Saturday Night Live is at its best when it’s delivering a wide range of guest hosts and comedy styles. That’s been clear so far this season, as Amy Poehler, Bad Bunny and Sabrina Carpenter all brought very different sensibilities and subject matters to Studio 8H. I’ve enjoyed every single episode so far in its own way, but as I was looking through a list of the most popular sketches so far this season, there was an obvious recurring theme: politics.
Fans are consuming Saturday Night Live in very different ways these days. Yes, there are still plenty of people who watch the sketch comedy show live, but there are many others who wait for the sketches to get uploaded to social media. A lot of them end up on X or TikTok, but the most popular place to watch them is YouTube. SNL has had a long-running relationship with the platform and now uploads nearly all its sketches not long after they air.
Most fans, however, don’t watch every single sketch. They pick and choose the ones that look appealing or the ones they hear good buzz about and specifically watch those. Because of that, sketches have very different playcounts, and so far this season, it has been politics that has been attracting the most eyeballs by a pretty big margin.
The most popular sketch during Season 51 so far has been the debut episode’s cold open featuring Colin Jost as Secretary Pete Hegseth and James Austin Johnson doing his fantastic impression of President Donald Trump. It is already approaching 9 million views in less than a month. You can watch it below…
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Now, here’s what I think is interesting. This sketch is pretty solid. It commented on something very topical (Hegseth’s speech to military commanders), and it was fairly well received by most fans who thought it was pretty funny. I’d give it like a 7.5/10. It’s pretty obvious why a lot of people were interested in watching it, but to be honest, there’s nothing that would immediately jump out at you and make you think this would be the most popular sketch of the season so far.
The same could be said about the number two most popular sketch: the cold opener with Amy Poehler as Pam Bondi and Tina Fey making a surprise appearance as Kristi Noem, which is at over 6M views. It’s another solid political sketch commenting on ICE recruitment and the Epstein files, which are very topical issues, but once again, there’s nothing about it that says it should be the second most popular sketch of the season. The execution is solid and it’s funny enough, but you can tell from the audience it’s only landing at a solid level. You can watch it below…
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So, what does this tell us about SNL viewership? Well, I think it says that there are millions of people who hit up YouTube in the days after SNL airs, and a higher percentage of them are predisposed to watching anything involving politics. That makes the floor for an SNL sketch involving politics much higher than one about a different subject matter. If you go back through the show’s YouTube page, you can see evidence of the same recurring theme last year. A lot of the political sketches are at 4M views or above, and a lot of the more standard sketches are in the 1M to 3M range.
That doesn’t mean a sketch that isn’t about politics can’t break out. In fact, most of the biggest sketches in the show’s history, at least from a YouTube perspective, are not about politics. They’re things like Celebrity Jeopardy, David S Pumpkins, Black Jeopardy and Adam Driver’s hysterical sketch about Kylo Ren on Undercover Boss. SNL can still create a cultural moment about anything, as we saw recently with Beavis And Butt-Head, but those are the outliers. Those get mega-popular, not from regular SNL viewers, but from people who are being told by their friends and social posts to watch a specific sketch.
Whether you’re into politics or not, thankfully SNL has always been committed to making different types of jokes about different things directed at different people. Based on these numbers, they’ll obviously keep working in political sketches when they can, but it’ll always be one ingredient in a larger recipe.