Colin Jost, Marcello Hernández and Ashley Padilla Helped Turn SNL’s Cabinet Cold Open Into a Joke Machine

The latest Saturday Night Live cold open may have started with James Austin Johnson addressing the nation, but the real fun came from watching the people around him turn the whole thing into a joke-by-joke cabinet collapse. Instead of playing like one long political monologue, the sketch worked because each cast member arrived with a specific comic weapon — and once the room filled up, the cold open became less about policy than about who could land the next humiliating moment fastest.

James Austin Johnson held the whole thing together with the kind of breezy, half-improvised confidence that makes his Trump impression so durable. But the sketch really started firing once it gave him smaller, meaner jokes to weaponize — especially the moment he read Marco Rubio’s private note out loud, including the childish “Do you like me? Circle yes or no” bit. That joke worked because it instantly shrank Rubio from cabinet official to insecure kid in class, and Marcello Hernández played the humiliation perfectly. He did not overpush it. He let the embarrassment sit on his face, which made the whole thing land even harder.

Ashley Padilla also scored because her Kristi Noem was not written as the loudest person in the room — she was written as someone being casually reduced to image, styling, and superficiality while everyone around her acted like that was normal. That kind of joke only works if the performer commits without chasing it too hard, and Padilla did exactly that. She gave the sketch one of its most useful energies: someone trying to stay composed while the whole room keeps degrading into nonsense. In a crowded cold open, that kind of stillness can be its own punchline.

Then there was Colin Jost, who once again arrived as Pete Hegseth like he was kicking down the door of the sketch rather than entering it. That has become the joke in itself. Jost’s version of Hegseth does not need a complicated setup anymore — the audience already knows the energy is going to be loud, reckless, and just one step away from total frat-house collapse. Mediaite’s recap singled him out as one of the sketch’s most aggressive comic engines, and that tracks: every time he talks, the temperature spikes. He does not just deliver jokes; he turns the room into a worse place to stand, which is exactly why the bit keeps working.

That is what made the cold open click. Not one giant punchline — a lineup of performers each attacking the scene from a different angle. Johnson had the control. Hernández had the humiliation beat. Padilla had the deadpan damage. Jost had the chaos. Put them together, and the result was a cabinet sketch people remember less for the official premise than for the individual joke hits each actor managed to land. In the end, this was not really a “national address” sketch at all. It was a cast showcase disguised as one.​