When Tracy Morgan stepped out a stage to host last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, he knew viewers would have questions. Critically injured in a car accident nearly 16 months ago, the SNL appearance was a kind of announcement that he was ready to return to work. “People were wondering: Can he speak? Does he have 100 percent mental capacity?” Morgan said during his monologue. “But the truth is, I never did,” he joked. “I might actually be a few points higher now.”
SNL alum Tina Fey and the cast of 30 Rock, joined Morgan in his monologue, recreating the first episode of the show:
It was a sweet opening monologue, and Morgan handled the rest the episode well, recreating some of his SNL characters, like Brian Fellow.
But Morgan was ultimately overshadowed by this week’s cold opener, a sendup of the Democratic presidential debates featuring Larry David with a perfect Bernie Sanders impression (Alec Baldwin also did a pretty deft Jim Webb).
Riffing on Sanders’ continued emphasis on his outsider status and his refusal to play by the status quo of politics, David joked: “I’m the only candidate up here who’s not a billionaire. I don’t have a super PAC. I don’t even have a backpack. I carry my stuff around loose in my arms like a professor between classes. I own one pair of underwear, that’s it.”
It was truly the impression the internet had been waiting for and, between David’s Sanders and Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton, the long, seemingly never-ending march to 2016 might have a silver lining.