TV Show Recaps: SNL’s David Pumpkins Return Crashed
Meta description: Tom Hanks returned as David S. Pumpkins in Saturday Night Live’s Halloween cold open, before James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump crashed the sketch.
In tv show recaps from Halloween night, Saturday Night Live delivered the return that its audience had been waiting a decade for, and then immediately interrupted it. Tom Hanks came back as David S. Pumpkins, the baffling, suit-wearing figure who first appeared in a sketch ten years ago, in the cold open of the show’s October 31 episode — and before the sketch could finish, James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump walked in, took over the stage, and turned the rest of the opening into a midterm-elections pitch. It was a cold open that worked on two levels at once: a nostalgic Halloween revival for longtime viewers, and a political sketch about a president facing an election he is publicly worried about losing.
The episode itself was a Halloween occasion in its own right. It was hosted by Inde Navarrette, the breakout star of the horror film Obsession, in her first time hosting the show, with Gracie Abrams as the musical guest. It was only the fifth time in the programme’s 52-season history that an episode has aired live on Halloween night, the most recent previous occasion being the 2020 Halloween show hosted by John Mulaney. After a two-week break, and after a run of episodes that had drawn mixed notices, the show returned with a host whose horror credentials fitted the night, a musical guest returning for a second appearance, and a cold open built around one of its most beloved recurring characters. The cold open, however, belonged less to the host than to the returning guest and the impersonator who hijacked his sketch.
TV Show News: The Tombs of Doom Ride
The cold open began not with a political set but with a haunted-house ride. A couple, played by Grace Reiter and Jeremy Culhane, boarded the “Tombs of Doom” attraction, guided by Kenan Thompson as their creepy tour guide, and were treated first to a horror exhibit inspired by the musical Monster, featuring Jane Wickline as Lizzie Borden and Sarah Sherman as her beheaded victim. The setup was a classic piece of Halloween staging: a dark ride, a guide who relishes the scares, and a pair of visitors who are not quite sure what they have signed up for. Then the ride took the turn that the audience had been hoping for, and the ineffective scare worker himself appeared.
Hanks’s David S. Pumpkins, flanked as always by two dancing skeletons, made his entrance to the familiar confusion of everyone on the ride. Mikey Day returned as one skeleton, and Bobby Moynihan — who had played the other skeleton in the original sketch — made a surprise return as the second. The character’s appeal has always rested on his inexplicability: he is not scary, he is not funny in any conventional sense, and he keeps popping up in places where he does not belong, dancing, while everyone around him tries to work out what he is supposed to be. That was the joke in 2016, when the sketch first aired, and it was the joke again on Halloween night, with the added pleasure of seeing the original cast reassembled for the first time in a decade.
Hanks managed one jump scare and a dance before the sketch was derailed. That, too, was part of the design. The original David S. Pumpkins sketch worked because the character’s appearances were brief and baffling, and a full return risked explaining a joke that only worked while unexplained. The show’s solution was to let the revival run just long enough to satisfy the nostalgia, and then to break it deliberately, handing the stage to the figure who has dominated the show’s political comedy for the past several years.
Hollywood News: Trump Crashes the Sketch
Johnson’s Trump arrived with a line that doubled as a summary of his own role on the show. “Boom! It’s me, Donald Trump, your one true God, pausing an ‘SNL’ skit yet again,” he announced, before asking the audience, “Oh, are you sad you don’t get to see your third David Pumpkins scene?” He then supplied his own spoiler: “I’ll save you four minutes. He keeps popping up and confusing the people on the ride. The end.” It was a joke about the show’s own habits — Trump sketches interrupting other sketches — delivered by the very interruption it described.
The impersonation then drew an explicit comparison between the president and the pumpkin-headed character. “You know, I actually have a lot in common with Mr. Pumpkins,” Johnson’s Trump said. “We both appeared in 2016. We’re both very loud, very orange and very, frankly, annoying. But we love Tom Hanks.” The comparison landed because it was true on its own terms: both figures entered American popular culture in 2016, both are defined by a loud, orange presence, and both have a habit of appearing where they are not expected. The sketch then pushed the joke further, with the character admiring Hanks and joking about admiring men’s appearances, a line that gave the episode’s coverage its most quoted headline. It is important to be precise about what happened here: this was Johnson, playing Trump, making a joke in character — not a statement by the real president, and not a confession of anything. The humour came from the character’s shamelessness, not from any real-world admission.
