in Dolly-drag, but claims it’s just her Christmas outfit. Colin Jost accuses her of trying to sneak her Dolly impersonation onto the show. Colin’s right and it’s nothing short of amazing how much Melissa sounds like Miss Dolly Parton. If you’re only going to watch 3 minutes out of this 90 minute show, please make it these 3 minutes.

We have the masked promos from the host Timothée Chalamet and musical guest, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for tonight’s repeat episode of Saturday Night Live below for you to watch. The host and musical guest are joined by cast member Cecily Strong and the big news is that there are some new cast members ready to join SNL this evening. Also, with everyone wearing protective masks and calling each other by their own name, it gets a little confusing. But I think we can figure out which one is Bruce.

Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet hosts an encore presentation of a Saturday Night Live episode from December 12th, 2020 with musical guests, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The rerun begins this evening at 11:30pm et on NBC.

Good News! Saturday Night Live announced via Twitter that SNL returns with all-new shows next, Saturday, January 30th! Next Saturday, SNL is live with host John Krasinski (“The Office“, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan“) with musical guest Machine Gun Kelly (Pete Davidson’s best friend).

The following week on Saturday, February 6th, SNL gets fabulous when it’s hosted by the Emmy Award winning creator of “Schitt’s Creek“, Dan Levy. Then on Saturday, February 13th, Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Regina King (“If Beale Street Could Talk“, “One Night in Miami“) will be your SNL host for the St. Valentine’s Day show.

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Ernie Tripper
Ernie Tripper