Maya Rudolph Brings Big Mom Energy to Saturday Night Live

Not now children, mother is mothering. Because God loves women, and so apparently does Lorne Michaels, the great Maya Rudolph returned to host Saturday Night Live’s Mother’s Day episode. The mother of four hit the stage in a voluminous gown only to be immediately flanked by a reverential Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman. “You’re not just a mom, you’re a mother,” said Yang, his voice thick with drawling awe. Echoed Sherman, “You have achieved extraterrestrial mother status.” Cut to Kenan Thompson looking like Law Roach, ready to emcee: “This is Maya’s house now. Mother of the Haus of Rockefeller.” As the camera swung back to Rudolph, she’d stripped down to a half Alien/half mermaid catsuit emblazoned with a breast plate and a leg of mirrored panels.

What followed felt like a bottomless mimosa brunch wrapped in an eighty-minute massage topped off with a childless afternoon in bed scrolling through Ryan Gosling press junket reels. Rudolph strutted through the studio in her catsuit, vogueing and flipping her hair and stomping her way down the memory lane of all her iconic characters. She paid homage to stepmothers, godmothers, mothers from another brother, dance moms, Octomoms. “What about dog moms?” wondered Chloe Fineman, clutching her little prize papillon. “What about them?” said Rudolph. “And honey, that’s not a dog, that’s a bitch.”

I do hope that backstage all the SNL cast members’ mothers were jumping in a circle with fists raised and hips bumping. Maybe the cold open skewed a twinge too windy and sentimental, but in these hellscape news days, pour that sugar on me.

The show had opened on Thompson with his arm wrapped around mother, Ann, who had just one grievance about turning over the cold open to the moms. “I wanted to see who was going to play Stormy Daniels,” she sighed. Special shout out to Marcello Hernandez’s mother, looking like a Cuban Christie Brinkley. Praising the cast’s friendliness, his ma noted that “Michael Che even gave me flowers, but the note was just his phone number.” Mikey Day’s mother thanked him for the gift of the Beavis and Butthead sketch. “Now everyone knows me as Butthead’s Mom.”

Yang’s mom was especially adorable, even if her Tom Brady roast joke got muddled. She nicely summed up the point of union: “We are from all over the country, from every side of the political spectrum, but with one thing in common: We love our children with all our hearts.” Please, please, please grant Mrs. Yang the stamina to make it to the afterparty, preferably after a quick change into Rudolph’s cat suit.

Rudolph’s Beyonce returned to Hot Ones, this time dressed up in her finest leathers and Stetson. Two wings in, she was gushing sweat through crossed eyes. “Will you excuse me, I’m about to start speaking in tongues,” she said at one point, before unleashing into a torrential babble of Zorg. She summoned her assistant, played by Thompson, insisting that he replace her bones with new bones that weren’t on fire. “Can I have your milk?” she asked Day’s Sean Evans, before splashing it in his face. “You need to kill yourself, Gollum.”

The most sentimental of the sketches revolved around a girl who couldn’t make it through a sleepover. Over and over, she sounded the alarm to her poor mother in the middle of the night, begging for a last-minute pick-up couched in a discreet excuse. “Her grandmother’s having a funeral,” Rudolph’s mother explained. Or, “it’s her father. He has become gay.”

Finally, Rudolph sent Dad, played by Thompson, whose explanations were more to the point. “She wants to leave because your daughter is mean, and your house smells weird” or “She got her period, and she don’t want to say. And even when she wears pads it goes into her underwear.”

Even when the daughter tried to save face, whining about her parent’s appearance at the door she pretended not to have sought out, Rudolph stayed strong. It was time to go. “Because I’m your mother, and I’m a bitch.” The way the girl curled into her on the walkway, free from the pressure of socializing under someone else’s roof, near brought a tear to my eye. “Thanks, mom.”