From there, the sketch turned to the reason Trump was on stage at all: the midterm elections, which take place on Tuesday, November 3. Johnson’s Trump told viewers that the polls were not looking good for Republicans, and he urged viewers in Texas to vote for the Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton instead of the Democratic candidate James Talarico. He introduced Saidah Belo-Osagie as Nicki Minaj, described by the character as his “new friend and future press secretary,” and he pushed the same message again: vote Republican, because, in the character’s words, if the Democrats won and gained power, they would do nothing, just as they had the last time. The politics were broad, the jokes were blunt, and the target was unmistakable — a president, played by an impersonator, using the biggest comedy stage in America to campaign in the final days before an election.
Celebrity News: The Ending That Went Wrong
The cold open ended with a deliberate piece of awkwardness. Johnson’s Trump welcomed his former press secretary, Katie Zacharia, played by Veronika Slowikowska, to deliver the night’s famous sign-off line, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” — and she botched it. Trump shoved her out of frame, exclaiming, “Nope! You whiffed it.” The fumbled ending was a fitting close to a sketch that had been built out of interruptions: a haunted-house ride interrupted by a pumpkin, a pumpkin sketch interrupted by a president, and a sign-off interrupted by its own failure. The show then moved on to its host, but the cold open had already set the tone for the night — chaotic, political, and deliberately unresolved.
Reactions to the sketch, in the recaps published overnight, were mixed in a way that reflected the sketch’s own divided loyalties. Some writers welcomed the return of Hanks and Moynihan unreservedly, arguing that the character’s reappearance on Halloween, of all nights, was exactly the right occasion. Others questioned whether the Trump interruption was necessary, noting that the sketch had been largely the same as the original at first and that the political section, while funny in places — one recap singled out a joke in which Trump roasted Moynihan for not shaving his beard, and a random shouted callback to “Riblet” — felt like a familiar routine grafted onto a revival that could have stood on its own. That division is itself a familiar pattern for the show’s political cold opens: they are designed to be talked about, and the argument about whether they should exist is part of their effect.
New TV Shows: A Halloween Episode in Context
The episode’s place in the show’s history helps explain why the cold open carried so much weight. Saturday Night Live has been on the air since 1975, and in all that time it has aired live on Halloween night only five times. The previous Halloween episode, in 2020, was hosted by John Mulaney with The Strokes as musical guest — and Mulaney returns on November 14 as a seven-time host, with Phoebe Bridgers as musical guest, following next week’s episode on November 7 with Druski and The Strokes. The Halloween episode therefore sat at the start of a three-week run that the show’s producers clearly hoped would reset a season that had begun on September 26 with New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson and musical guest KATSEYE, and had since drawn criticism for episodes hosted by Dakota Johnson and Shane Gillis.
For Navarrette, the episode was a hosting debut at the end of a breakout year. Her horror film Obsession, released in May, made her one of the year’s most talked-about new screen performers, and she has since been cast in an upcoming X-Men film as well as the projects Invertigo and The Waffle House Index. In promos for the episode, recorded with cast member Grace Reiter, she insisted that Obsession was a romantic comedy — a joke that the promos played for all it was worth, with the two performers repeatedly failing to get through the recording. Abrams, meanwhile, was making her second appearance as musical guest, following her debut in December 2024, and she arrived fresh from the release of her third studio album, Daughter from Hell, ahead of a world tour beginning in December. The pairing of a horror star and a singer-songwriter with a dark new album was a deliberate piece of Halloween casting, and it gave the night a coherence that went beyond the cold open.
What to Watch This Weekend: Why the Sketch Matters
Beyond the jokes, the cold open mattered because it showed how the show handles the collision between nostalgia and current events. David S. Pumpkins is a character whose entire comedy depends on not making sense, and the show’s decision to interrupt him with its most topical figure — a president facing an election in three days — was a way of saying that even nostalgia cannot escape the news cycle in the final weekend of a campaign. The sketch’s political message was not subtle, but it was not really aimed at persuading anyone: by the time a voter is watching a Halloween comedy show, their mind is largely made up, and the sketch’s function was closer to rallying than to arguing. It gave the show’s audience a version of the election they already expected, delivered by the impersonator they already knew, inside a sketch they already loved.
It also mattered because of what it revealed about the show’s own confidence. Bringing back Hanks, one of the most beloved figures in American entertainment, for a character that many viewers regard as a modern classic, is a statement of intent after a difficult start to the season. Pairing that return with a Trump sketch, rather than letting it stand alone, is a different kind of statement: that the show’s political comedy remains its centre of gravity, even on a night when it had every excuse to simply celebrate Halloween. Whether that was the right choice will be argued about in recaps and on social media for days, which is, in the end, exactly what a cold open is supposed to achieve.
The episode is available to stream on Peacock from Sunday, November 1, and the show continues next week with Druski and The Strokes. For viewers who missed the live broadcast, the cold open is the part of the night that will be replayed most: a pumpkin, two skeletons, a president who would not leave the stage, and a sign-off that went wrong on purpose.
Source: Variety