Colman Domingo made his “Saturday Night Live” hosting debut Saturday night — and if you’re not sure where you know him from, he’s got a few guesses. Probably several.
Kicking off his monologue, Domingo acknowledged that after three decades in the business, his resume can be a little hard to pin down. The answer to where you’ve seen him, he suggested, is basically everywhere — rattling off credits including “Fear the Walking Dead,” “Sing Sing,” “The Four Seasons,” “Lincoln” — and then a few he did not appear in.
“I was Carly in ‘iCarly.’ I was inside the C-3PO suit in ‘Star Wars.’ And I am also your uncle.” He pauses. “You saw me at your cousin’s wedding in 1994.” The point, he said: “I’m practically in everything — like raisins at a Caucasian cookout.”
He added that he can usually tell which project someone knows him from. “If you’re a Latin bro, I’m like, oh, ‘Fear the Walking Dead.’ But if it’s a girl under 20 or a creepy dude over 30, that’s ‘Euphoria.’”
With the credentials established, Domingo pivoted to his actual agenda for the evening: vibes. Specifically, the kind he said he serves when you come to his house. “Tonight, I’m going to make you feel like you’re at my house,” he said — then proceeded to direct the entire production toward that end.
He called for music and lighting “that’s extremely flattering for people of color.” Once satisfied he turned to the cameras and issued his next directive: “Can I get a sexy slow push on this?” Then he quipped, “Also, I’m 56 — so boom up the hell up.”
Cast member Jeremy Culhane, summoned into the monologue, was directed to gaze into the camera. What followed was a wide-eyed stare into the wrong camera that, once the crew found the right angle, devolved into an unsettling mog.
Domingo then took to the audience, working the crowd with the ease of someone who has, in fact, been doing this since the ’90s. When he asked one woman what brought her to the show, she said she’d gotten tickets from someone who worked there. “Inside connection,” Domingo said approvingly. “That’s hot.” He asked if it was someone in the cast. “No,” she said. “It was a writer.” Domingo turned back to the audience jokingly disappointed. “Don’t tell people that.”
By the end, the vibe had apparently gotten away from him slightly — a couple in the audience was making out. “They’re straight,” Domingo joked. “You don’t see that every day.”
He wrapped things up the way he said he always ends a party at his place: by telling everyone to get out so he could take a fiber pull and go to bed — but not tonight. “We’ve got a show to do, so boom up!”
Watch Domingo’s monologue below.
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