Saturday Night Live recruited John Mulaney to return to the stage as host this week -- although it's been less than a year since his last turn top-lining the show -- and he was happy to do so because (1) it's some serious validation after all of those failed auditions and (2) it means he got to sneak in at least one skit he'd been working on for a full-on decade with his BFFs.
Mulaney revealed on social media that he and writers Simon Rich (creator of TBS' Miracle Workers) and Marika Sawyer had been pitching last night's "Toilet Death Ejector" skit since 2009, which was shortly after he boarded the series as a writer, but it kept getting cut. This week, though, that long-simmering potty invention infomercial finally got its SNL debut, and Mulaney was delighted that it didn't get flushed this time.
View this post on InstagramSimon Rich and Marika Sawyer and I wrote together every week for four years. Here we are in 2009 when we wrote "Toilet Death Ejector" and swipe for us in 2019 (with a chimp puppet) when we finally got it on tonight after it was cut twice! We wrote Whats That Name and brought it back tonight. They're the greatest friends and writers in the world.
The trio were also responsible for putting together the original "What's that Name?" skit back in 2010, so Mulaney was also jazzed to revive that bit this week. Bill Hader was already on hand for the week's cold open and doubled down on his guest star status to reprise his role as Blight the game show host who challenges contestants to remember the names of their real-life friends as well as they do celebrities.
Other highlights from Mulaney's latest stint on the show include his "Cha Cha Slide" routine that highlights the awkwardness of the obligatory wedding line dance and the "Legal Shark Tank" segment which features him as Alan Dershowitz alongside some similarly divisive TV lawyers: Pete Davidson's Michael Avenatti, Cecily Strong's Jeanine Pirro, and Kate McKinnon's Rudy Giuliani. The quartet entertain a bevy of representation requests from the most embattled personalities of late, including Beck Bennett as Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Chris Redd as Empire's Jussie Smollett.
Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays at 11:30/10:30c on NBC.
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