“No one likes him”: John Mulaney roasts RFK Jr in his seventh SNL turn, one short of Chevy Chase’s record

John Mulaney is closing in on Saturday Night Live history, and he spent part of his seventh night as host going after one of the most powerful men in Washington.

The former SNL writer opened Saturday’s episode, which went to air at 11.30pm in New York (12.30pm AWST, 3.30pm AEDT on Sunday), with a routine about deciding that his father is autistic, a realisation he said explained his whole childhood. “He doesn’t know he’s autistic,” Mulaney said. “He’ll find out right as this airs.”

He then moved to a bit about the scratchy voices of his son’s young friends, and turned the impression into one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition that affects the voice.

What did Mulaney say about Kennedy?

Mulaney said he had known Kennedy for more than a decade through benefit events for the environmental group Riverkeeper, and joked that Kennedy’s environmental law career involved joining cases late, once they looked like winning.

The sharper line was about Kennedy’s standing. Mulaney said even his right-wing friends, who had once backed Kennedy, had turned on him. “No one likes him,” he said.

In character, he had Kennedy ask the audience to let him be in charge of their “bones” and their “tummy”. It was not the first time Mulaney has taken aim at Kennedy: he roasted him on stage at the Hollywood Bowl in May during Netflix’s comedy festival.

Why was Bowen Yang there?

Yang, a former SNL cast member and writer who is now on Broadway in “Oh, Mary!”, was the surprise of the cold open. The sketch had Mulaney as a CIA officer briefing a room of tech chiefs, played by the current cast as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, on how to tell a spy from someone who is genuinely interested in them. Yang walked on as Jensen Huang, who left the top job at Nvidia this week.

Yang stayed on later in the night to play Mary Todd Lincoln, the role he is playing on Broadway, in a musical theatre sketch.

On Weekend Update, Colin Jost joked that Huang’s midlife crisis was so bad “you might lose your house in his divorce”.

How close is Mulaney to the record?

One step. Chevy Chase, a member of the original 1975 cast, has hosted eight times, the most of anyone. Mulaney’s seven puts him ahead of Will Ferrell and Tina Fey, who have hosted six times each.

Mulaney wrote for the show from 2008 to 2012 before his stand-up career took off, and has become one of its most reliable hosts since his first turn in 2018.

What else happened?

Phoebe Bridgers, the musical guest, performed “Bobby” from her August album “Lost Weekend”, then “Still Standing”, a song about her late father, ending the night with blacklight make-up that revealed a skeleton.

Among the sketches were a pretaped parody of a home-care advertisement, a plane-crash scene in which passengers try to pass off cosmetic surgery as injuries, and a Woodstock sketch with Mulaney as a hippie urging his friends to buy houses and hoard money.