After a day of performing in Broadway’s “Oh, Mary!,” Bowen Yang returned to “Saturday Night Live” to play the former Nvidia executive Jensen Huang in a cold open that lampooned a gaggle of tech moguls. (Yang, an “S.N.L.” alum who left the show last season, also appeared in a sketch to poke fun at “Oh, Mary!,” but we’ll get to that later.)
John Mulaney, who was hosting “S.N.L.” for the seventh time, appeared in the opening sketch as a C.I.A. agent who was briefing a group of technology billionaires on what he called “an extremely sensitive matter of national security.”
“America needs you,” Mulaney explained, “to learn the difference between a woman who would actually want to have sex with you and a woman who is clearly a spy.”
Pointing to the revelation that Huang had engaged in an affair with a Chinese citizen who was sharing intelligence with the Chinese government, Mulaney asked the group, “What do you think the lesson is here?”
Jane Wickline, who was playing the Anthropic founder and chief executive Dario Amodei, answered, “Never date a Chinese woman.”
“No,” Mulaney said.
Andrew Dismukes, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, answered, “Never date a human woman.”
“No,” Mulaney said again.
James Austin Johnson, playing the right-wing tech investor Peter Thiel, responded, “Never date anyone lest they become the Antichrist.”
After being chided by Mulaney (“You gotta chill with the Antichrist stuff”), Johnson asked, “Name one time technology has let us down.”
“Uh, yesterday, when every plane in America was grounded,” Mulaney responded.
“OK, name one more time,” Johnson replied.
“Uh, the day before that, when Microsoft Outlook went dark,” Mulaney said.
Mulaney empathized with the billionaires, he said, who had risen “from these bug-eyed little weirdos to being gods.”
He added, “Never in the history of our species have people as pale and as strange as you, A, survived, and, B, been given all the world’s wealth and power.”
Jeremy Culhane, playing the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, said, “My face when I have all the world’s wealth and power” before shrugging and pouting for the camera in a meme-like moment.
Mulaney showed the group a Venn diagram of two circles labeled “Beautiful women” and “Your interests and opinions.”
He explained to them, “I cannot stress this enough — there is no overlap.”
Finally, Mulaney said, they needed to hear from “someone who learned this lesson the hard way.”
Enter Yang, who wore a leather jacket and a wig of frosted hair, and introduced himself as “Jensen Hide-Your-Wife Huang.”
“Ladies,” Yang said, “when you invite Jensen over, you know what’s about to go down: the S&P 500. That’s right, I’m into B.D.S.M. — Breakin’ Da Stock Market.”
As a last warning to the other billionaires, Yang said, “Women don’t like guys like us. That’s how we became guys like us.”
Opening monologue of the week
In a stand-up routine that seemed to land a bit better than Shane Gillis’s a few weeks ago, Mulaney joked about a recent observation: that his baby-boomer father is autistic.
“He is, that’s why,” Mulaney said, adding that he and his sister had arrived at this diagnosis “after thinking about it for more than a minute.” It explained a lot about his father, Mulaney said, including “the time he shook hands with a baby” and his devotion to Roman Catholicism and corporate law — spheres united by “rules, rules, rules, rules, rules.”
Mulaney also relentlessly mocked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., imitating his spasmodic dysphonia and saying, “No one likes that guy anymore.” Pretending to be Kennedy, Mulaney said: “No, please, let me be in charge of your bones and your tummy. Please allow me to control how your blood feels in your butt and everywhere.”
As Kennedy, he added: “Robitussin, when taken during menstruation, will cause telekinesis. This is clear from the pamphlets in my rental car.”
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the government’s halt of air travel on Friday.
Jost began:
The F.A.A. suddenly and mysteriously grounded all U.S. flights yesterday. “Oh, thank God, a different news story,” said Jensen Huang.
Thousands of flights were canceled. Tens of thousands have been delayed. Well, well, well, suddenly ferry transportation — suddenly, it’s looking pretty reliable. [His screen showed a picture of a Staten Island Ferry like the decommissioned one that he and Pete Davidson bought in 2022 for $280,100.]
The scary thing, by far, about all these flights getting grounded was the messaging from the normally dependable Trump administration. First, they said it was a telecommunications outage “as of now.” Which, why add “as of now”? No one wants to hear, “Your child is safe — as of now.”
Then Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said the whole situation was the result of a contractor upgrading copper wire to fiber-optic cable. So one guy switched out one wire and took out all planes? I think that’s literally a scene from the movie “Airplane!” [His screen showed a picture of the actor Stephen Stucker unplugging a power cord in “Airplane!”]
Che continued:
After the F.A.A. grounded all flights on Friday, D.H.S. Secretary Markwayne Mullin tried to calm fears by saying, “This is not a 9/11.” Which he knew, because Rudy Giuliani didn’t see his shadow.
Welcome return of the week No. 1
Because it was an “S.N.L.” episode hosted by Mulaney, you knew there had to be a new entry in his long-running series of musical parodies set in dissolute New York locations.
This time, Mulaney played a soon-to-be unemployed driver of a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, showing his passengers some of the oddities the park has to offer. This was all just a setup for various New York-theme parodies of musical numbers from “Little Shop of Horrors” (sung by a trio of park critters); “Cats” (featuring Kenan Thompson as a cloud of marijuana smoke); and “West Side Story” (with Johnson and Culhane singing head-to-head parodies of “Maria” about Mayor Zohran Mamdani).
This is where Yang reappeared — as a character identified as Mary Todd Lincoln Tunnel — to deliver a parody of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” (from “Dreamgirls”). Veronika Slowikowska, as a runner still trying to finish the New York City Marathon, sang the ever-loving heck out of a parody of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” (from “Funny Girl”). Even Mulaney had to remark after her performance, “Wow, we should have put her earlier.”
Welcome return of the week No. 2 (and No. 3)
Ashley Padilla made one of many splashes last season playing Kathy, an office employee who is desperate to insinuate herself into her co-workers’ conversations (“We talkin’ TV?”). Tonight, Kathy appeared twice — first, in a sketch about office workers hoping to unwind at a bar, and, later, in the musical parody segment. We talkin’ recurring character?
