Last night’s episode of Saturday evening livethe comedy juggernaut’s 50th season premiere kicked off with a battle of vibes. The long, cold open ping-ponged between campaign rallies for the two leading presidential candidates, with Vice President Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph) taking her turn first. “Well, well, well. Look who fell out of that coconut tree,” Rudolph said at the top of her speech, referencing the viral meme that supported Harris’ candidacy after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race in July. The actor continued with a nod to the comedic persona she first developed for the politician half a decade ago. “Your nice aunt is back,” Rudolph said. “The ‘fun’ has restarted. 2 Funny 2 Furious.”

When Harris was best known as Biden’s 2020 running mate, Rudolph’s decision to play the politician — a former prosecutor — as a free spirit opened up an unexpected dimension to her character. By now SNL viewers are familiar with the “fun” antics, in part because Harris herself has leaned into them. Rudolph’s latest portrayal of the VP acknowledged Harris’ newfound prominence on the political and cultural stage, and the shift in the way many Americans now seem to see her — and want to see more of. “My campaign is like the song Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter,” Rudolph’s Harris said early in the skit. “The lyrics are vague, but the atmosphere is striking.”

Harris’ speech was the first of many moments when SNL highlighted the strangeness of the current political climate, in which intangible “vibes” are perhaps the most valuable currency. During its premiere, the show did point out some concrete policy differences between its political characters — Rudolph’s Harris prefaced her “Espresso” joke with reassurance that she would protect reproductive rights — but more time was spent portraying their contrasting behaviors . “If we win together, we can put an end to the drama. And the trauma drawer,” Harris promised. “And relax in our pajamas.” Meanwhile, the show portrayed former President Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, as seemingly more animated by racial resentment than a desire for peace or specific plans for the country. “They say me blaming Democrats for inciting violence is the pot calling the kettle black,” he said at his rally, calling out Trump’s obsession with Harris’ racial background ( and his apparent inability to understand that biracial people exist). “But to be honest, I didn’t know the kettle was black until recently. I thought the kettle was Indian, but then it decided to go black.

SNL‘s mood-based satire extended to the treatment of the vice presidential candidates. In his debut as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, guest star Jim Gaffigan played up a rhetorical slogan that Walz popularized over the summer. “Trump and Vance are weird, okay? They want the government to monitor what you do in your bedroom and what books you read,” he said, as Rudolph’s Harris nodded behind him. Gaffigan infused Walz’s signature seriousness with a rawer, high energy, otherwise leaning into the governor’s folksy attitude rather than undermining it: “In Minnesota we have a saying: Mind your damn business. We also have another saying in Minnesota: My nuts froze on the park bench.” Unlike Rudolph’s Harris who happily ceded the floor to her VP pick, Johnson’s Trump more reluctantly called his running mate, JD Vance (played by an amusingly cast Bowen Yang). SNL framed the Republican gathering as bland compared to the Democrats’ (almost) hip soiree, a choice the show also underscored in a later sketch led by Yang.

On “The Talk Talk Show With Charli XCX,” Yang played the British pop singer whose early endorsement of Harris helped the vice president gain meme-driven popularity among younger voters. In the retro-style sketch, in which Sarah Sherman played Australian musician Troye Sivan, Yang’s Charli CNN news anchor Kaitlan Collins (Chloe Fineman) and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (Ego Nwodim). Instead of taking advantage of her access to one of Washington’s most recognizable political journalists, Yang’s Charli XCX asked all her tough questions to Smart’s Bartsch, skipping Fineman’s Collins. And she largely used her time at Nwodim’s Crockett to search for potential discourse bait. “I have a song on my album called ‘Mean Girls,’ and you went viral this summer because of what you called Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Yang’s Charli said, referring to a verbal altercation between the two politicians during a House committee meeting Delegates in May. “I want to hear you talk about everything, so this is ‘Jasmine Crockett’s Mean-Girl Cam.'” The segment tasked Crockett with delivering blistering political commentary in a snappy, quotable way. When asked about gerrymandering, she called it a “crazy, crooked bitch.” Something, Crockett suggested, just feels wrong about it: “Why is that county shaped like a tapeworm wearing a hat?”

“Weekend Update” best captured the show’s approach to satirizing our current moment: mood-driven, with doses of sharper insight when convenient. Yang took the spotlight as he channeled a figure who has become surprisingly relevant to political conversations. Appearing as the viral pygmy hippo Moo Deng, Yang played his character as an overwhelmed young star in the vein of pop musician Chappell Roan, who has publicly struggled with the weight of fame in recent months. Roan’s concerns stem in part from the way both her avid fans and commentators from across the political spectrum have responded to recent videos in which she has expressed reservations about supporting Harris. Yang’s irritated, Roan-coded Moo Deng was in stark contrast to Devon Walker’s swaggering portrayal of New York’s embattled mayor, Eric Adams. Where Moo Deng begged for privacy and emphasized her youth, SNL‘s Adams stopped by “Weekend Update” to brag that he was the “first mayor to leave the office and go to the VIP section of nightclubs.” Part of what got the mayor in hot water, the segment suggested, is his obsession with “bringing swagger back to the city.” The most damning thing Walker’s Adams says begins as a positive self-evaluation: “What was once a swagless mess is now a swag tropolis.” After a while, he added that his tenure has also left New York “with significantly more crime than before.” It turns out that vibrations are not Actually everything. SNLsometimes seemed to realize that. Politicians should probably do the same.