Saturday Night Live's David S. Pumpkins return: what Trump admitted in the middle of Tom Hanks's sketch
Tom Hanks got one jump scare and one dance as David S. Pumpkins before someone else took over his haunted house.
Saturday Night Live's Halloween episode aired on October 31, with Inde Navarrette hosting and Gracie Abrams as musical guest. The cold open brought back one of the show's most beloved recurring characters, ten years after his debut, three days before the midterm elections.
Who is David S. Pumpkins?
A man in a pumpkin suit with two dancing skeletons, and no further explanation. He debuted on October 22, 2016, in a sketch now known as "Haunted Elevator," on an episode Hanks hosted. Riders on a haunted-house elevator keep getting the same scare: the doors open, Pumpkins and his skeletons dance, and nobody can figure out why. His catchphrase is "Any questions?"
Mikey Day, Bobby Moynihan and Streeter Seidell wrote it, and Day and Moynihan played the skeletons. Hanks was skeptical at first. He found the character "very bizarre" and suggested Chris Hemsworth for the part. It became a phenomenon anyway:
- 2017 — NBC aired a half-hour animated special, The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special.
- 2022 — Hanks, Day and Moynihan returned in a Halloween sketch on the episode Jack Harlow hosted.
- 2026 — back again, with Moynihan, who left the cast in 2017, in skeleton makeup alongside Day.
What happened this time
The setup was a haunted ride called "Tombs of Doom," with Grace Reiter and Jeremy Culhane as the riders. They passed Jane Wickline's Lizzie Borden first. Then the doors opened on Pumpkins and the skeletons, and the trio got through exactly one dance.
Just as Hanks promised to explain who Pumpkins is in "two words," James Austin Johnson's Trump burst in with one: "Midterms!" He announced he was pausing an SNL sketch yet again, and told the audience he'd "save you four minutes" while Hanks, Day and Moynihan stood frozen behind him.
Trump's case for why he belonged in the sketch:
"We both appeared in 2016," he pointed out. "We're both very loud, very orange and very, frankly, annoying."
What Trump admitted
From there, Johnson's Trump turned to the Texas Senate race, pitching Ken Paxton, whom he called "an ugly son of a bitch," over Democrat James Talarico, about whom he had a different observation: "What a dynamic ass."
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That led him to Hanks. "A great ass on Hanks — something that I've enjoyed lately admiring," he said, before getting to the confession the internet clipped: "Just that I might be gay."
Saidah Belo-Osagie stopped by as Nicki Minaj, and Veronika Slowikowska's Katie Zacharia was supposed to deliver the "Live from New York" line. She flubbed it and was shoved out of frame. Trump turned to the man in the pumpkin suit instead.
"Tom, why don't you take this one?"
Hanks got the last word of the cold open.
Previously we wrote: A 19-year-old said Gen Z can't watch movies. Reddit's replies blamed his parents