Some of the most memorable farewells to “Saturday Night Live” cast members over the years have been musical ones: Kristen Wiig got Mick Jagger and Arcade Fire to play “She’s a Rainbow” and “Ruby Tuesday” to her on her final episode in 2012, and Cecily Strong shared a duet of “Blue Christmas” with Austin Butler when she departed in 2022.
This weekend, Bowen Yang did most of the singing at his own departure, leading a bittersweet cover of “Please Come Home for Christmas” in his final “S.N.L.” sketch after seven and a half seasons on the show.
Yang, who became an “S. N. L” writer in 2018 and a cast member in 2019, revealed earlier on Saturday that he would be leaving the show. In a post on Instagram, he wrote that his “S.N.L.” tenure occurred “at a time when many things in the world started to seem futile, but working at 30 rock taught me the value in showing up anyway when people make it worthwhile.”
Yang’s true goodbye occurred at the end of the broadcast, in a sketch where he played an attendant dispensing eggnog to travelers in his final shift at a Delta lounge in John F. Kennedy Airport.
It was pretty obvious what Yang was really talking about when he said in the sketch he would “miss everything about this place — the way it smells, the celebrities who would come through.”
A character played by Grande congratulated Yang on “all the eggnog you’ve made over the years — some of it was great, some of it was rotten.”
“And a lot of it got cut,” Yang replied. Still, as he said, about eggnog, “it’s not for everyone, but the people who like it are my kind of people.”
And yes, Cher joined in the sketch at its conclusion to tell Yang, “Well, everyone thought you were a little bit too gay. But you know what? You’re perfect for me.”
Cold open of the week
This week, if you just wanted to get right to James Austin Johnson’s recurring impression of President Trump, “S. N. L,” gave you your gift as early as possible, beginning the broadcast with a Christmas message from the show’s resident commander in chief.
Johnson said that he was speaking “from a part of the White House that Melania’s Christmas decorations haven’t gotten to yet — that’s why we still have fireplace and garland, and not spooky twigs and black vase.”
He told Americans to be vigilant because “Arctic immigrants are coming in through our chimneys and stealing our milk and cookies.”
Johnson also boasted of doing his own version of the Nativity where “kings from the Middle East bring gifts for me, like gold and airplane and casino deal in Dubai.”
Though the kings in his Nativity don’t arrive by camel, Johnson said he would easily recognize the animal. “I know it from my mandatory daily cognitive test,” he said. “I always point right to camel. I always get camel right. It’s bumpy horse, that’s how I know.”
He showed off a photograph of the renamed John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which in his depiction was now called “the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, No Homo.”
And he said he was introducing his own version of “The Hunger Games,” which would be an athletic competition for high school students called the Patriot Games.
“Because I thought, what’s the best way to distract from the Epstein files?” Johnson explained. “I know, invite a bunch of teenagers to my house, that’ll help.”
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on the Justice Department’s release of a collection of files related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.
Jost began:
Well, it’s that time of year when everybody is talking about the man who flies through the air to visit children all over the world: Jeffey Epstein. Yesterday, the Department of Justice released another batch of Epstein documents which critics pointed out deliberately omitted references to Donald Trump, in a totally nonsuspicious way. And honestly, it’s not fair. Donald Trump was my favorite character in the Epstein files. It’s like when “House of Cards” suddenly stopped starring Kevin Spacey, probably because he had booked a recurring role in the Epstein files.
Che continued:
The Justice Department announced that it would not be able to release all of the Jeffrey Epstein files by yesterday’s deadline. I guess they kept running out of black ink. Those files were so boring. The only interesting thing I saw was this picture of Bill Clinton hugged up on Melania.
[His screen displayed a photograph from the released materials that showed Bill Clinton and Michael Jackson.]
Rockin’ around the Christmas tree of the week
Hope you wore your most garish sweater and came prepared to bob your head along to lots of holiday tunes, because there was no shortage of them this week: there was Grande’s monologue, which featured a parody of “All I Want for Christmas is You”; a segment about mismatched musical artists performing Christmas and Hanukkah songs, like an ethereal and very nontraditional version of “Silent Night” by Kate Bush (Sarah Sherman) and Yoko Ono (Yang); and a courtroom sketch featuring Kenan Thompson as a criminal defendant who explains his string of burglaries by singing a cover of Cher’s “Believe” in which he claims to be “Black Santa Claus.”
Alas, Cher herself did not appear in that particular sketch, but if that still wasn’t enough caroling for you, she performed “DJ Play a Christmas Song” and “Run Rudolph Run” in her own segments on the show. Happy holidays!
Dave Itzkoff is a former Times culture reporter.
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