Harry Styles Returns to SNL Stage March 14 After 2019 ‘Joan Song’ Sketch With Aidy Bryant
Harry Styles will show up on Saturday Night Live on March 14. He’ll both host and perform. The singer was last seen on SNL back in November 2019, starring in…
Harry Styles will show up on Saturday Night Live on March 14. He'll both host and perform. The singer was last seen on SNL back in November 2019, starring in the "Joan Song" sketch alongside Aidy Bryant.
That 2019 pretape had Bryant playing Joan, a woman who was dumped by her boyfriend, Steve, played by Kyle Mooney. Joan doesn't have friends except for Doug, her Chihuahua. The sketch shows Styles crawling around on the floor, munching trash, and hiding from a vacuum cleaner while pretending to be Doug.
"Joan, I love you," Harry Styles sings as Doug. "I love the way you feed me ham / You're my life, my love, my everything / I love you just the way you am."
Bryant came up with this idea one night, thinking about her own dog. She grabbed her phone, recorded herself improvising the tune, then brought it to SNL writer Anna Drezen.
"I literally was lying in bed, and I was thinking about my dog, and I was like, 'I love him,'" Bryant told Backstage. "And then I recorded it, just improvising. And it's pretty close, at least most of it."
Bryant nearly abandoned the whole thing. She figured it was too weird. Would Styles really want to crawl around like a Chihuahua on national television?
"That's a good example of something that I think in my first couple years I would've been like, that's too crazy; Harry Styles wouldn't want to do that — self-editing before I could ever even try," she told Backstage. "And that was something where I was just like, 'Let's at least put it to table.' Then when we got into shooting it, it was so joyful, because everyone was like, 'This is so bizarre,' and you're feeding fake ham to Harry Styles...I just felt like everyone was having fun, and that was the best feeling."
Bryant told Ellen DeGeneres in a 2020 interview that the musician had no problem with the unusual demands of the bit. "He was down for all of it," she said. "He is the best."
The sketch became one of Bryant's favorites from her time on the show. "It was a living dream," she told DeGeneres. "And I will never get over it."
