Saturday Night Live returns from its winter break this Saturday, January 18, with eyes toward its big 50th-anniversary special next month. At the start of this season, Lorne Michaels said the show planned to celebrate its milestone by bringing back alumni for appearances, and so far, this has largely meant Dana Carvey playing Joe Biden, a couple of digital shorts, and the Five-Timers’ Club cold open for the Martin Short episode. We’re not complaining, but it isn’t enough. In order to properly honor its legacy, SNL should strive to feel a little bit more like the early days. And since legally I cannot demand everyone do cocaine, I have the next best nose-adjacent suggestion: All the male cast members should grow and maintain a mustache.
First, a little SNL facial hairstory: Although Michaels shaved his mustache by the time he started SNL in 1975, most of the men in the original cast sported facial hair at some point during their time on the show. While this was after Nixon resigned and the U.S. left Vietnam, it was still common for men to maintain at least some follicle talisman of their formerly anti-Establishment stance. John Belushi occasionally appeared on television with heavy stubble. Head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who co-starred opposite Belushi in SNL’s first-ever cold open, had a solid beard. During the second season, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Garrett Morris all had mustaches (and Morris eventually grew a full beard). Aykroyd shaved his ’stache by the third season, but there are few more iconic images of the show’s original seasons than Aykroyd impersonating the mustache-less President Jimmy Carter with his own light-brown crumb catcher on full display. Before Michaels left the show in 1980, one more mustached cast member would be added: Don Novello, who forever will be linked to the dark-black caterpillar at the center of his and Father Guido Sarducci’s face. After Michaels’s departure, Eddie Murphy regularly sported a nice mustache even when impersonating celebrities without them, like Desmond Tutu (in “White Like Me,” he glued a whiter mustache on top of his own).
When Michaels returned to SNL in 1985, America was deep in the Reagan years and conservatism had taken hold both politically and face-wise, so clean-shavenness became much more common. Michaels came back to SNL to restore it after cast turnover and the threat of cancellation, which is a much different perspective than getting hired to lead a television revolution. Like George Steinbrenner and his Yankees, maintaining a culture of bare cheeks goes hand in hand with discipline and order. When Chris Rock asked to keep his mustache after he was cast in 1990, Michaels reportedly said, “In comedy, we put on beards.” Ever since then, facial hair has been extremely uncommon among SNL cast members. Tracy Morgan, Jerry Minor, Finesse Mitchell, and Jay Pharoah are exceptions, but they all shaved for impersonations; Kyle Mooney sometimes had stubble in pre-taped sketches, but generally was clean-shaven during live segments. By 2012, when Pharoah took over as Barack Obama, there was no way he would’ve had facial hair. It would have been interpreted as unprofessional or amateurish compared to, say, Jordan Peele, who by then was doing his version of the president on Key & Peele.
Watching the second season of SNL in 2025, it’s striking how Aykroyd, Murray, and Morris come off as just people, living a New York City life, who take a break to be on live TV every week. It’s scrappy and exciting, whereas a lot of SNL over the past decade, particularly the cold opens, have felt like a group of people doing homework — something serious everyone must get through for the good of the nation. And facial hair really is part of it. Would Nate Bargatze’s “Washington’s Dream” sketch been as silly if he didn’t have a real and ahistorical beard?
So as long as we are in this moment of nostalgia and reflection, boys, grow them thangs out. I can’t think of anything that would make the sketches feel more like the ’70s — other than barely giving the women any lines, of course. Kenan Thompson, our leader, grow a mustache. Movie star Bowen Yang, grow a mustache. Marcello Hernández, how about Domingo has a mustache next time? James Austin Johnson, Andrew Dismukes, Mikey Day, Devon Walker, Michael Longfellow, and Emil Wakim: You know what to do! Let’s throw the Please Don’t Destroy boys in there, too, if they are capable of growing facial hair. As a sidenote: Timothée Chalamet, you better not shave before you host next week!
Lorne, I know you are reading this and thinking to yourself [Lorne voice] Yeah … no. Then let’s make a compromise: one sketch. Just James Austin Johnson doing Trump with a mustache — a real mustache. You said you wanted to reinvent the show’s take on Trump this season. What’s more of a reinvention than the exact same impression but he has a mustache? It can even be like “’70s Trump” or something. Maybe as a Valentine’s Day gift to me, where it would look a little like this: