Paul Simon’s ‘SNL50’ Duet With Sabrina Carpenter Led to a Lot of ‘Hot Garfunkel’ Jokes
While regular Saturday Night Live viewers may have been expecting the SNL50 special to kick off with an overlong cold open starring cast members and A-list celebrities as vaguely recognizable political figures, instead the show went a different route.
The 50th anniversary celebration began with Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter duetting on Simon’s “Homeward Bound,” which, as Simon reminded the audience, he once played on SNL with George Harrison in 1976. “I was not born then. And neither were my parents,” Carpenter joked.
Simon opening the show makes a lot of sense, considering that he’s longtime friends with Lorne Michaels, and has been a fixture of SNL since the very beginning. In fact, he came close to hosting the very first episode. Instead, he helmed the second show, while George Carlin starred in the series premiere.
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“Lorne said, ‘No, let me work out the kinks on the first show,’” Simon revealed in Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live. “But I would have been happy to do the first show. It would have been more historical.”
Sabrina Carpenter, on the other hand, isn’t quite an SNL regular, having appeared in just one episode last year. But she did, indirectly, contribute to one of the show’s biggest sketches in recent history. Her hit “Espresso” was reworked/ruined for the wildly viral “Domingo” sketch, which is why Carpenter was incorporated into the increasingly convoluted Domingo-verse during one SNL50 sketch.
Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter may have seemed like an odd pairing, but at least it gave us a whole lot of Garfunkel memes. Several viewers who tuned into SNL50 then posted about how Simon is looking his age, while his taller, blonder partner, Art Garfunkel, is looking younger and hotter than ever before.
Some audience members joked that this clip was clearly evidence that Garfunkel had taken The Substance. Come to think of it, has anyone ever seen Carpenter and Garfunkel in the same room together? For all we know, the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” singer really is lying unconscious on the bathroom floor every time Carpenter performs.
All kidding aside, is it possible that Michaels tried to get Garfunkel to perform with his old partner for the show, then had to settle for one of music’s biggest superstars in his place? After all, Michaels produced Simon and Garfunkel’s iconic “Concert in Central Park” reunion during his hiatus from SNL.
Probably not. The Simon-Carpenter duo seemed conspicuously designed to appeal to both Gen Z and confused Boomers who were just trying to find the channel playing the Matlock reboot.
