On this week’s Saturday Night Live, Emma Stone was presented with her five-timers club velvet smoking jacket during her monologue. She’s just the sixth woman to achieve the full handshake of hosting honors, joining the fine company of Drew Barrymore, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson, Candice Bergen, and Tina Fey. The latter two flanked Stone at the top of the show, welcoming the 35-year-old into their illustrious ranks. Bergen boasted of first creating the women’s section of the five-timers club: “It’s got everything. Showers, a locker room, a big portrait with the eyes cut out so Martin Short can peek in.” Stone didn’t get much of a chance to tell jokes, but she did get in one zinger about meeting her husband and father of her child on one of her earlier SNL gigs. Asking the camera operator to cut to a shot of her camera-shy guy, we were treated not to an image of her comedy writer beau Dave McNary but a bashful-looking Lorne Michaels. 

If we as a culture must endure spectacles like Sarah Palin and George Santos, at least we have SNL’s finest snapping into their batshit buttons. Just as Fey’s embodiment of Palin made the vice-presidential nominee’s crass rip through history almost worthwhile, one hates to lose Bowen Yang’s take on the recently booted congressman/forever carnie. 

In the cold open, Yang’s Santos complained of reporters “bullying me just because I’m a proud gay thief” and that “America hates to see a Latina queen winning.” With an extravagant toss of his cape, Yang moved to a piano looking like a cross between Liberace and R.L. Stine’s Slappy the Dummy. “It seems to me like I lived my life like a scandal in the wind,” he crooned. Put it on the man’s tombstone: “It was filler, slut.”

The musical numbers kept coming. A sketch opened with Yang in New York, looking seasonally depressed. Stone was having just as rough a go. Their slump was going to take more than an egg and cheese and an increased dose of Lexapro to fix. The cure for their Big Apple blues was a naked ride on the back of a garbage truck with their bits blurred out. Chloe Troast and Marcello Hernandez opted to work construction in the buff. Chloe Fineman, Andrew Dismukes (always surprised by the thatch of chest hair on this guy), Punkie Johnson, and Sarah Sherman self-soothed by baring their all. Even Lady Liberty understood the allure of having her “big fat ass flapping in the breeze.” Dumb; well done.

Stone had one truly extraordinary sketch. She played a manager with a long game for impressive belter Troast’s Mama Cass who was recording a new Mamas and Papas track. Clad in a car salesman’s '70s business suit and a curly mop of hair, Stone’s manager promised that her song would pay monster dividends decades later in film soundtracks. The gusto with which Stone then threw herself into imagining future scenes in which she used a saxophone as a shotgun to murder zombies, then a flute for her weary sex worker to slice and dice her foes, before finally clawing herself out of a grave in a pitch about Joan of Arc’s resurrection is Emmy-nomination-reel-worthy.

Noah Kahan, the much-played hero troubadour of college town radio stations, was the very enthusiastic musical guest. This good, grateful Vermont singer-songwriter looked ecstatic to be called up to the show and he and his American Spirits-vibe band brought a winning energy to “Dial Drunk.” “I’ll die for you SNL,” Kahan ad-libbed his lyrics at one point, “or at least seriously injure myself.” It was both cheesy and dear. And his voice sounded even better and more relaxed with “Stick Season.” Kahan has a great honest, homespun appeal and mandolin-heavy songs that go dowe easy and uncomplicated. He could be this generation’s Dave Matthews.

In Weekend Update, Michael Longfellow arrived with a commentary on vaping dressed up as an old-fashioned cigarette. There’s a vaguely sinister quality to Longfellow that’s interesting, especially when smoke is pluming out of his ember of a head and he’s waving his cigarette’s enormous white puffy hands around. “You ever see a kid vape?” he groaned. “They don’t even do it with confidence, blowing it down their little shirts. Dorks.”

Usually the last sketch is trash, but damn I laughed watching the women of SNL splash cola on their face in the Diet Coke by Olay ad. “I liked my old facial cleanser, but I hated the calories,” said Heidi Gardner. A round of Diet Coke Olay shots for all the female five-timers; keep some on ice in the locker room for the many more—one hopes—to come.