This year, Saturday Night Live hired the entirety of sketch team Please Don’t Destroy with hopes of replicating the success of The Lonely Island’s viral videos in the 2000s. The hard work of trio Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall appears to be paying off; after a pair of sketches aired in the back third of the show earlier this season, “Three Sad Virgins” went up in the first half hour this week.
The premise is simple: Cool kid Pete Davidson comes into PDD’s office and offers to shoot a music video with them; he calls them “the boys” and the trio practically melt with pride. They’re thrilled… until they discover the refrain of the song. We see the video with a shirtless Davidson rapping about his enviable life — court-side seats, paparazzi, celebrity friends — and then the boys find themselves labeled, in a smoothly R&B way, as three sad virgins.
They stop the video shoot to confirm that the song isn’t about them, and they’re assured it’s not. They’re just playing characters — except that the next line calls them out by name, and it devolves from there. Unflattering associations are made with their appearance (including, weirdly, the second mention of Big Bird’s feathers falling out this episode), Marshall is forced into pigtails and a dress, medical conditions are revealed (“That was my real doctor!” laments Herlihy).
Taylor Swift appears in the clip’s final minute to perform the track’s bridge, lampooning the guys for their individual shortcomings. Marshall looks like “a sad Ron Weasley, he looks like if Big Bird lost all his feathers,” she roasts. The singer then takes aim at Herlihy, crooning that he has “the charm and sex appeal of a scarecrow.” (Watch the full video embedded above.)
Elsewhere in the episode, Ted Cruz and Joe Rogan checked in on Sesame Street‘s vaxxed Big Bird, while Swift performed the full, 10-minute version of “All Too Well.”
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