Aidy Bryant Is SNL's New Queen of Comedy Songs

It's often tough to demarcate "eras" of Saturday Night Live given the way the cast turns over at irregular intervals, but the 2012 season was clearly an important one for the show's most recent incarnation. The preceding season saw Kate McKinnon join mid-season, and then, in the fall, both Cecily Strong and Aidy Bryant joined the cast. The three women have been pillars of the show basically ever since, yet all this time we've felt the impulse to call Aidy Bryant "underrated" — even as she got more and more sketches, and even when she got her own show (Shrill on Hulu).

This feeling reached a crescendo back in March when I first encountered Bryant's "Overnight Salad" sketch on SNL's YouTube channel:

I've spent the better part of the last ten months with this song rattling around in my brain. It helps that it has the kind of shopping-list patter that makes it easy to pick off everything you encounter as if it were an ingredient for Nadine's increasingly nauseating overnight salad. But the real credit goes to Bryant's enthusiastically unhinged performance. It's the kind of thing she's been doing throughout her SNL career: a commitment to playing characters who hide their lunacy just below the surface. It's also a testament to the fact that there's no one around who can deliver a comedy song like Bryant can.

The Aidy Bryant Comedy Song has been happening since pretty much the beginning. "Do It On My Twin Bed" came in Bryant's second season, a Pussycat Dolls-type jam about the indignities of bringing your boyfriend home for the holidays and trying to have sex in your childhood bedroom. The number featured the whole female cast at the time — McKinnon, Strong, Vanessa Bayer, Nasim Pedrad, and Noel Wells — but made a point of singling out "Lil' Baby Aidy." Two years later, "Back Home Ballers" was a sequel of sorts, with Bryant's parents' friend Jean as a kind of connecting character.

Those two numbers, plus "Dongs All Over the World" with Anna Kendrick in 2014, were all under that similar Nasty Girls umbrella, which made it feel more like a recurring sketch (much like Bryant's dearly departed Girlfriends Talk Show). They were a fun niche for Bryant and the other female cast members, but they were all in the same box. Then Bryant started branching out, joining McKinnon in other genres like country ("The Wishin' Boot") and contemporary Christian ("The Christmas Candle").

Over the years, Bryant has proven herself to be the MVP of these numbers through a combination of attitude and a perfect ear for the genre she's going for. Clearly that's a reputation that the show has been cultivating, since they've given her backstage segments with both Cardi B and Lizzo:

At the moment, Aidy Bryant stands atop a hill that's been building since the early days of SNL. The digital shorts era and Andy Samberg's Lonely Island songs put these interludes at the forefront of what people were tuning into the show for, but the comedy song itself goes all the way back to the show's earliiest years. Am I claiming Gilda Radner's "Jewess Jeans" and Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn's Sweeney Sisters as the founding fathers of the America that Aidy Bryant now rules with pride? Yes, I am.

Aidy Bryant's reign as SNL's song queen now bounces around genres with ease, from the Nasty Girls ("First Got Horny"; "Crucible Cast Party") to puppy loving with Harry Styles. Each one both hilarious and earworm-y at once. All of them as layered, complex, and bizarre as that overnight salad.

Saturday Night Live returns with a new live episode this Saturday January 30 at 11:30 PM ET / 8:30 PM PT

People are talking about SNL in our forums. Join the conversation.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.