Saturday Night Live (1975) is airing its 46th season finale this week, so I'm celebrating the show with two blog posts on back-to-back weeks: today I'm sharing my ranking of my ten favorite current cast members, and next week I'm sharing my list of the 10 greatest cast members of all time. I'm ranking these cast members purely based on how much I enjoy their work on SNL, and not based on their overall comedy careers.
Here are my honorable mentions: Aidy Bryant, Chris Redd, Ego Nwodim, Heidi Gardner, Kyle Mooney.
10. Mikey Day
I know that most likely Mikey Day is a smart guy in real life. But that's easy to forget and even feels hard to believe, because he does such an incredible job playing dumb characters. While there are many kinds of roles that he's capable of, Day absolutely excels when playing characters that are various degrees of clueless, confused or just plain stupid. He is best remembered for his over-confident and hysterical recurring role as Donald Trump. Jr., and that role alone earns him a spot in this top 10.
9. Melissa Villasenor
Melissa Villasenor is quite a unique comedian with her commanding, sort-of-purposefully-annoying style of speaking. Once you get used to her comedic chops, she's very endearing to watch. I'm a big fan of her Weekend Update appearances, as she often appears as an exaggerated version of herself, always with the same concept: she's supposed to be discussing a certain topic, but then makes everything about herself and goes way off topic. Whether it's a review of the Oscars that turns into a series of songs about white male rage, or a Christmas appearance where Colin Jost keeps asking questions unrelated to Dolly Parton but she insists on showing off her Dolly Parton impression, it's always a great laugh. She also did a confusingly great job playing Kevin from Home Alone (1990) in a memorable yuletide skit!
8. Alex Moffat
SNL has always been one for political satire, and it's a long-standing tradition that the sitting U.S. president is always played by the same comedian throughout their tenure. Whether it's Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford or Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump, these impressions are often quite legendary, which is why the hype was real for who would be SNL's official Joe Biden. Throughout the 2020 election campaign, several comedians played then-candidate Biden in individual episodes, but none of them were quite right - Jim Carrey overacted even by SNL standards, Woody Harrelson didn't feel natural in the role, and while John Mulaney was hilarious, that was just because he's John Mulaney, not because of the impression.
So I was very glad to hear that after a lot of deliberation, longtime castmember Alex Moffat was chosen as the official Joe Biden for the next four years. Based on his first few appearances in the role, Moffat is hilarious as Biden, as he is in all of his appearances, from Weekend Update mainstay "Guy Who Just Bought a Boat" to his unforgettable Eric Trump. Maybe his Biden impression will earn him a newfound fame that will stop people from mistaking him for the real Eric Trump on the street (this happens all the time, according to Moffat).
7. Beck Bennett
While most SNL castmembers are very versatile in their comedic chops, each individual often has one particular type of character they particularly shine as. Whereas Mikey Day is at his best when playing dumb characters, Beck Bennett's forte is without a doubt playing arrogant characters. This guy is a world champion at playing smug jerks who are more or less full of themselves - I don't know what it is about his style of acting, but it always makes for a pitch-perfect parody of such people. While he seems like a modest and likable person in real life, he almost always brings this well-built flair of smugness into his best impressions, which include modern classics from Vladimir Putin and Mike Pence to Wolf Blitzer and Tom Brady.
6. Cecily Strong
Cecily Strong is one of those comedians who can make any line of dialogue funny with her delivery. While she's great at playing the "normal person" in the room whose job is to react to whatever strange is going on, she's even better when she's in the spotlight and being all sorts of weird herself.
I absolutely love the several instances where she has played the role of generally unlikable people, making her own opinion of them clear with impressions so hideously over-the-top and caricature-like that they're actually magnificent - these include her recurring roles as Fox News's Jeanine Pirro, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and various members of the Kardashian/Jenner circles. Her recurring Weekend Update characters, such as The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation with at a Party as well as The Woman Who's Always Yelling Outside Michael Che's window, are creative and quite spectacular.
5. Michael Che
Co-head writer of the series and co-host of the beloved Weekend Update segment, this guy is just pure gold. His sense of humor is probably darker than the rest of the cast combined, and I can't help but laugh at his absolutely shocking, right-on-the-verge-of-being-offensive-while-somehow-managing-to-never-actually-offend jokes on all sorts of hot-button issues. His style of comedy can be boiled down to the time where he revealed in an interview that when Avengers star Chris Hemsworth hosted, Che wanted to do a skit where the Avengers save New York City from space aliens but kill an unarmed Black teenager in the process. Somehow, the skit didn't make the final cut.
