The SNL promo is a time-honored tradition. Ahead of each episode, the show films a short clip in which the week’s host stands onstage with the week’s musical guest and a cast member, and they do two to three extremely short bits to camera. You know the ones I’m talking about. They typically begin, “Hi, I’m [host], and I’m hosting SNL this week with [musical guest].†In recent years, SNL has begun filming a second, sketch-style promo ahead of each episode with the week’s host as well. They’ve featured such bits as Brendan Gleeson unleashing his inner Tony Hawk and Aubrey Plaza terrifying and seducing Chloe Fineman. Ahead of the upcoming November 2 episode, the show went meta and filmed one of these latter promos about the process of filming one of the former promos.
It begins with host John Mulaney reading lines for his promo off a cue card and being confused by its “overwritten†content. He uses his own experience as a (allegedly) former writer on the show to break down to the newbie who wrote these lines how these promos are usually meant to go. “We just need something energetic. They’re almost exclusively not funny,†he tells the upstart. The twist? The writer is James Austin Johnson’s Bob Dylan, and the promos he’s crafted feel like riffs on the strange, anticlimactic anecdotes he’s been posting recently on X. As Dylan sees it, Mulaney should promote the show by saying, “It’s great to be back in the Big Apple. Herman Melville was born here, author of Moby Dick. That’s the ultimate fish story, if you ask me.â€
Even if this exists for no other reason than to give Johnson a platform for his Dylan impersonation, that is reason enough. Those who saw him do Bob Dylan’s cell phone on vibrate have been waiting for this.