Saturday Night Live’s (SNL) latest cold open on Oct. 18 featured the fourth installment of “Domingo,” a series of sketches involving a woman named Kelsey repeatedly cheating on her husband with a man named Domingo, but the Internet is over the once-loved sketch.
The first sketch featuring Domingo, “Bridesmaid Speech,” debuted nearly a year ago on Oct. 13, 2024. At 20 million views, it’s far from SNL’s most popular sketch, but it is among the most popular SNL sketches in recent history. It broke the containment of the usual SNL crowd, with Marcello Hernandez attending a Sabrina Carpenter concert in-character as Domingo.
“Bridesmaid Speech” was later followed by “Babymoon” and “Vow Renewal,” the latter of which was a part of SNL’s 50th season and marked the return of multiple SNL alumni.
The format of a Domingo sketch is as follows: Kelsey (Chloe Fineman) and Matthew (Andrew Dismukes) are celebrating some sort of event, like a bridal shower or a baby shower, when Kelsey’s friends (Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim, and Sarah Sherman) appear with the sketch’s celebrity guest of the week, who is a never-before-mentioned close friend of Kelsey. They poorly sing a parody of a pop song, where the lyrics inform Matthew that Kelsey has cheated on him with Domingo. Domingo himself shows up at the end to join in the song.
The Domingo sketches have had an element of metahumour regarding the song choices. For example, the song’s parodies are rarely songs actually sung by the celebrity guest. “Bridesmaid Speech” featured Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Espresso.” “Babymoon” featured Charli XCX and Chappell Roan’s song “Hot to Go!” Carpenter herself makes an appearance in “Vow Renewal.”
“Domingo Cold Open” follows this formula to almost a T. Carpenter, the celebrity guest, joins Kelsey’s friends to poorly sing parodies of “The Fate Ophelia,” “Abracadabra,” and “Ordinary” as they reveal yet another affair Kelsey has had with Domingo, with the man himself appearing at the end. Response online has been rather lukewarm and outright negative, with people criticizing the quality of the sketch and remarking that it’s been milked dry. But what led to this response, if the sketch is still following its own formula?
The answer lies with the previous final sketch, “Vow Renewal.” Though the sketch followed the formula, it still differed from its predecessors. The first part of the sketch follows the formula almost perfectly, but with an added twist. Because it aired as a part of the “Saturday Night Live: 50th Anniversary Special,” this sketch included many SNL alumni, including Martin Short and Molly Shannon as Kelsey’s parents.
Additionally, after Kelsey’s friends finish their performance, the sketch turns its own joke (and formula) in on itself when a group of Matthew’s friends, played by current cast members Bowen Yang, Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, and led by SNL veteran Andy Samberg, poorly sing another parody to the tune of “Espresso,” revealing that Matthew has had affair with Domingo’s brother, Rinaldo (Pedro Pascal).
The writing of “Vow Renewal” contains many components of good comedy, including the rule of three and the callback. The rule of three is not limited to comedy writing and posits that a group of three is more effective and satisfying than other numbers. It’s why so many book series and movie series end up as trilogies. This concept of the rule of three is baked into the very foundation of “Vow Renewal,” as it is the third sketch in the Domingo continuity. It is the first Domingo sketch to use three songs, those being “Defying Gravity,” “You Belong With Me,” and “Espresso.” This sketch features three affairs: Kelsey’s with Domingo, Matthew’s with Rinaldo, and one between Kelsey’s mother and Domingo’s third brother, Santiago (Bad Bunny). Santiago himself is another example of the comedic rule of three.
“Vow Renewal” also utilized many callbacks throughout the script. The callback is a form of comedy where the joke references and often builds on a different joke in the same set, or continuity when it’s used outside of stand-up. “Vow Renewal” uses the call-back in several ways with this sketch by incorporating Sabrina Carpenter, the original singer of the first song the series parodied, in their finale. They also call-back to the original sketch by reperforming it with the genders flipped.
But the main problem with “Domingo Cold Open” is not that it breaks the rule of three; it ties back to another component of what made “Vow Renewal” feel like an ending: the way it escalated its jokes. It was the most ambitious Domingo sketch, containing not one, but six celebrity guests: Martin Short, Molly Shannon, Sabrina Carpenter, Andy Samberg, Pedro Pascal, and Bad Bunny.
It also packed in so many jokes that could have possibly been their own sketches in the Domingo series: the original singer of the first song parodied on the show appearing as the celebrity guest, the gender-flipped friends of the group poorly singing a parody, Matthew having an affair instead of Kelsey, Kelsey’s parents having a similar functionally-dysfunctional relationship to hers.
What’s left to escalate to? Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga as Kelsey’s aunts? Chappell Roan as her college roommate? And after the sheer volume of jokes included in “Vow Renewal,” anything less than that was bound to be underwhelming. Besides, there’s only so many times Matthew can forgive Kelsey’s repeated cheating before it stops being humorous. Once you’re taken out of the joke, you start to wonder why this couple is even staying together. Comedy dies when that suspension of disbelief snaps.
The way “Vow Renewal” packed so many potential Domingo plotlines into one sketch could be analyzed as a detriment to the sketch, and indeed, some people were over Domingo even then. But it still works because it aired during one of the biggest SNL events in the show’s history. When else would you pack six celebrity guests and the most popular riffs on the original joke besides the 50th anniversary special? An important component of comedy is timing, delivering the joke at the right time. The 50th anniversary special was the perfect time to air “Vow Renewal” and give the “Domingo” series a conclusion.
SNL is no stranger to long-running series of sketches in their programming, so it’s not surprising that they still put out “Domingo Cold Open” after “Vow Renewal.” Still, that doesn’t take away the elements of “Vow Renewal” that marked it as the end of the Domingo era, and fans are now tired of that plotline.