Culture 3 min read By Trevor Kendall
Tom Hanks returns as David S. Pumpkins in Halloween ‘SNL’ opener
Tom Hanks revived his David S. Pumpkins character on Saturday Night Live’s Halloween episode, and a cold open skewering Donald Trump’s midterm anxieties soon took over the sketch.
Tom Hanks returned to Saturday Night Live on Halloween night as his lounge-singing character David S. Pumpkins, but the sketch was quickly overtaken by a cold open in which James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump urged supporters to head off a possible drubbing in the midterm elections. «The midterms are on Tuesday, and the polls say we’re doing very badly,» Johnson’s Trump said, setting up a segment that moved from campaign anxiety to a haunted-ride parody.
The Pumpkins sketch was a Halloween-themed opener built around a haunted ride, a format that recalled Hanks’s two earlier appearances as the character. Pumpkins has become a cult figure since his first turn on the show, and Hanks’s return gave the episode a nostalgic hook. Even so, the political material ended up dominating the opening and set the tone for the rest of the cold open, with the Halloween premise serving as the frame for the president’s stump-style remarks rather than the other way around.
The cold open also took aim at the president’s increasingly unusual comments on the campaign trail and his recurring fixation on men’s physiques, the same areas of his public speaking that drew comment across the political press that week. Saidah Belo-Osagie appeared as Nicki Minaj in a spoof of the rapper’s public support for Trump, adding a celebrity impression to a sketch that combined character comedy with pointed political satire. The mix reflected the show’s broader approach during the current election cycle, in which impressions of political figures have frequently shared airtime with cameo appearances and genre parody.
Coverage from several outlets focused on the same contrast: a beloved, comparatively gentle comic return that was pushed aside by a louder, more pointed political bit. Variety described the cold open as a skewering of the president’s increasingly bizarre remarks and his fixation on men’s physiques, while Consequence framed the episode as a comeback that had been, in its words, hijacked by another very loud, very orange, and considerably less entertaining character. That framing underlined how quickly the political segment became the center of the discussion around the broadcast.
The Halloween theme gave the writers room to combine both threads in a single opener, and the result was an episode whose most-discussed moment was not Hanks’s return but the Trump impression that followed it. For a sketch built around a character with a long-running cult following, the interruption became the story, a reminder of how often the program’s biggest moments now come from political satire rather than its recurring characters.
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