‘Saturday Night Live At Home’ Featured Tom Hanks In His First Appearance Since Contracting The Coronavirus

HOST: Tom Hanks
MUSICAL GUEST: Chris Martin
EPISODE: Saturday Night Live Season 45, Episode 16
DATE: April 11, 2020

Last night’s SNL was the boldest in the show’s 45-year history, faced with an unprecedented challenge and deprived of all the trappings of traditional show business including sets, costumes, makeup, music, and, most importantly, the studio audience that puts the L in SNL.

The result was a fascinating and, at times, deeply personal episode that landed numerous funny and touching moments, and accurately reflected the bizarre, perilous, and heartbreaking aspects of the global moment that has hit the show hard. SNL suffered two losses to the coronavirus this week, as Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che lost his grandmother to the disease, and the show’s longtime music producer Hal Willner succumbed as well. 

Leading off with the cast popping up on a Zoom screen – where else? – from their individual homes, a bearded Kenan Thompson opened the show saying how wonderful it was to see his castmates, and Kate McKinnon, wearing a headset mic, replaced the show’s iconic opening line with, “Live from Zoom, it’s sometime between March and August.” Thompson weighted back in with, “This is crazy. Let’s do this,” and the opening theme played as members of the SNL band and cast were shown at home.

The glamorous opening credits normally filled with the cast partying and looking their best around New York City were replaced for Saturday Night Live at Home with a tableau of intimate details. Instead of cocktail bars and city landmarks, we saw Thompson and Mikey Day playing with their kids, Ego Nwodim baking biscuits, Aidy Bryant watering plants and McKinnon and Heidi Gardner cuddling with their cats. It was the first time in the show’s history that the cast was in the same situation as the viewers at home, a case where glamorous escapism was replaced by a unifying national camaraderie.

Supported by surprise host and musical guest Tom Hanks and Chris Martin —the latter of whom covered Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From The Storm”— the show rose to the occasion, finding the funny in our collective tragedy.

The episode kicked off with Hanks, not only one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and a longtime friend of the show but also the first celebrity to contract, and subsequently recovery from, the coronavirus, delivering a monologue in front of his kitchen. 

Brought on to canned applause at first, this dissipated quickly, and we were left with Hanks talking directly to us, as all of the entertainment world has been doing of late. That he wore a suit – his first since the crisis started, he said – did not distract from the intimacy of the moment. 

“It’s good to be here, but it’s also very weird to be here,” he said. He spoke of his recovery from the disease, and joked that he was more like America’s dad than ever before, since “no one wants to be around me very long, and I make people uncomfortable.” He said the show would do its best to be funny as the cast members filmed themselves at home, showed he was reading from cue cards just like on a regular episode, and even jokingly attempted an audience Q&A, posing as various audience members including a guy with a taped on mustache and a pipe.

The episode’s highlights were numerous. If compared to traditional episodes in terms of pure laughter, this would have ranked in the current season’s top half, although laughter alone was not the only factor here. Ingenuity and vulnerability played key roles.        

The episode was at its best when it tackled the weirdness of our current lives head on. Given our sudden national reliance on Zoom, Day played a man running his office’s Zoom tutorial, with McKinnon and Bryant appearing on the call as clueless receptionists Henrietta and Nan. From placing their faces way too close to the camera and McKinnon revealing her Wayne Brady background, their ineptitude led to quick weeping, accidental bathroom shots, and opportunities for the pair to display a impressive level of physical comedy.

McKinnon also gave us “Working Out at Home with Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” showing us how to work the major muscle groups including “Abs, Gams, Tuchus, and Chicken Wings.” Using dental floss as a jump rope, Q-tips and batteries as weights, and tea bags she nicknamed “Kavanaugh and Gorsuch” as punching bags, she included her trademark Ginsburns, such as reminding us of the importance of social distancing by noting she’d been social distancing from Justice Alito since ’03. Saying that the virus seems to have come from a sick bat, she added, “It makes me wonder, what was Giuliani doing in China?”

The most fascinating segment comedically was “Weekend Update,” which found co-anchor Colin Jost webcasting from his impressive living room, and Che from what seemed to be his den. The intimacy of the moment was augmented by people listening in on Zoom, who provided the closest thing the episode had to a live studio audience. Some on Twitter found the crew’s giggles distracting. I thought it was a smart move, adding an appreciated dose of levity. As Che noted, “Telling jokes with nobody just looks like hostage footage.”

The pair began conversationally, talking about President Trump’s press briefings, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Bernie Sanders dropping out of the race, then segued into more traditional Weekend Update-style jokes. Alec Baldwin called in as the president, bragging about his ratings, believing the city-wide 7:00 p.m. applause break was for him, and feeling pride that America was now the number one country for the coronavirus. He also read off a list of alternate racist nicknames he workshopped for the disease, including “Hong Kong Fluey,” “Wang Chung Lung,” and “General Tso’s Revenge.”

Che ended the segment mentioning the loss of his grandmother, then using that to trick Jost into a joke swap, a feature they usually save for the end of a season where each has the other read a joke sight unseen. Che’s joke always makes Jost look racist, but he told Jost that joke swap was his grandmother’s favorite segment. After Jost read the joke, Che admitted his grandmother had never seen the show.

Other fun sketches included Alex Moffat as an English sportscaster inventing sports at home to replace the sports we’ve lost, including Laptop Challenge – which involved seeing which of his laptops would boot up first – and “Popcorn Pop-off,” where four popcorn kernels competed to see which would pop first. Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney turned a Facetime call into a music video with guest Fred Armisen, and Bennett hosted a dating show called “How Low Will You Go,” which showed how far women’s dating standards will have fallen once quarantine ends.

Larry David appeared as Bernie Sanders, sans hairpiece, talking about dropping out of the race and how quarantine has allowed him to finally finish that heart attack he started in October, and Chloe Fineman got to show off her skills at impersonation in a fake ad for Masterclass, posing as Timothee Chalamet, TikTok celebrity JoJo Siwa, and Tiger King subject Carole Baskin teaching bike riding and claiming she didn’t kill her husband.

The episode ended with a touching tribute to Willner, who has produced the music for the show’s sketches since 1980 and worked with artists from Lou Reed to Marianne Faithfull. In addition to personal recollections from current and former cast and crew members including Thompson, McKinnon, John Mulaney, Bill Hader, and Adam Sandler, a collection of the show’s women alumni including Tina Fey, Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer sang Reed’s “Perfect Day” in tribute.

SNL at Home was announced as a one-time event, and while that could change, it’s probably for the best, as part of what made this episode work was its novelty. But for this particular moment, SNL should be applauded for adding just the right tone of laughter and empathy at an incredibly difficult time.

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.

Watch the "SNL At Home" episode of Saturday Night Live on YouTube