Last Week's 'SNL' Musical Guest Was, Against All Odds, a First for the Show

More than a half-century into its historic run, Saturday Night Live is still crossing milestones that give its Millennial-and-older fans new gray hairs.

On the most recent episode of SNL, 30 Rockefeller Plaza played host to a sensation in Generation Z’s independent music scene: Shane Michael Boose, better known by his stage name Sombr, and known by very few members of Kenan Thompson’s own age-group. As the longest-tenured cast member in SNL history, Thompson has already had to come to terms with the fact that his younger cast mates have never known a SNL without him, but, this past weekend, the 20-year-old Sombr recorded a new first for Thompson’s incumbency by becoming the first musical guest in SNL history to be born after Thompson made his debut in 2003.

Even at age 50, the old dog of SNL is still breaking out new tricks. And, thankfully for all the older SNL fans who now feel downright decrepit knowing that the new age of musical guests weren't even alive when Will Ferrell was on the show, Sombr's music is too soft, sensitive and slow for us to break a hip trying to dance to it:

This little Saturday Night Live tidbit to put an ache in your bones and a colonoscopy on your calendar comes courtesy of the superfan organization Saturday Night Network. Fans of SNL who were both alive on 9/11 and old enough to have seen Rudy Giuliani roast the show in the first episode following the tragedy commiserated about this new piece of trivia in the SNL subreddit, sharing their thoughts in a viral thread titled, “I feel so old!”

“I was a freshman in college when Kenan debuted. I now have nagging back pain I’m going to talk to my doctor about tomorrow,” one SNL fan lamented, “Sunrise, sunset.”

Added another user, “I saw someone post awhile back that if you’re birth year starts with 19, you’re officially old.”

“I remember seeing Kenan on the first episode of All That in 1994,” one more aged SNL fan chimed in, adding a fitting skull emoji at the end of the comment.

While Sombr's alarming birth year may be a reminder that many of us older SNL fans should start taking baby aspirin on the regular, it is undeniably impressive that SNL is still finding new milestones to cross after so many years on the air. Additionally, just like SNL itself, we, too, can continue to innovate and find new firsts in our lives, even if we're almost always conked out by the cold open and have to watch each new episode on Peacock early Sunday morning. 

However, the day SNL finally adds a cast member who is younger than Thompson's tenure will be the day we stop pretending that we find all this Zoomer music remotely listenable.