SNL's Halloween Cold Open Brought Back David S. Pumpkins. Trump Took It Over
Tom Hanks's ride-along with the scariest man in a pumpkin suit is the most-watched SNL sketch of the week, at 4.2 million views, interruption and all.
By the Heckle Desk · · 1 min readThe most-watched SNL sketch of the past week is the Scary Halloween Cold Open from Inde Navarrette's Oct. 31 episode, which had 4,193,343 YouTube views by Monday afternoon. That's well ahead of anything else from the night, and it's because Tom Hanks put on the suit again.
The setup is a cheap haunted ride through a mausoleum. Grace Reiter and Jeremy Culhane play the young couple in the car, and Kenan Thompson's Grim Reaper guides them past the frights. Then David S. Pumpkins arrives, in the pumpkin suit, with Mikey Day dancing alongside him and a cameo from Bobby Moynihan. It's the same joke it was in 2016: a man who is not scary, insisting that he is the main event. Ten years on, he's still right.
Then James Austin Johnson's Trump shows up and the sketch turns into a midterm message, with Trump listing what he and Pumpkins have in common, including being 'loud, very orange and very annoying.' He compliments Hanks, then hands the 'Live from New York' line to Katie Zacharia, who flubs it. The Omnicosm called the turn lazy; other reviews were kinder.
The Omnicosm has a point. Pumpkins works because he is pure nonsense, and politics is the one thing nonsense can't survive. But YouTube doesn't mind. Hanks is 70 and can still pull four million people into a pumpkin. Most men his age can't get their grandchildren to come for dinner. The moral, I suppose, is that the scariest thing at any party is the guest who turns every conversation back to himself.