One of my biggest pet peeves with Saturday Night Live is the recent trend of bringing in big-name celebrities to impersonate people in the news or just appear in sketches for the sake of shining their star to the camera.
SNL always felt like a show where new comedy talents could have a place to thrive for a national audience. That’s hard to do when stars like Matt Damon are playing then-Supreme Court judicial candidate Brett Cavanaugh and Ben Stiller regularly appears as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
It still happens occasionally but not with the fervor of the first Trump administration, a presidency that gave the world more predictable, egotistical characters than a Cannonball Run sequel.
This trend has finally cooled down during the show’s 51st season, and it happened just in time. Cast member and TCU alum Jeremy Culhane joined the cast in September last year along with four new performers. It hasn’t even been a full year, but Culhane is shaping up to be one of the show’s best new finds in everything from straight man roles to dead-on impressions of notable names.
Culhane is a Los Angeles native who attended TCU from 2010 to ’14 and also performed in the student improv group Senseless Acts of Comedy. As a professional actor, he scored regular and recurring roles on shows like Netflix’s American Vandal, Paramount Network’s TV adaptation of the ’80s dark comedy Heathers, and HBO’s The Sex Lives of College Girls.
Culhane is best known among his hundreds of thousands of fans on TikTok (@jazzy_jelly), where his video “Get ready with me for my date!” amassed over 9 million views, changing the trajectory of his career. He’s also one of the regular players on Dropout TV programs such as the Emmy-nominated comedy panel show Game Changer and the improv game show Make Some Noise.
Most recently, he captured the internet’s attention with a spot-on and much-needed impression of bloviating talking head Tucker Carlson during a Weekend Update segment in March with anchor Colin Jost. Culhane deftly pulls apart Carlson’s “I’m just asking questions” act by bemoaning the choices of this year’s Oscar candidates before bellowing that giant fake laugh that’s actually “the soul of an 18th-century mental patient trying to escape from this locket.”
If anyone deserves to be dressed down on SNL these days, it’s Captain Confused Dog Face, and Culhane clearly did his homework. I feel sorry for Culhane when I imagine how many hours he had to watch Carlson’s social media show on X to get the impression just right.
Culhane’s Tucker Carlson is his most noteworthy appearance, but he’s found success in all sorts of roles that show how he’s destined to break the internet in other ways. My favorite is the silliness he and cast member Mikey Day put on display in a sketch called “Pinwheel.” Host and comedian Nikki Glaser is saying goodbye to a group of fantasy friends who appear to be some kind of mid-station “Animorph” sprites in an other-worldly kingdom of pure happiness. Culhane and Day ramp up the silly with wide-eyed Norwegian accents as they become enamored with the pinwheel Glazer gives them. At one point, one of the pinwheels breaks off from its stick on live TV, but the two roll with it. They resist the urge to “Fallon” the scene by breaking.
Another one of Culhane’s destined-to-be-recurring characters happened during a different Weekend Update segment called Mr. On Blast. The Mr. (Insert Character Trait Here) concept has been done on SNL since the 1980s. (Remember Mr. No Depth Perception?). But it’s a clever way to to show off Culhane’s physical abilities. Mr. On Blast is an ego-driven call-to-tasker who thinks he’s putting people in our neverending stream of current events in their place, but it’s just an excuse to dance to silly synthesizer exclamations in a variety of different ways. It’s a simple idea with a brilliant execution.
Culhane has also been cast as the straight man in several sketches throughout the season, such as playing opposite one of Melissa McCarthy’s socially awkward psychopaths in “Free Samples” and portraying notable names like Coach Bruce Pearl and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in two of the show’s signature “cold opens.” He sticks the landing every time and resists urges to even crack a smile that would otherwise break some impeccable writing and dedicated preparation.
Culhane seems to have cemented his place as a regular player on SNL. He presents hilarious characters and well-researched impressions, even when he’s just in the scene to set up his fellow castmate or the celebrity host for a joke. TCU should be expanding its theater and improv programs instead of condensing its departments to produce more top-notch talent like ones destined for stardom like Culhane.
