The easy read on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live cold open is the one most of the coverage ran with: Colin Jost walked out from behind the Weekend Update desk, put on Pete Hegseth again and flattened him. That is half right. The impression lands. What it no longer does is surprise, because the character has a single engine, and the show keeps handing the end of the sketch to somebody else.

That matters more than a recap lets on. Jost’s Hegseth has become one of the show’s dependable recurring characters going into an election season, and recurring characters live or die on whether they can grow. So far, this one repeats.

The setup, as Rolling Stone laid it out: party consultants, one of them played by Andrew Dismukes, audition messengers for a turnout ad one month out from the midterms. Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio, Jeremy Culhane’s JD Vance and Mikey Day’s Mitch McConnell, in a wheelchair and able to manage only a peace sign, all wash out before Jost’s Hegseth arrives chugging a non-alcoholic beer.

His pitch, quoted by Deadline and Rolling Stone alike: he needs patriots at home “to do the gayest thing ever and vote.” Then comes a slam poem recapping his speech to the troops, a list of everyone he no longer wants in uniform that The Daily Beast quotes as ending on “no weirdos, no beardos, no Jills who became Joes.” Then the sign-off, “In conclusion, vote, I guess,” and a pun about voting by mail being the only “bi male” he is comfortable with.

One engine, every outing

Every one of those laughs is the same laugh. The joke is that the man most loudly policing masculinity cannot stop talking about men. It was the engine when the version of the character that stuck first appeared in the season 51 premiere, a parody of the real Hegseth’s address to assembled military officers in which, per NBC’s own recap, the new “highest male standard” turns out to be the president’s physique. It was the engine in December’s “Pentagon Press Conference” cold open, where Jost’s Hegseth waved off news from “some gay newspaper” and decided that Kelly was “a girl’s name.”

It was even the engine from the anchor’s chair. On Weekend Update in the season 52 premiere, a week before Saturday, Jost reacted to a clip of Hegseth’s Texas A&M address by saying the phrase “sounds like something he repeats to stop himself from having uncomfortable fantasies.” Same writer, same target, same punchline, with and without the wig.

That is the gap in the “Jost humiliates Hegseth” framing. Satire sharpens when it follows its target somewhere new. Across a year of outings, the writers keep returning to one gag.

Upstaged by the president, again

The second pattern is structural. Each time, James Austin Johnson’s Trump takes the sketch away from him. NBC’s write-up of the debut ran under a headline saying Jost’s Hegseth “was upstaged by Trump,” with Johnson interrupting and Jost frozen in the background. December’s cold open also turned on a cut to a sleeping Johnson. This time Deadline argued the sketch earned its extra length “entirely because POTUS came to cook”: Johnson’s Trump announces “I’m President Trump and I approve this ramble” and, per Rolling Stone, pitches a $5,000 promise he insists is not a bribe because he has “no intention of following through.”

None of this makes the casting a mistake. For SNL it is a smart use of talent. Jost has written many of the show’s cold opens but only occasionally appears in them, NBC notes, so the anchor in costume is an event on its own, and The Daily Beast counts the character among the show’s most popular political impressions of last season. It also lets the show carry material across the week: Michael Che’s Weekend Update joke about McConnell flashing reporters a peace sign in the premiere became, seven days later, Day’s McConnell barely managing the same gesture.

Saturday’s show was the second of season 52, hosted by Dakota Johnson for the third time, fresh off the box office start of Verity, with Turnstile making their SNL debut as musical guest, according to Deadline. The premiere aired on September 26. Shane Gillis returns to host for a third time next week, with Rosalía back for her third appearance.

The reviews agree the bit still works, and on this evidence they are right. But a midterm season is long, and a character with one joke has a ceiling. Until the writers hand Hegseth a punchline that is not about men, one of last season’s most popular impressions keeps the same job: warming the stage for the president.

Tags: Dakota Johnson, Saturday Night Live, Colin Jost, James Austin Johnson, Pete Hegseth