The Studio 8H audience and viewers at home were quick to notice that Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader was back for this weekend’s cold open, but that’s not all the Barry star was up to. He also revived the irritable game show host character Vince Blight for the “What’s That Name?” that host John Mulaney had previously created and written with fellow SNL writing staff alums Simon Rich and Marika Sawyer.
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“Simon Rich and Marika Sawyer and I wrote together every week for four years,” Mulaney recalled in an Instagram post explaining the sketch’s return, as well as the appearance of another gag that trio wrote that had been cut twice before:
Here we are in 2009 when we wrote “Toilet Death Ejector” and swipe for us in 2019 (with a chimp puppet) when we finally got it on tonight after it was cut twice! We wrote [What’s] That Name and brought it back tonight. They’re the greatest friends and writers in the world.
As longtime SNL fans will recall, “What’s That Name?” sees the Blight character teasing and humiliating the contestants repeatedly by asking them to remember the names of people in their own lives. This latest edition of the sketch was no different, as Mulaney and Cecily Strong’s characters were forced to endure increasingly embarrassing rounds of the game.
“Toilet Death Ejector,” meanwhile, was another fake commercial in SNL‘s long history of bogus product placements that is as ridiculous as it is funny. Words simply cannot do it justice, so check out salesman John Mulaney below with an offer for everyone’s elder relatives.
