Who’s Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: January 6, 2018

Tonight at 11:30pm on NBC, it’s Chance the Rapper hosting Saturday Night Live the Rerun.

This evening’s encore episode will be the last in a stretch of SNL repeats before the award winning variety series returns live next weekend with its mid-season premiere. And to get fans ready for the first new show of 2018, Lorne Michaels and crew has picked one of the stronger episodes from the first half of SNL: Season 43.

Originally airing on November 18, 2017, tonight’s Saturday Night Live repeat helmed by first-time host Chance the Rapper was the series’ Thanksgiving episode. Chance had been a musical guest prior to hosting and had appeared in SNL digital shorts. So, he was no stranger to Saturday Night Live and gave a solid performance in his hosting debut. Even though his monologue was shaky to say the least, which included a Thanksgiving song that you might want to fast-forward through if you’re recording tonight, when the show got to the sketches, Chance’s comedic abilities came through for him.

Chance the Rapper’s sketch highlights in tonight’s repeat SNL included playing an underprivileged youth in Gotham City whose family was invited to Bruce Wayne’s Thanksgiving benefit at Wayne Manor. His character gave the audience a different perspective on Batman’s vigilante justice when he asked Bruce Wayne to tell the Dark Knight to “cool it down in our neighborhoods.” Chance also more than held his own comically in sketches where he played an MSG Network Knicks basketball correspondent who was forced to cover hockey for the first time, a contestant on “Family Feud” who quite possibly could be Steve Harvey’s love child and as part of the classic hip-hop group, the Soul Crush Crew, who gives modern artist Lil Doo Doo (a Pete Davidson character which may have legs) a lesson in rap history in a digital short.

The moment of the night in this SNL episode which lit up social media was the digital short music video “Come Back, Barack“. Chance the Rapper had viral success before with the December-2016 SNL Digital Short music video, “Jingle Barack“, the holiday song celebrating President Obama’s last Christmas as Commander-in-Chief. In tonight’s episode, Chance and Kenan Thompson along with new feature cast member Chris Redd lit up Twitter, appearing as the 90s style group, De-Von-Tré, with a break up song begging for President Obama to come back and lead the country again. The Presidential love song, “Come Back, Barack” had Twitter going off with anti-Trump tweets cheering for the song while Trump supporters saw it as the liberal media and Hillary voters still crying over the 2016 election.

The non-Chance the Rapper parts of tonight’s SNL repeat included a cold open that went no-where with Mikey Day and Alex Moffat as the Trump sons, Don Jr. and Eric, secretly meeting with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to get dirt on Hillary Clinton during the ’16 Presidential campaign. Other than Kate McKinnon breaking gender boundaries by appearing as Assange, the cold open really gave us nothing new. Followed by Chance the Rapper’s disastrous musical monologue, this show looked like it was headed for the dud pile. However, the strong sketches mentioned earlier as well as another strong Weekend Update with Colin Jost and Michael Che saved it and made it one of the stronger shows of the season. The WU team was still on point taking on the massive sexual misconduct stories scandalizing male celebrities across the country. Jost and Che hilariously took on Senator Al Franken, actor Jeremy Piven and then-embattled Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.

In the promos for tonight’s rerun episode, cast member Beck Bennett gets a nervous Chance the Rapper ready to go live by dancing it out with Kate McKinnon, Pete Davidson, Chris Redd and Heidi Gardner, much to the disgust of Kenan Thompson. Then Chance finds himself in between musical guest Eminem and Leslie Jones who both try out new names for tonight’s SNL host.

Chance the Rapper hosts an encore episode of Saturday Night Live with musical guest Eminem, tonight at 11:30pm on NBC.

SNL returns live next week! The first live show of 2018 will be hosted by 2018 Golden Globe nominee Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) next Saturday, January 13th on NBC.

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