A very tall Jacob Elordi hosts ‘SNL,’ makes out with Chloe Fineman

Saturday Night Live returned this weekend for the first show of 2024. The show has been on break since Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph (oh yeah, and Kate McKinnon) wrapped up 2023 before Christmas. Jacob Elordi hosting SNL for his first time was a welcome way to reset the season after that last episode.

As someone who isn’t into Euphoria and has yet to see Saltburn, my Eldordi knowledge is slim. (I didn’t even know he was Australian until he started his monologue!) I know that he was rumored to be in the running for James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy, but beyond that this episode was my introduction to the actor.

I’m impressed.

While Elordi wasn’t Adam Driver-level amazing (who else out there is memorizing their SNL lines?), he was a very solid host. He seemed game for pretty much anything SNL threw at him — especially if the sketches were about his height.

What happened to Please Don’t Destroy this episode? The trio was teased during the opening sequence but a sketch from them never ran during the episode …

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COLD OPEN

Trump Courthouse Cold Open

I was scrolling through SNL’s Instagram earlier today and came across some comments on a clip from this sketch where people were legitimately making the argument that Alec Baldwin was a better Donald Trump than James Austin Johnson.

Which is absurd.

What Johnson is doing with Trump is SNL hall-of-fame work. No one else who has portrayed Trump on the show even comes close to how Johnson nails Trump’s demeanor and his stream of consciousness way of speaking.

• “I am new at this, and I am learning”: This was the first time we’ve seen Chloe Fineman or anyone else portray Alina Habba on SNL.
• “Doing great with cognitive”: My former colleague Dan Diamond published a newsletter today about the cognitive test that Trump loves to brag about.

THE MONOLOGUE

Jacob Elordi went the “ask the audience questions” route for his monologue for the “first and, so far, best show of 2024.” Not a lot of new ground here, but like I said earlier, I now know that Elordi is Australian.

• “What the hell is a Saltburn?” Sarah Sherman brought up The Kissing Booth, the series of Netflix films that Elordi starred in with Joey King. Elordi previously told GQ that he wasn’t a fan of the series, so I guess it’s good to see him joking about it now.