Saturday Night Live: the 10 best clips of the biggest season ever

Saturday Night Live has been enjoying quite the resurgence this year. Presidential campaigns are always good business for the long-running sketch series, but it’s been the election and presidency of Donald Trump that has launched the show into mega-drive. Ratings are the highest they’ve been in 23 years, and stars including Alec Baldwin, Melissa McCarthy and Scarlett Johansson seem happy to stop by to reprise their roles in the current political melodrama whenever necessary.

The show also switched to airing live in all (continental) US time zones, making it easier for it to build a social media following and allowing clips of the sketches to be online minutes after they air live on TV. That energy has brought some real classics: here are the 10 best sketches of SNL’s 42nd season.

10. Translator

Scarlett Johansson is scientist who has found a way for humans to interact with household pets – but it doesn’t seem so impressive when she discovers her dog is a Trump supporter. It’s a classic high-concept sketch that’s stuffed with good jokes and a layer of commentary on our cultural obsession with Trump over everything.

9. The Bubble

SNL may still be trying to figure out what to do with its Trump impression, but in the wake of the election, the show was smart to keep some balance to its mockery. In this November sketch, a collection of Brooklynites gather to form their own perfect, open-minded, and very insulated bubble.

8. Amazon Echo

Since the Lonely Island boys departed from SNL, the show has had fewer goofy pre-taped bits, but it has regained its decades-long supremacy in fake commercials. Here, a special version of the Amazon Echo, made in partnership with AARP, is aimed at the Greatest Generation.

7. Kellyanne Conway

Kellyanne Conway was always a perfect target for SNL – predictable, mockable and (for a time) absolutely ubiquitous. But this particular sketch – Conway was Roxie Hart, soaking in the glory of her newfound fame – seems like even sharper satire now that Conway has virtually disappeared from the public eye.

6. Pepsi Commercial

In reruns, this sketch will make absolutely no sense. But for as long as we can all remember the debacle that was the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad, this take on the whole affair is pitch-perfect.

5. Aziz Ansari Stand-Up Monologue

While not technically a sketch, Aziz Ansari’s monologue on the day after Trump’s inauguration was an important, cathartic moment for the show. His patriotic, topical stand-up could have veered into preachiness, but it never stopped being funny.

4. Complicit

With so much coverage of the Trump administration this year, SNL has had a lot of fun developing a whole wacky cast of characters inhabiting the White House. Here, the show aims straight at Ivanka and hits her where it hurts. Sorry, girl, you’re Billy Zane.

3. Haunted Elevator

There’s so much to say about this brilliantly, epically idiotic Halloween sketch, and yet only one thing that needs to be said. David S Pumpkins. Any questions?

2. Black Jeopardy

It’s no secret that Tom Hanks is a great actor, but his turn as the Maga-supporting Doug in this edition of Black Jeopardy was a revelation. With Hanks pitted against the always hilarious Kenan Thompson, this sketch turned into one of the most interesting takes on race and culture in a complicated time.

1. Sean Spicer Press Conference

Part of what made this sketch so great was the surprise appearance of Melissa McCarthy (who was not that week’s host) as Sean Spicer. Part was the incoherent fury and petty incompetence she brought to the press secretary. Part was definitely the prop comedy. In total, McCarthy’s just-barely-holding-it-together take on Spicer was an immediate classic.