As John Mulaney notes in his promo for this week’s SNL, which he’s hosting with musical guest Chappell Roan, these promos are “usually punchy,” but almost immediately it goes into a weird tangent involving Shooter Jennings and a Duff McKagan song he produced. John asks to see the cue cards and asks who the writer is?
Turns out it’s Bob Dylan (well, SNL master impressionist James Austin Johnson), lit as usual in shadows. “I’ve been hired as a writer,” he tells John. “Season 50, they’re busting out the big guns. I won a Nobel Prize in literature.” Leave it to Mulaney, who made the talk show feel fresh and exciting again with his Netflix series Everybody’s in LA, to bring something new here. It’s really more of a full-on sketch than a promo, that also features new SNL hire Jane Wickline, and labyrinthine, Dylan-esque digressions into Herman Melville and more. If you follow Dylan on X/Twitter it makes more sense. Watch below.