Paul Reiser Made Out With a Xenomorph for ‘SNL’s Unhinged ‘Aliens’ Parody

This week sees the release of Alien: Earth, the latest installment in the increasingly congested Alien franchise. The new streaming series is reportedly a prequel, set two years before the events of the original 1979 classic and 16 years before Alien: Eastbound & Down.

In addition to the plethora of official Alien sequels and spin-offs, there have been countless parodies over the years, the best of which have featured actual franchise alumni. For example: Mel Brooks convinced his former Elephant Man collaborator John Hurt to recreate the classic chestburster scene for Spaceballs.

Less fondly remembered is the time that Paul Reiser got frisky with a Xenomorph on Saturday Night Live.

Reiser, of course, portrayed Carter Burke, the villainous corporate sleazebag in James Cameron’s blockbuster sequel Aliens. 

But when he hosted SNL in 1995 (one week after the show was trashed by New York Magazine), Reiser was better known for playing Paul Buchman in the hit sitcom Mad About You. So, naturally, SNL’s writers decided to combine Reiser’s two famous roles in the baffling, weirdly lazy “Aliens 4: Mad About You Aliens.”

The sketch begins with a recreation of the Mad About You credits, but this time, the show stars “Paul Reiser” and “An Alien,” and features black-and-white snapshots of Reiser and a Xenomorph canoodling in the streets of Manhattan.

We then see Reiser in a recreation of the Buchmans’ New York apartment. But instead of Helen Hunt’s character Jamie, Paul is in a romantic relationship with H.R. Giger’s iconic psychosexual space beast. “Hey sweetie, what do you think of this sweater?” he casually asks the hissing creature. 

If that wasn’t horrifying enough, Paul’s cousin Ira is stuck to the wall, trapped in a gooey slime cocoon by the alien, which is possibly a reference to Burke’s deleted death scene. When a bloody chestburster emerges from his body, Paul praises his partner’s reproductive capabilities: “How do you do that? You plant your eggs and then they hatch out of someone else’s body! It’s amazing.”

The sketch ends (thankfully after just 90 seconds) with Reiser leaning in to smooch the Xenomorph. 

While the sketch didn’t seem to generate much laughter, the kiss provoked audible groans from disgusted audience members. 

“Mad About You Aliens” wasn’t the only time that SNL enlisted an Aliens cast member to star in a bizarre pop-culture mash-up. When Sigourney Weaver hosted the show in 1986, just three months after the release of Aliens, she appeared alongside Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz in “Alienses,” which found Ripley and her band of space marines inadvertently murdering E.T. and planting evidence to justify the killing. 

But at least Weaver wasn’t asked to make out with E.T.’s corpse.