Will Ferrell’s SNL monologue hijacked by Chad Smith, Paul McCartney joins in

Will Ferrell’s return to Saturday Night Live became a live-event stunt built for instant sharing, as Chad Smith, the Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer who has shadowed Ferrell in celebrity lookalike lore for years, opened the monologue before Ferrell cut back in and took over. Paul McCartney then surfaced as an audience questioner, turning the Season 51 finale into a tightly staged collision of nostalgia, self-aware celebrity comedy and surprise cameos.

The episode aired May 16, 2026 from Studio 8H in New York City, and it marked Ferrell’s sixth time hosting the show. The monologue leaned directly into the long-running resemblance gag between Ferrell and Smith, a joke that had circulated publicly for years before SNL used it as a centerpiece. Smith did not just appear for the monologue. He later returned to play drums for McCartney, extending the bit beyond the opening minutes and giving the finale a second layer of callback comedy.

The punchline had a clear history. Ferrell and Smith staged a drum-off on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on May 22, 2014, a charity stunt tied to Cancer for College, which awards scholarships to cancer survivors. That earlier appearance helped formalize the pair’s resemblance into a recurring public joke, and SNL used the finale to cash in on that memory with a bigger platform and a bigger guest list. In a fragmented media landscape, the joke worked because the audience already knew the setup.

Ferrell’s monologue was only one piece of a finale that kept reaching for high-recognition spectacle. In the cold open, Ferrell played the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein, a sharper, more topical turn that gave the episode an entirely different register before the monologue shifted into comedy nostalgia. Molly Shannon also returned for a cameo, adding another familiar SNL face to a night built around legacy and repetition.

McCartney’s presence widened the effect further. As the musical guest, he performed as part of an episode that also featured the surprise audience exchange inside the monologue and his later songs, including a third performance that helped make the finale feel more like a live pop-culture crossover than a standard host-guest episode. The result was classic SNL strategy: turn old lore into a fresh live moment, then let millions of viewers do the rest.