Che is the perfect counterpart to the more conventional and safe comedic style of his partner in crime, Colin Jost, and their dynamic is what has made Weekend Update the highlight of pretty much every episode in recent years. My favorite tradition of his has to be the special segment that comes at the end of each season, where he and Jost 'trade jokes' for the other one to read live on air without seeing it beforehand - each time this has occured, his pranks on Jost have been more brutal and hilarious than the last. Here's hoping this week's season finale continues the tradition!
4. Colin Jost
Choosing between Che and Jost is like naming your favorite Beatle - why compare elements that so clearly complement one another? But, when all is said and done, Jost very barely edges out his Update co-host and comes out on top. It's hard to describe what makes his comedic style tick so well - his jokes aren't as unique as Che's and could be told by anyone, but the precise manner in which he delivers them is just sheer perfection.
Take the time when he showed the clip of Donald Trump ranting about dishwashers at a rally of his on the day of his impeachment, after which the camera returns to Jost who says in a subtle yet dramatic manner: "Words that will echo through the ages". Or, even better, the Weekend Update segment from the first episode after President Biden's inauguration, in which Jost begins a joke about Trump with the introduction "Former social media influencer Donald J. Trump..." - I don't even remember what the punchline was, but that just might be my favorite beginning to a joke of all time.
3. Kenan Thompson
This magnificently talented comedian became a featured player on the show back in 2003, and an official cast member in 2005 - he broke the record for longest-ever tenure on SNL years ago, and he's still going strong. At this point, it's hard to imagine the modern Saturday Night Live without him. His greatest talent doesn't lie in creating quirky characters or doing spot-on impressions, but rather in the fact that his natural energy when just being himself is so tirelessly funny. His amusing way of speaking, and the overall tongue-in-cheek nature of everything he says and the way he fills a room with his warm and fuzzy presence, make all of his SNL moments feel like quality comedy no matter what role he's playing.
That being said, I don't want to downplay his roles - he shines whenever he plays a game show host, whether it's a Steve Harvey impression or the fictional Black Jeopardy host, and his range of dark humor really comes into its own when he takes on roles such as Bill Cosby or O.J. Simpson.
2. Pete Davidson
Lately, Pete Davidson has expanded his range on the series, doing some surprisingly decent impressions of people such as congressman Matt Gaetz, not to mention his rapping skill improving many musical skits and his recurring character "Chad" being amusing. But there's no escaping the fact that Davidson's best material on SNL has always been and will always be his Weekend Update appearances as (perhaps a slightly exaggerated version of) himself.
Whenever Staten Island's golden boy Colin Jost interviews Staten Island's more controversial product Pete Davidson, it makes for comedy gold. His statements are often prone to cause conflict due to his less-than-filtered dark humor, but at the end of the day, it's always clear that his heart is in the right place. Whether he's opening up about his mental health struggles in an inspiring way (still with a shockingly tongue-in-cheek style), telling hilarious anecdotes through his unique and chaotic lens on life, or saying stuff like "The Goblins in Harry Potter are Jewish caricatures! They're tiny little Jew Goblins! And I can say that, because as you know, Colin, I'm half goblin", his Update appearances are always the highlight of the episode. I can't decide a favorite clip of his between classics like "Pete Davidson & John Mulaney review Clint Eastwood's The Mule" and the unforgettable "Pete Davidson on Staten Island".
Speaking of his unlikely friendship with John Mulaney, I have to bring up my all-time favorite SNL skit: Lobster Diner, from Mulaney's first time hosting. While there are several factors to what makes this skit into a masterpiece, one of the funniest parts is Davidson repeatedly breaking character and failing to hold back his real-life laughter at the skit's absurdity. Can't blame the guy - the whole cast, including Mulaney himself who wrote the skit, had trouble keeping a straight face.
1. Kate McKinnon
Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth Warren. Nancy Pelosi. Kellyanne Conway. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Jeff Sessions. Anthony Fauci. Lindsey Graham. Rudy Giuliani. Angela Merkel. Theresa May. Queen Elizabeth II. Ellen DeGeneres. Lisa Kudrow. Greta Thunberg. Justin Bieber.
These are just a fraction of the celebrities that Kate McKinnon has not only impersonated, but absolutely mastered on Saturday Night Live. She is comedy dynamite whenever she appears on screen, proving time and again that there's nothing in the world of sketch comedy she can't do (and certainly no one she can't play - if McKinnon had been chosen as the show's de facto Joe Biden, I wouldn't have questioned it at all). It's no wonder that she has gotten 7 Emmy nominations (of which she won two) in the category of Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on the show. Certainly one of SNL's all-time greats.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week for my list of the Top 10 Saturday Night Live cast members of all time!
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