Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live is set to premiere on October 4, but before that a new NewsBusters study looked back and found that 82 percent of Season 50’s Weekend Update jokes targeted conservatives and that 60 percent of its cold open political characters were conservatives or Republicans.
NewsBusters analysts looked at 21 shows (20 regular episodes plus one additional 50th anniversary special) from September 28, 2024, through May 17, 2025.
Weekend Update
Co-anchored by Colin Jost and Michael Che, the Weekend Update segment is the part of the show that is most like the nightly comedy shows that NewsBusters analyzes elsewhere. In fact, SNL’s 82 percent matched the figure for the combined totals of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, NBC’s own Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in 2024.
In Season 50, Jost and Che combined to tell 249 political jokes, 203 of which were about right-leaning people, groups, or things. That left 45 against left-leaners and one for non-partisans.
In the five episodes before the election, Jost and Che told 3.4 liberal jokes per episode. After the election, they told 1.8. By contrast, they told 9.6 conservative jokes per show both before and after the election.
Jost and Che’s top ten included seven right-leaners and three left-leaners. They were Donald Trump (96), Joe Biden (18), Elon Musk (16), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (15), JD Vance (13), Matt Gaetz (7), Pete Hegseth (6), Kash Patel, Kamala Harris, and Democrats (5 each).
Cold Opens
The cold open is the skit before the opening credits and is probably what most people think of when they think of Saturday Night Live. In Season 50, conservative or Republican characters appeared 43 times, while liberal or Democratic figures appeared 29 times, or 60 percent to 40 percent. In terms of unique characters, it was split 15-15.
However, the relative closeness of the numbers can be deceiving. In the five pre-election episodes, Democrat characters appeared 21 times, or 4.2 Democrat parodies per episode. In the 16 post-election shows, Democrats appeared eight times, or 0.5 per episode, and five of those came on the last pre-inauguration episode satirizing MSNBC.
In the five pre-election shows, Republican characters actually appeared less often, at 2.4 instances per episode, or 12 total. After the election, the number dropped to 1.9 Republican characters per episode, or 31 total.
The top ten recurring characters featured 5 left-leaners. They were James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump (15), Dana Carvey’s Joe Biden and Bowen Yang’s JD Vance (6 each), Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio and Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris (5 each), Jim Gaffigan’s Tim Walz and Andy Samberg’s Doug Emhoff (4 each), Dana Carvey/Mike Myers's Elon Musk (3), Colin Jost’s Pete Hegseth, Sarah Sherman’s Matt Gaetz, and Chloe Fineman’s Kaitlan Collins (2 each).
These numbers do not take into account the content of the satire. For instance, the real Harris joined Rudolph in one of her skits to do some last-minute campaigning. Another one satirized Harris’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, but Baier and Fox were clearly meant to be the butts of the joke. Skits satirizing Trump were less friendly.
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As SNL enters its 51st season, it will experience quite a bit of turnover. Cast members Heidi Gardner, Devon Walker, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim, and Ego Nwodim have all left—Gardner and Nwodim more willingly than the others. Writer Celeste Yim (they/them pronouns) also left. Joining the cast will be Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Ben Marshall, Kam Patterson, and Veronika Slowikowska. The show also screen-tested different Weekend Update anchor combinations amid speculation Jost and Che would also depart, but they will be back for Season 51.