Saturday Night Live will have another Five-Timers Club initiation ceremony this season, and hopefully it will go a little better than the last one. John Mulaney will join the exclusive group when the show returns form a month-long break on Saturday, Feb. 26. LCD Soundsystem will be welcomed back as musical guest for the first time since May 2017.
The Feb. 26 episode will be Mulaney’s first time hosting since Oct. 31, 2020. He has hosted one episode per season since Season 43, when he hosted the April 14, 2018 episode. This will also be Mulaney’s first major television appearance since he and his new girlfriend, actress Olivia Munn, welcomed their son Malcolm. Mulaney also completed a rehab stint in December 2020, briefly served as a writer for his friend Seth Meyers’ Late Night, and split from his wife Anna Marie Tendler in May 2021.
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Mulaney joined the SNL team as a writer from 2008 to 2012, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2011 for Justin Timberlake’s monologue. He won a second Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for the 2018 special John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City. His 2019 SNL appearance scored him an Emmy nod for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. That same episode featured the now-classic “Bodega Bathroom” sketch. He is scheduled to start his From Scratch tour at Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Pennsylvania on March 11.
Mulaney’s episode could give SNL a chance to properly induct both Mulaney and Paul Rudd into the Five-Timbers Club. Rudd officially joined during the Dec. 18 episode, but only Tom Hanks and Tina Fey were there to induct him. The show was paired down at the last moment due to the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant in New York City, so only Kenan Thompson and Michael Che were at the studio. Only a handful of pre-taped new sketches were featured, alongside a mix of classic Christmas sketches.
As for LCD Soundsystem, the group recently released LCD Soundsystem Holiday Special on Amazon Prime Video. Their previous appearance on SNL was in 2017 came as they released their fourth album, American Dream. The group’s current members are James Murphy, Nancy Whang, Pat Mahoney, Tyler Page, Al Doyle, and Korey Richey.
SNL airs on NBC Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET. Past episodes are available to stream on Peacock and Hulu.