SNL Cold Open May 9, 2026: Kavanaugh, Hegseth, and Patel Walk Into a Bar
Saturday Night Live has always functioned best when it has rich material — and the May 9, 2026 cold open arrived with an embarrassment of it. Matt Damon returned to Studio 8H for his third hosting appearance and immediately reprised his signature Brett Kavanaugh impression, joining Colin Jost's Pete Hegseth and Aziz Ansari's Kash Patel for a boozy fictional night out at Martin's Tavern, described in the sketch as a legendary Georgetown watering hole. The result was one of the sharpest cold opens of the season: a single comic premise — powerful men bonding over drinks — that let the show methodically work through a genuinely staggering list of real-world controversies, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to a leaked plan to let Donald Trump run for a third term.
The sketch didn't need to exaggerate much. The real news had already done the heavy lifting.
The Premise: Drinking with Power
Setting the sketch in a bar was a deliberate and pointed choice. Both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced serious questions about their drinking during their Senate confirmation hearings — Kavanaugh's 2018 confirmation battle was defined in part by testimony about his behavior at parties and his own defensive, emotional performance before the Judiciary Committee. Hegseth's confirmation as Defense Secretary similarly surfaced allegations about alcohol use. SNL didn't invent this irony; it just gave the characters a shared space to inhabit it.
The cold open framed the three men as buddies blowing off steam, trading war stories that happened to include starting actual wars, dismantling civil rights protections, and consolidating executive power. The bar-hangout format gave each character room to deliver their punchlines in context, making the satire land more naturally than a traditional press conference parody would have.
Matt Damon's Kavanaugh: An Impression Eight Years in the Making
Matt Damon first played Brett Kavanaugh during the justice's actual confirmation hearings in 2018, delivering a cold open that became one of the most-watched SNL sketches of that era. His impression captured Kavanaugh's aggrieved, defiant energy so precisely that it became the defining cultural moment of the confirmation battle — Damon's theatrical outrage, his insistence that he liked beer, crystallized something real about how the hearings felt to millions of viewers watching.
According to The Boston Globe, this May 9 episode marked Damon's third time hosting SNL overall, following his debut in 2002 and his return in 2018 — the same year he first played Kavanaugh. He also made a cameo during Kristen Wiig's Five-Timers Club induction sketch in 2024. So when Damon walked out in the robes and the slightly reddened face, it carried genuine history. The audience wasn't just watching an impression — they were watching a character who had aged alongside the actual justice, both now embedded in the fabric of American public life in ways nobody quite anticipated.
The sketch's most explosive moment came when Damon's Kavanaugh leaned in to share something "top secret" with Hegseth and Patel: that they were going to allow Trump to run for a third term. As reported by MSN, the line played to sustained laughter — partly because it's absurd, and partly because in 2026, the distance between satire and genuine political anxiety has shrunk to almost nothing.
Aziz Ansari's Kash Patel and the FBI Bourbon
Aziz Ansari's return as FBI Director Kash Patel — his second consecutive week in the role — was the sketch's freshest element, built around a genuinely strange real-world detail. The Wrap reported that Ansari's Patel unveiled a custom "FBI bourbon" bearing his name and the FBI shield — a direct reference to an Atlantic investigation revealing that the real Kash Patel travels with personalized branded bourbon featuring official FBI insignia.
The detail is almost too good for satire. When you can't improve on the source material, you simply present it: Ansari did exactly that, playing Patel with a kind of gleeful, self-aggrandizing energy that made the character both ridiculous and recognizable. If you're curious about the kind of premium bourbon that would appeal to someone who puts their name and a federal agency's seal on a bottle, Kash Patel FBI Branded Bourbon has become a pop-culture talking point worth knowing about.
Ansari's presence also signals something about SNL's casting strategy in 2026. Rather than relying exclusively on its repertory cast to fill political roles, the show has been bringing in celebrity guests specifically chosen for their ability to inhabit a character — and Ansari's Patel has enough comic texture to sustain multiple appearances. His return a second consecutive week suggests the writers see real longevity in the impression, particularly as Patel's real-world tenure continues to generate material.
Colin Jost Steps Out from Behind the Desk
Colin Jost has anchored Weekend Update alongside Michael Che for years, which means audiences rarely see him playing characters rather than playing himself. His Pete Hegseth was a notable departure — Jost leaned into Hegseth's military-bro confidence and the awkward reality that the Defense Secretary oversaw the launch of a military operation that the sketch happily called "starting a war."
The casting choice made a specific kind of comic sense. Jost and Hegseth share a certain preppy, assured affect that the sketch could exploit — the joke wasn't just about Hegseth's policies but about the particular type of man who holds power with breezy certainty. Hegseth's confirmation battles, which included questions about both his drinking and his conduct, gave the bar setting an extra layer of resonance. These are characters for whom accountability appears to be a concept that applies to other people.
The Political Targets: What the Sketch Was Actually About
Good political satire does more than poke fun at individuals — it identifies a systemic argument and makes it entertaining. The May 9 cold open had a clear thesis: that a small group of men, appointed or confirmed rather than elected, are reshaping American life in ways that are permanent and far-reaching, and that they are doing so with evident comfort and impunity.
The sketch hit several specific targets, each grounded in recent news:
- The Voting Rights Act decision: The Supreme Court recently issued a ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, including redistricting in Tennessee that carved up a Black majority district covering Memphis. Damon's Kavanaugh referenced this directly — and the laugh it drew was uncomfortable in the specific way good satire achieves. SNL wasn't explaining the case; it was marking it as something that deserves to be named and held in the public consciousness.
- Hegseth's military record: The sketch included jokes about Hegseth having started a war — a pointed reference to ongoing questions about Pentagon decision-making under his leadership and the controversies that marked his confirmation process.
