Dear Gossips,

If you’ve been visiting this site regularly over the years, you know how I feel about Saturday Night Live. No, it’s not always funny, and of course I disagree with so many of the hosting choices. But SNL is live comedy on television, a valuable artform across the board, in front of and behind the camera… I’ll never not argue for its relevance and I’ll never not watch. And this past weekend was especially notable because for the first time in the show’s history, the host was a content creator: Druski.

Druski’s popularity has been steadily rising since the pandemic with sold out shows that reflect that he’s not only attracting a digital audience but an audience willing to go outside to see him. But he went next level earlier this year when his skit “How Conservative Women in America Act” went megaaaa viral, with hundreds of millions of views across all social platforms.

It’s exactly the kind of sketch that connects him to SNL and why he is indeed the right choice to be the first content creator to host the show… even though, no, not all the sketches worked this weekend. But then again, not all the sketches work for any host on any given weekend. What worked is his energy. He showed up with the commitment to keep it going, push through a sketch no matter how badly it’s bombing, especially the one in which he played a wedding photographer, which was ROUGH. But sometimes those are the ones that tell you if the hosts are made for it.

And then, that f-cking curtain call. James Talarico and Emma Stone were already featured in the cold open and the monologue, respectively. Walton Goggins popped in to play bongos with The Strokes. But having the endorsement of two comedy legends, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle on stage with him must have been such a trip for Druski…. PLUS Crockett and Tubbs aka Austin Butler and Michael B Jordan?! They’ve both hosted before, and they’re in NYC filming Miami Vice 85, but they were just there to be there and they’re not known to be celebrities who show up just to be there.

MBJ and Austin also arrived and left the afterparty together.

So they’re hanging out after work, living up to the gossip promise of friendship offscreen. But if you watch that entire curtain call on Twitter, which every gossip should!, you’ll see both MBJ and Austin having a moment with Emma Stone – three of the most successful and acclaimed actors of their generation, all of them under 40, born within four years of each other, millennial movie stars that came up by TikTok standards through the old fashioned way, anointing a member of the new guard.

As mentioned in the monologue, Druski has a role in Emma’s new movie, The Catch, co-starring Chris Pine and directed by her husband, Dave McCary who, of course, has his own SNL connections as he spent several years there as a director. Production on The Catch began in the summer, if they’re not wrapped now, they should be close. The movie, a rom-com, is set for release May 21 and it’s about baseball; it might be the only baseball we get in the spring considering a lockout seems imminent.

It’ll be interesting though to watch Druski’s continued trajectory now that he’s just checked off a legacy ambition on Saturday Night Live and is about to move from YouTube to the movies, another legacy artform – and another example of a digital celebrity cementing his status by engaging with legacy media. We have seen this over and over again, despite what they say about the influence of social media, the stars of social media continue to assign value to legacy platforms.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

Photo credits: Walik Goshorn/MediaPunch/INSTARimages

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