The cast of Saturday Night Live isn’t ready to forget about Morgan Wallen’s set walk-off anytime soon, mentioning the moment in two separate sketches on Saturday, April 5.
During “Weekend Update,” anchor Colin Jost playfully jabbed Wallen’s exit while discussing the plummeting stock market.
“This was the worst week for the stock market since the summer of 2020,” Jost, 42, set up his joke. “But you have to remember, back then, the president was also [Donald] Trump. Just in the past two days, investors have lost over $6 trillion.”
He continued, “Money is leaving the stock market faster than Morgan Wallen at ‘Goodnights.’”
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Wallen, 31, was the musical guest on the March 29 episode of SNL, where he now-infamously walked off the stage as the end credits rolled. The rest of the cast, including host Mikey Madison, were still on the stage, congratulating one another on the end of the episode.
Within hours, the country singer took to his Instagram Stories and wrote, “Get me to God’s country,” along with a snap of his private jet. Wallen has not further addressed the incident aside from selling merchandise with the same phrase.
Wallen’s “God’s country” line also inspired a joke in Saturday’s cold open.
“McDonald Island? I’d love to visit there,” James Austin Johnson, impersonating Trump, joked in the opening skit. “Can you imagine that? A Big Mac and a hula skirt? Ooh la la! … I want to go to there. Get me to God’s country, right?”
One of the writers on SNL, Josh Patten, previously made a similar joke about “God’s country” and quoted the phrase in a March 30 Instagram Story pic of a Krispy Kreme’s donut truck in New York City.
Longtime cast member Kenan Thompson, meanwhile, had a potential explanation for Wallen’s hasty departure.
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“I don’t know what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that. I don’t know if he understood the assignment or not, or if he was really feeling a certain kind of way,” Thompson told Entertainment Weekly last week. “You see somebody before you get a chance to say hi or say good job or anything like that, they just dipping. I thought maybe he had to go to the potty or something.”
He added, “It’s definitely a spike in the norm. We’re so used to everybody just turning around and high-fiving us, everybody’s saying, ‘Good job, good job, good job.’ So when there’s a departure from that, it’s like, hmm, I wonder what that’s about?”
While Wallen has not confirmed why he left SNL early, he does have a complicated relationship with the spotlight.
“It’s still weird, and there’s parts of [fame] that I don’t like,” Wallen admitted on the Wednesday, April 2, episode of the “Last Weekend” podcast. “I think anybody who has to deal with that … it’s not ideal. It’s not ideal to go everywhere, and even if you don’t get bothered, you were on edge the whole time because you thought you might. There’s things that you just don’t do. There’s just things you don’t do anymore.
Saturday Night Live airs on NBC Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET.
