Tina Fey fills in on Paul Rudd-hosted Saturday Night Live… as Charli XCX dresses up as a parrot

Tina Fey made a last-minute appearance on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live after Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost sat out the show amid a slew of positive COVID-19 results.

The 51-year-old comedian helped keep the long-running sketch comedy series afloat while host Paul Rudd returned to mark his entry into the Five Timers Club with special guests Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Martin Short.

Also making a brief appearance was the show’s original musical guest Charli XCX, who starred in a bizarre musical sketch as a parrot after the show’s producers opted not to have a live audience and canceled her live musical performances.

This episode features only a spattering of new pre-taped sketches filmed earlier in the week and was padded out with several classic sketches to fit the holiday theme. 

SNL didn’t bother to set up the usual Weekend Update set for Tina’s return, so she and regular co-host Michael Che performed their jokes from two director’s chairs set up on the main stage.

The low-key sketch didn’t feature any of the standard humorous news graphics, and the two simply stuck to jokes rather than bringing on any special guests. 

Since there wasn’t an audience, regular cast member Kenan Thompson joined Hanks and Rudd as the live laugh track.

‘It’s not what you think,’ Fey joked at the start about Jost’s absence. ‘He’s having work done.’

Tina asked if she could call the Forrest Gump star ‘Hanks’ before starting.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he said with a smile. 

He also confirmed that he hadn’t heard the jokes before, ‘except the two you blew in rehearsal.’

Michael started off the segment by joking about O.J. Simpson being released from his parole early. 

‘”I can’t believe I got out of parole early, but I did it,”‘ he said, again emphasizing, ‘”I did it.”‘

Tina joked that Time Magazine had named Elon Musk itsPerson of the Year, which people could read about on their phones while their Teslas drove them into a lake on autopilot.

She also joked that she had impersonated a nurse to get the first COVID-19 vaccine in the US on the one-year anniversary of the first dose being administered.

Afterward, Michael jokingly wondered why he and Kenan Thompson were the only regular cast members on the show as he told a joke about a Louisiana who took a leave of absence after saying the N-word. 

He also made things awkward when he told a joke about camels disqualified from a beauty pageant in Saudi Arabia for getting facelifts to make them more appealing.

‘But, hey, man, we ain’t looking at their faces. Am I right?’ he joked, pointing to Hanks.

One of the highlights of the new sketches was a hilariously long-winded video in which Charli XCX made her sole appearance of the night with Paul and Kyle Mooney.

The two men opened the video singing in the style of a holiday-themed soft rock or light country song about a ‘magical moment between a boy and a strange man at a department store.’

The two began singing about Christmas time becoming a ‘chore,’ before the action shifted to the store, where Kyle played a boy trying to buy a pair of socks.

However, he only had pocket change and couldn’t afford them, so a stranger (Rudd) stepped up from behind and offered to pay for the socks, which the boy was buying for his mother for Christmas. 

But the two start chatting about his mother and his beloved bird, and they quickly annoy everyone behind them in line as they hold up the purchase to talk about the bird.

‘Tell me about the bird. / Did it say any words? / Or was it just one of those quiet birds?’ Rudd sang.

‘I guess I’d say quiet bird. / Never heard a word. / Just a bird that we got at the store,’ Kyle responded, testing everyone’s patience. 

Kenan, who played the clerk, urged them to hurry up and pay, but just as he was about to set his bills down, Paul had to ask if the bird had a name.

‘T.J. Rocks,’ Kyle replied, which set them back to talking some more.

Then Aidy Bryant appeared out of nowhere as Kyle’s mother, who sang that she didn’t like it one bit when Paul told her he was now friends with her son.

The sketch was interrupted by Charli XCX, who was dressed in a ridiculous parrot costume to play T.J. Rocks.

She launched into a bizarre surf rock–style tune about driving to Los Angeles and getting famous before returning to spend Christmas with Kyle.

The surreal sketch ended with Paul proposing out of the blue to Kyle’s mom, who replied that ‘of course’ she would marry him.

The episode opened with Fey and Hanks in their Fiver Timers Club robes as they welcomed Paul into the fold.

Fellow club member Steve Martin appeared via a video congratulating Paul, but he seemed to have filmed it for Tom’s entrance into their ranks and simply overdubbed ‘Paul Rudd’ in post.

Martin Short also made a brief appearance, but when he revealed that he had only hosted three times, Steve shoved him out of frame.

The first new sketch of the evening featured only Paul with Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon.

They played grandmothers brought in to film a commercial for the furnishings store HomeGoods, while Rudd played the director.

He introduced himself to them as ‘Casey HomeGoods,’ before adding, ‘I got this job on merit.’

He instructed them to list out things they hoped to get for Christmas, but at first they were too modest and wouldn’t ask for anything.

‘Oh nothing, I’m not fussy,’ Aidy said, while Kate joked, ‘Don’t spend too much.’

But after he asked what they really wanted, all there answers were about grandchildren.

Aidy said that she wanted a ‘son for my son,’ while Kate said she wanted a cake stand ‘with grandchildren on top.’

‘I want Kelsey to be full of my son,’ Aidy said about her daughter-in-law. ‘I want the son stuff to go into Kelsey,’ Kate added.

‘I want the baby to come out of Kelsey so I can take it to Red Lobster,’ Aidy continued.

Paul got frustrated and called cut, but the two managed to transfer their grandchild fever to him.

The sketch ended with Aidy getting a call from her daughter-in-law revealing she was pregnant.

Next up, Tina introduced a classic sketch and remembered how she used to love to go skating at Rockefeller Center after the show concluded on Saturdays, even though Kenan Thompson was the only good skater in the cast.

Then SNL aired the classic D*** In A Box sketch, featuring Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake in huge ’80s-style suits with terrible goatees.

Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig played their girlfriends, who were delighted to discover that their boyfriends had packed their privates into gift boxes for Christmas.

Pete Davidson took center stage in the next new sketch, which also starred Paul.

The skit was inspired by classic black-and-white Christmas films like It’s A Wonderful Life, but also Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s iconic black-and-white boxing film Raging Bull.

The sketch opened decades into the future, with Pete playing an aging and overweight version of himself with a receding hairline, which was inspired by De Niro’s weight gain for the 1980 masterpiece.

‘All right, Pete. You’ve still go it, baby. You’re the champ,’ he said to himself in his dressing room. ‘You can still do Update with the best of them.’

He put on a lounge performance for the futuristic SNL, which now had a terrifying fleshy robot standing in for Colin Jost, though the comedian had provided his voice despite not being on the show in person.

Pete performed terrible Staten Island jokes on stage that got no laughs, while Mikey Day egged him on to do his Chad character from the audience.

‘OK!’ Pete replied, and the catchphrase was enough to placate them.

He also performed a song with his friend Machine Gun Kelly, but the rapper-turned-rocker was only there in spirit as Pete pulled up an urn full of his long-dead friend’s ashes. 

Then the Colin Jost robot got stuck in a glitch loop and caught fire, requiring a robot fire extinguisher to put it out.

After his set, Paul Rudd appeared as an old friend who used to write jokes for Pete.

The comedian didn’t remember him and threw him out, but took the gift that Paul had brought for him.

He opened it to see a note — ‘I saw this and thought of you’ — and a bag of weed, at which point he went out into the snow to bring Paul back in.

‘You guys know how I was a famous sex symbol for reasons no one could understand. This is the guy that came up with that,’ Pete told his friends while they dined with Paul.

‘Was it his idea to like cover your body in tattoos and then painfully remove them one by one?’ Mikey joked.

Pete ended the sketch with a somber farewell song while Paul watched from the audience.

Next up was an old sketch, which Kenan introduced. He said he loved it because he got to see Vanessa Bayer sweetly playing an elf.

He joined her in the sketch along with Ryan Gosling, while Bobby Moynihan played Santa, who returned to his workshop to find the three elves hadn’t completed any of the toys they were supposed to be making.

They were giddy and giggly, and it turned out they didn’t make them on purpose in hopes of being punished by Santa, which seemed to give them a sexual thrill.

‘We’re so bad! I guess it’s time to teach us a lesson,’ they said.

Tom Hanks introduced another classic sketch, this one from 1991 when he joined the Five Timers Club.

Mike Meyers hosted the Global Warming Christmas Special as Carl Sagan, while Hanks played a clearly inebriated Dean Martin.

Other SNL stars of the era joined them, including Dana Carvey as Paul McCartney and Kevin Nealon as George Hamilton. 

Paul Rudd introduced the next vintage sketch, the classic Christmas Wish routine featuring Steve Martin.

Paul admitted that he had memorized the sketch as a child when he first saw it, and he would annoy his friends by performing it for them.

In it, Steve says if he had one Christmas wish it would be for ‘all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.’

But if he had two wishes it would be for that and $30 million. And his third wish would be for ‘encompassing power over every living being and the entire universe.’ 

Fourth would be a 31-day orgasm, though he started shuffling the order around so that the ‘crap about the kids’ would be last, just in case he only got to have one wish. 

Paul McCartney joined Martin Short in the following older sketch. The Beatles legend played half of a duo with Martin, who sang a terrible Christmas song that he wrote.

But Paul, who’s nearly as good of a drummer as he is a bassist and guitarist, couldn’t manage to come in on his cue to hit his triangle, which was the only thing he had to do during the song.

Eddie Murphy’s 2019 return to hosting SNL was referenced in the next sketch, a humorous North Pole-set news broadcast.

Alex Moffat led a news broadcast about a fire at Santa’s workshop, while Mikey Day played an elf reporter on the scene.

But Eddie jumped into frame as a worker elf who wanted to take over the segment with his hysterics. He screamed about how a polar bear got into the workshop and starting eating elves, before holding up a severed elf leg. 

‘Let me break it down for you. I’ll tell you how bad it is,’ he told Mikey. ‘This white teenage elf girl came up to me, a Black elf in sweat pants, and asked me to keep her safe. That’s how bad it is.’

Paul was back in the next sketch, though it was from a previous time he had hosted.

He played an adult One Direction Fan who had a hilarious series of arguments as he tried to one up the tween girls surrounding him in line to get into a concert. 

Tina Fey introduced another sketch by remember a 2005 show hosted by Jack Black in which the wardrobe workers at SNL cut up a track suit to make an adorable Santa suit for her daughter Alice, who was born earlier that year.

Jimmy Fallon hosted the sketch, which was a round up for a Now That’s What I Call Christmas compilation featuring odd pairings of artists singing classic Christmas songs.

Fallon played a dour Alan Rickman reciting spoken-word Christmas tunes, while Kate McKinnon played a hilarious Shakira and Cecily Strong nailed Alanis Morissette.

The final sketch of the night was a claymation animated segment from the past done in the style of classic Christmas specials like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

A woman sang in the style of The Supremes as she sang about Christmastime for the Jews.

She noted that while the gentiles were at home on Christmas, Jews had the run of New York City, where they could see Fiddler On The Roof with actual Jewish actors. 

Paul Rudd signed off for the episode by poking fun at Tom Hanks’ famous line about life being like a ‘box of chocolates’ as he mangled it in front of the actor.

‘As my good friend Tom Hanks once said in a movie, life is a like a big weird chocolate bar,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s delicious. Other times it’s got that orange cream filling in it and it’s like, OK, it’s not what I would have chosen but that’s better than nothing.

‘I love that movie, and I love SNL,’ he added.