After hosting the show upwards of a thousand times and doing his arguably passable Donald Trump impression for so long that you would’ve thought the alternate persona might’ve completely infected him like the Venom symbiote, it shouldn’t be a weird shock when Alec Baldwin shows up on Saturday Night Live… and yet he’s been in the news for some stuff since the days when he was constantly visiting 30 Rock. Stuff that you might think would make it a little prickly to have him pop up on a comedy show, if only because everyone who sees him is either going to immediately think of what happened on the set of Rust or they’re going to wonder what he’s been up to and do some Googling.
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And yet SNL has been known to run full-steam ahead with questionable ideas (like when the real Trump hosted or when they did that “Hallelujah” song), so maybe it’s actually not a surprise that Baldwin made a somewhat inexplicable appearance last night as the button on an otherwise straightforward sketch starring host Timothée Chalamet as himself. In the sketch, Chalamet is recording a sleep story for the Calm app that becomes increasingly aggressive and non-calming (it’s about someone stepping in dog poop and wanting to attack the dog responsible), with the clever twist of the Calm employees being really hostile and mean to Chalamet for questioning them.
A solid sketch! No complaints! And then Alec Baldwin shows up to record his own sleep story, with the joke apparently being that he’s just really on board for the weird, aggressive vibe of the Calm employees? It’s something anyone could’ve done, but it’s also the kind of thing Baldwin has been regularly up for in the last couple of years on SNL, so the fact that it’s just a very, very minor cameo seems like he’s trying to gently dip his toe back into the public eye (as gross as that metaphor is) after the recent other stories. He was obviously going to do it at some point, and it makes perfect sense that SNL is the place he chose.