John Mulaney Receives Notes From ‘Bob Dylan’ in ‘Saturday Night Live’ Promo

Saturday Night Live episode promos are often about 20 seconds in length and feature little more than the host, the musical guest, a cast member or two, and a very lame joke that fades from memory about 12 seconds after you hear it, at best. But leave it to John Mulaney to put together a nearly two-minute promo that’s funnier than just about anything that’s aired on the actual show this season, as much as we’ve enjoyed Dana Carvey’s brilliant Joe Biden impersonation.

It begins with Mulaney reading from a cue card. “Last week I was in Luxembourg, where I ran into music producer Shooter Jennings at one of the country’s many castles,” he reads. “I told him how much I enjoyed the song ‘Chip Away’ by Duff McKagan.” That is indeed a real Duff McKagan/Shooter Jennings song from 2019, but it remained highly obscure until Bob Dylan praised it in a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It has profound meaning for me,” he said. “It’s a great song.”

Mulaney turns to meet the SNL staffer that wrote up such a bizarre promo, and sees that it’s indeed Bob Dylan, played by James Austin Johnson. When Mulaney asks him for more appropriate text, he comes back with, “It’s great to be back in the Big Apple, Herman Melville was born here, author of Moby Dick. That’s the ultimate fish story if you ask me.” (This was taken in part from Dylan’s onstage dialogue at the Beacon Theater in 2021.)
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Johnston is a longtime Bob Dylan fan with an incredible ability to mimic his singing styles from different eras of the Sixties and Seventies. But this is the first time we’ve witnessed him impersonate Theme Time Radio Hour-era Dylan circa 2007. It’s absolutely perfect, down to the tiniest elements of his speech pattern, and wardrobe. Let’s hope they find a way to work this character into the show at some point.

The real Bob Dylan, meanwhile, is continuing to post messages on X. “Nick Newman had replied to a tweet a few weeks back asking me what movies I would recommend,” he wrote on Wednesday afternoon. “I told him to try The Unknown with Lon Chaney and go from there.” For you non-cinephiles, he’s talking about a 1927 silent horror film starring Chaney as a knife thrower at a carnival. It’s the exact kind of movie Dylan loves, and further evidence that he’s writing these X posts himself.