There was perhaps no better host for this weekend’s Mother’s Day edition of Saturday Night Live than Maya Rudolph. The mother of four slayed, vogued and delivered some of the season’s most memorable zingers thus far.
In her third time as host, the SNL alum revived one of her most beloved characters — an exasperated Beyoncé — while also giving a tour-de-force monologue that set the bar for the rest of the episode. Some of the cast, including Kenan Thompson, found it hard to stay in character at points. That’s how you know she did her job.
Here are some of the highlights from last night’s episode.
📺 Cold open: It’s raining mamas
With Mother’s Day minutes away, the cast paraded out their moms and offered heartwarming stories and silly jokes in lieu of a traditional cold open about the week’s hottest topics. “That’s too bad,” Thompson’s mom Ann joked about the programming change. “I was excited to see who was gonna play Stormy Daniels.”
🎤 Monologue: Maya is Mother of the House of Rockefeller
In a musical performance dedicated to mothers, Rudolph slayed the stage with a Pose-style ball. The fans were clacking and the hands were voguing when Thompson’s character Mr. Infinity Decor proclaimed: “This is Maya’s house now. Ladies and gentlemen, gays and theys, I give to you the mother of the House of Rockefeller.” And boy did she deliver.
🐝 Buzziest sketch: Beyoncé goes on ‘Hot Ones’
Rudolph’s Season 46 parody of Beyoncé on Hot Ones, the popular YouTube show in which celebrity guests are interviewed while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings, was already iconic. But last night, she returned with a fully Cowboy Carter-ed out version that rivaled the original.
When host Sean Evans (played by Mikey Day) welcomed her back to the fake Hot Ones set, Rudolph-as-Beyoncé said: “Well, this is the only thing I have attempted that I did not slay, and that bothered both me and my husband. My husband is Jay-Z.”
⏪ Most rewatchable moments
‘Uneesa Confidence’
In a pretaped sketch, three couples are enjoying a group date night when one person suggests that they all share what kind of content Instagram’s algorithm has curated for them on their “Explore Page.” For the women, it is mostly recipes, lifestyle influencers and puppies. But the men reluctantly reveal that the social media platform has exclusively been serving them videos posted by Uneesa Confidence, “an online girlfriend for young men with self-esteem issues,” played by Rudolph.
‘Teacher PSA’
Congratulations, kids of the COVID era: “Y’all won,” Rudolph, playing a public school teacher, said in a “special message” for America’s youth. “Y’all rude and y’all nasty. Not only can y’all not read, but y’all on drugs and spectrums that did not even exist in 2006.”
‘Can you pick me up?’
In a very relatable mom moment, Rudolph is forced (time and again) to come up with excuses to pick up her anxious daughter from sleepovers after she keeps calling home in the middle of the night.
💩 What didn’t land
‘Coffee Commercial’
Rudolph paid homage to the infamous food poisoning scene from her 2011 film Bridesmaids with a sketch about an actress who experiences a similar digestive emergency while filming. Unlike the Bridesmaids scene, the sketch didn’t quite land for some critics.
Reviewers at AV Club thought the sketch relied too heavily on “cheap fart jokes” rather than delivering a stronger punch line to match Rudolph’s comedic potential.
📰 Ripped from the headlines: RFK Jr.’s brain worm, Trump’s hush money trial and Putin‘s new term
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made headlines last week after revealing that doctors found a dead worm in his brain in 2010. Now the worm, played by Sarah Sherman, is telling its story. When asked by “Weekend Update” host Colin Jost how they were able to get into Kennedy’s brain, Sherman replied: “The same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Through the anus!”
Jost also took swipes at Trump’s hush money trial. “This week in court, Stormy Daniels gave a detailed description of sex with Donald Trump, which was so disgusting even the sky turned green,” Jost said in reference to the northern lights that were on full display across the country on Friday.
“Weekend Update” co-anchor Michael Che followed up with a bit about Vladimir Putin. “During a ceremony in Russia, Vladimir Putin was sworn in for his fifth term as president by placing his hand on the Russian constitution,” he said, “which is just a label on a bottle of vodka.”
🎹 Musical performances: Vampire Weekend
The rock band took the stage with performances of “Gen-X Cops” and “Capricorn” from their latest album Only God Was Above Us.
