Remember your lines and don’t start laughing. Those are probably the two most straight-ahead, common sense pieces of advice celebrities get before appearing on Saturday Night Live. They sound easy enough, but when those lights come on in Studio 8H, it’s not always so easy. Lin-Manuel Miranda found that out last night, as the Hamilton star made a fun cameo in a Founding Fathers cold open sketch starring President Trump, and by the end, he was fighting for his life not to start laughing.
The basic premise of the sketch in question is about how the Founding Fathers set up the government in such a way that we’d never have a king. After about a minute of background and John Hancock bragging about how big his signature is on The Declaration Of Independence, Miranda appears from the back as Alexander Hamilton and starts to go into a musical performance when suddenly James Austin Johnson shows up with his fantastic President Trump impression and starts bragging about how he’s in his “King era.”
Everyone else freezes in the background while Trump is doing his thing, but near the end, he approaches Miranda, who is supposed to be frozen, and starts talking about how the audience is never gonna get to hear his rap, even though they would have eaten it up. He says he’s in “sniffing distance of an EGOT” and then starts riffing on his name, calling him Laura Linney and Lin-Manuel Miranda Cosgrove.
Each time, Miranda starts smirking and looking like he’s about to laugh, which he later seemed to confirm by reposting an Instagram story about how close he was to laughing. Fortunately, he never totally breaks. You can watch the magic below, which ends with Miranda emerging from the shadows to help with the Live From New York bit…
It might sound like I’m giving Lin-Manuel Miranda a hard time with this article, but I want to make it clear, I absolutely am not. You can tell he’s spent a lot of time doing live theater because he’s able to keep it together. Typically, Hollywood actors who are used to filming have a much harder time if they want to laugh or break character because they’re used to just being able to do another take. If you’re on Broadway or even off-Broadway and you start to lose it, there’s no calling cut. You need to figure out how to power through and get back in character, which he very clearly does here.
Shoutout to James Austin Johnson for almost getting him though. SNL fans talk a lot about the cast members who have had trouble keeping a straight face during sketches over the years. Jimmy Fallon is definitely the most talked about example of that, but there are also a few Not Ready For Primetime Players who have been particularly good at getting other people to break including Amy Poehler and Kate McKinnon who almost seemed to relish getting other people to lose it. They’d push in just a little bit harder when they saw someone about to break, as Johnson seems to do here when he just keeps going with the nicknames.
Fortunately, Miranda will likely have more chances to appear on SNL again. The mega-star has hosted SNL before and including last night, has cameoed an additional three times. It helps that he works in New York and is always willing to mobilize on short notice, as we saw last night, as showrunner Lorne Michaels apparently didn't even ask him until Friday night. Hopefully he gets another crack at hosting at some point. Maybe it'll even be later this season as all the upcoming hosts haven’t been announced yet. Fingers crossed they actually let him finish a song next time.