- The third-term revelation: Kavanaugh's "top secret" disclosure about allowing Trump a third term worked as satire precisely because the constitutional prohibition on a third term is one of the clearest limits on executive power — and in the sketch's world, it's treated as a minor logistical detail to work around rather than a foundational democratic principle.
- Kavanaugh and abortion rights: The sketch also touched on the Supreme Court's role in ending federal abortion rights protections, completing a portrait of a court whose decisions have reshaped American daily life in the years since Kavanaugh's confirmation.
The sketch ended with the bar patrons breaking into Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" — the 1997 anthem whose chorus ("I get knocked down, but I get up again") has become a kind of accidental theme song for political resilience and stubbornness. Applied here, it cut both ways: these are men who keep getting knocked down by scandal and keep getting up again, but so does the opposition to them.
Matt Damon's Episode: Monologue, Noah Kahan, and The Odyssey
The cold open was the most-discussed moment of the night, but the full episode had other notable elements. Damon's opening monologue included a Mother's Day message — the episode aired on May 9 — and promotion of his upcoming role in The Odyssey, the anticipated adaptation that represents one of the more ambitious projects of his career's next phase. For longtime Damon fans, the monologue offered a glimpse of what the actor is focused on beyond SNL, and his comfort in the host chair after three appearances was evident.
Noah Kahan served as the episode's musical guest, his second SNL appearance following his 2023 debut. Kahan's rise since that first appearance has been substantial — he's become one of the defining voices of a certain introspective, folk-inflected indie sound, and his return to the show marked his elevated status in the music landscape. The Boston Globe noted both Damon's and Kahan's New England connections as a subtext of the episode, which aired the night before Mother's Day.
What This Cold Open Reveals About SNL's Satire in 2026
SNL's political cold opens have been criticized for years on two opposite grounds: sometimes for being too toothless, willing to mock the powerful without really challenging them; sometimes for being too partisan, functioning more as liberal wish-fulfillment than genuine satire. The May 9 cold open sits in more interesting territory than either critique allows.
What the sketch did well was ground each joke in specific, verifiable facts — the branded bourbon is real, the Voting Rights Act decision is real, the questions about drinking during confirmation hearings are documented. This specificity is what separates satire from mere mockery. When SNL simply caricatures powerful figures without connecting to concrete actions, the comedy dissipates quickly. When it identifies the specific absurdity in real documented behavior, it has staying power.
The choice to bring back Aziz Ansari for a second consecutive week also signals something about the show's ambitions. SNL is treating Kash Patel as a recurring character worth developing rather than a one-week joke — which means the writers believe his tenure will continue to generate material and that the impression has genuine comic depth. MSN noted that Damon and Ansari led the cold open together, reflecting a broader trend of SNL investing in specific performers to carry political narratives across multiple episodes.
The show has always reflected the cultural moment back at itself — sometimes with more precision than other times. In a period when the distance between institutional satire and institutional reality feels genuinely narrow, SNL's cold opens function partly as a public record: these things happened, they were absurd, someone named them. That's not nothing. For comparable long-form political satire, South Park Season 27's approach to Trump satire offers an interesting contrast in how different entertainment formats handle the same raw material.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who played Brett Kavanaugh in the SNL cold open on May 9, 2026?
Matt Damon reprised his long-running impression of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Damon first played Kavanaugh during the justice's 2018 confirmation hearings in a cold open that became one of the most-watched SNL sketches of that era. The May 9, 2026 appearance was part of Damon's third time hosting SNL overall.
What was the "FBI bourbon" joke about?
Aziz Ansari's Kash Patel unveiled a bottle of personalized bourbon bearing his name and the FBI shield during the sketch. This was a direct satirical reference to a real report in The Atlantic revealing that the actual FBI Director Kash Patel travels with custom-branded bourbon featuring official FBI insignia. SNL essentially played the real detail straight, which is often funnier than invention.
What Supreme Court ruling did the SNL sketch reference?
The cold open referenced the Supreme Court's recent decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, specifically including redistricting in Tennessee that carved up a Black majority district covering Memphis. Damon's Kavanaugh mentioned this as one of the group's collective "accomplishments," framing it as cocktail-party small talk among men who have fundamentally altered American democracy.
Is this Aziz Ansari's first time playing Kash Patel on SNL?
No. The May 9 episode was Ansari's second consecutive week playing FBI Director Kash Patel. He debuted the impression the previous week and was brought back immediately, suggesting the writers and producers see the character as a recurring fixture rather than a one-off cameo.
What song did the sketch end with?
The cold open ended with bar patrons singing Chumbawamba's 1997 hit "Tubthumping," best known for its chorus "I get knocked down, but I get up again." The choice was pointed — applied to characters who have survived multiple public controversies and confirmation battles, the anthem takes on a darker comic meaning about the durability of power and the difficulty of accountability.
Conclusion
The SNL cold open of May 9, 2026 worked because it understood that the best political satire doesn't embellish — it illuminates. Matt Damon's Kavanaugh, Colin Jost's Hegseth, and Aziz Ansari's Patel didn't need to be exaggerated into monsters or buffoons. They were rendered as recognizable types: powerful men, comfortable in their power, meeting for drinks to celebrate decisions that affect millions of people who were not in the room. The bar setting, the branded bourbon, the Chumbawamba finale — each element earned its place precisely because it connected to something real.
For SNL, the challenge of political satire in 2026 is the same one it has always faced: staying sharp when the real world keeps producing material faster than any writing room can process. The May 9 cold open suggests the show is up to that challenge, at least for now. With Ansari's Patel becoming a recurring character and Damon's Kavanaugh still finding new angles after eight years, the show has the performers it needs. What happens next — in Washington and on Saturday nights — remains, as always, to be seen.
