Saturday Night Live this weekend featured multi-hyphenate James Franco as host and Nicki Minaj as the musical guest.

‘Saturday Night Live’ Recap

Saturday Night Live’s cold open starred Kenan Thompson as Al Sharpton hosting Politics Nation and discussing the grand jury verdicts in Ferguson and New York. Regarding the stress of it all, he admitted, “I have gained over 100,” but on the bright side, “For the first time in my life, everyone agrees with me.” According to Sharpton’s research, the only way to indict a police officer for killing someone is if the person wasn’t resisting arrest and were white.

James Franco Monologue

Franco’s monologue more or less revolved around Sony’s recent hacking that revealed, among other things, his salary for starring in The Interview. Predictably, his The Interview costar Seth Rogen stopped by and told Franco that their private photos had been leaked as well. Among the images was one of Franco and Rogen posing as John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Peter Pan Live

Peter Pan Live!, which aired on NBC Thursday, was ripe for mockery and SNL ran with it in a sketch that starred Cecily Strong playing Allison Williams playing Pan.  Strong repeatedly mentioned how great it was to play a boy, “a gorgeous boy.” As for Tinkerbell, she was replaced by Aidy Bryant‘s Tonkerbell. James Franco, meanwhile, played Christopher Walken playing Captain Hook.

Star Wars Trailer

Billed as the “Alliance of New and Old Heroes” featured Taran Killam as a deaf and cranky Harrison Ford and  Bobby Moynihan as Carrie Fischer’s Princess Leia. As for James Franco’s Luke Skywalker, he’d configured a few light saber into a new walker.

Jingle Ballerz

Pete Davidson and Rihanna (Sasheer Zamata) hosted Jingle Ballerz with a Hip Hop Nativity. Eminem (Killam), Riff Raff (Franco), Rick Ross (Thompson), Justin Bieber (Kate McKinnon) and Beyonce (Minaj) all turned out to perform. When Jesus is finally presented, it turns out it was Kanye (Jay Pharoah) in the manger.

Grow A Guy

Mike O’Brien returned to the SNL writers room to create the pre-taped Grow-A-Guy sketch that starred him as the victim of some adult bullying about his lack of friends. Eager to show he has other friends, he buys a Grow-A-Guy, who grows into James Franco.  After teaching him how to open a beer can and do a hand shake, he brings him to meet his friends. Apparently, not getting the point of hashtags is the biggest social faux pax, leading one of the pals to realize he’s a Grow-A-Guy. Since Mike was none to pleased with his Grow-A-Guy’s performance, he self-destructed. And all the others followed suit.

Weekend Update

Weekend Update featured a long back and forth between Colin Jost and Michael Che about the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner Case. “Even the jury didn’t want to seem like they were resisting police,” says Jost. Che suggested, “We can play these videos in negative, then the cops will be black.” Other topical shout outs when to the Detroit power outage and the Oprah bomb threat. Bobby Moynihan’s second-hand reporter Anthony Crispino, Leslie Jones and Nicki Minaj as Kim Kardashian also stopped by.

Kid Mayor

Kid mayor poked fun at the phenomena of toddlers being named mayors in small towns. In the sketch, Franco played defeated mayoral candidate Ted Rankin. Among the reasons Ted lists for why he’d make a better mayor are that he only likes Olaf’s scenes in Frozen, stays up later than 7 p.m. and hasn’t crapped his pants all year.

Music

Minaj performed a mashup of “Only” and “All Things Go.”

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