“Had to explain, direct from Domingo.” Saturday Night Live’s most recent viral sensation is Domingo. The character first appeared in a sketch with Ariana Grande when she hosted on October 12, 2024. Portrayed by Marcello Hernández, the character has now appeared twice on the long-running sketch show and, more notably, has taken on another life online.
On October 12th’s SNL, the first sketch after the monologue was simply called “Bridesmaid Speech.” In the sketch, a group of Bridesmaids played by Grande, Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman sing an off-key song about a bachelorette trip at the wedding of their friend, Kelsey, played by Chloe Fineman. The song is a parody of the infectiously catchy Sabrina Carpenter song, “Me Espresso” and is all about how the bride hooked up with a guy named Domingo. After several verses, Domingo (Hernández) comes to the wedding to sing the final part.
The sketch works for a couple of reasons. The way it starts feels very authentic to anyone who has had to sit through a “creative” toast at a wedding. The song is catchy and Grande’s purposely bad singing is absolutely spot on. The heightening of the sketch is also very well done. However, while the sketch is good, the viral response was still impressively large. The official SNL YouTube upload currently has 11 million views making it the most watched (non-Cold Open) sketch of the season on the platform. The sketch even received more views than the Cold Open with guest star Kamala Harris (currently at 10M views.) On TikTok the partial upload of the sketch received over 15.2 Million views and the attached official sound has been used over 4,400 times by TikTok users.
The sketch is on track to be one of the most watched sketches of the season. While last season’s most watched sketch, a Beavis and Butthead parody from Ryan Gosling’s April 13, 2024 episode, had over 16 million views on YouTube, ‘Bridesmaids Speech’ and its star Domingo have become notable for more than just views.
Just over a month after the first “Domingo” sketch SNL revived the character in a sketch called “Babymoon.” The premise is similar, the same set of girls now lead by Charli XCX come out to sing a parody of Chappell Roan’s ‘Hot To Go’ at Kelsey’s baby shower. In it they tell the story of how they went on a trip to Miami to see Domingo because he is the baby’s father.
The second iteration doesn’t capture the same magic as the first, but it harkened back to older seasons of SNL. To more recent SNL audiences, repeating a character so quickly might seem off. However, SNL used to repeat characters often and bring them back for multiple sketches.
In the larger world of sketch comedy, there are a couple of approaches to sketch shows and the schools that teach this type of comedy. While there are far more sketch comedy theaters now, historically, there have been three major theaters in American sketch comedy: Los Angeles’ Groundlings, Chicago’s Second City and New York’s (among other markets) UCB. While there is overlap between some of these schools’ teaching techniques and comic offerings, Groundlings has long been associated with zany characters and character-led sketches. Second City also has an emphasis on character and behavior, while UCB has a focus on teaching “game” aka sketch plot and heightening.
The early days of SNL saw more players from stand-up and The Second City than from other backgrounds. Vulture published a numeric breakdown in 2013 which found that percentages of each of the theaters’ representation had fluctuated over the years. They also found, “Overall, Second City/iO and stand-up have contributed the most cast members to SNL, but that’s only because Lorne Michaels didn’t start pulling heavily from The Groundlings until the mid-’80s and the UCB until the early ‘00s. While nearly a quarter of the show’s total cast members have come from stand-up, the medium’s dominance over SNL is confined to the stand-up boom of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”
It is hard to say if years with fewer Second City grads have fewer recurring characters, but the trend of having recurring characters has felt more absent in recent seasons. There have been some more recent recurring characters like Bill Hader’s Stefon and Pete Davidson’s Chad, but older seasons feel like they have far more. Maybe this isn’t due to pure numbers, but rather the style of recurring characters and how memorable they are.
SNL fans will remember characters like Tim Meadows’ Leon Phelps, Bill Murray’s Nick the Lounge Singer, Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna, Dana Carvey’s The Church Lady and even Land Shark. But even more notably, many SNL characters have further permeated pop culture. Many non-SNL fans will be familiar with The Blues Brothers, Wayne’s World’s Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar or maybe even David S. Pumpkins. This is where Domingo comes back in.
On November 17, 2024, Domingo appeared not on the show but at Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet tour in Los Angeles. Carpenter arrests a fan at every show before she sings her hit song ‘Juno’ and chose Domingo at the Los Angeles show. Hernández, in character as Domingo, ‘quoted’ the original sketch to Carpenter, saying, “Came all the way/Had to explain/Direct from Domingo/Sabrina’s a friend/She’s like my sis/But I would hook up though.”
This signals that Domingo isn’t a one-off character or one that is confined to the show. Time will tell if they revive the character again, but these kinds of viral character moments may be the 2020s answer to the character-driven SNL movies of the 1990s. Both introduce SNL characters to wider audiences and, thus, the cultural reach of the long-running sketch show. Likely, this isn’t the last time we have heard it ‘direct from Domingo.’
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