SNL Sends John Mulaney Back to Woodstock as a Prophetic Boomer

John Mulaney played a Woodstock attendee with a plan on Saturday Night Live this weekend: the boomer playbook, pitched fifty-six years early.

The sketch drops Mulaney and his friends — Andrew Dismukes, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson and Mikey Day — into the mud of the 1969 festival while Sly and the Family Stone plays. Then Mulaney's hippie blurts the first prophecy. "Hey, when we get older, I think we should buy all the houses."

Dismukes looks confused. Mulaney clarifies. "Our generation, the baby boomers, when we get older, I think we should just buy as many houses as we can get, and just like, have them." And then, the kicker: "Also, we should have all the money."

The friends stay skeptical. Mulaney insists their generous spirit should flip "in fifteen years, like 1985 or so." His words: "we should become ruthless corporate climbers that absolutely fetishize money in an almost pornographic way. Far out, right?"

What does the hippie propose next?

Marijuana gets passed around. Mulaney has another idea: "We should scare our kids about this stuff." The group objects. He doubles down. "I feel like in 1985—hey, there's that year again, feel like it's going to be a big year for us—we should tell our kids if they smoke weed even once, it'll ruin their lives. And not just weed, everything."

Everything they enjoy, he explains, should be presented as lethal. "Everything we should enjoy, we tell our kids that it will kill them stone-ass dead."

A friend concedes that hard drugs might warrant a warning. Mulaney refuses the compromise. "No, we should make our kids do speed: ritalin, adderall, just shove it down their throats their entire childhood so they can get into college."

College, a friend notes, is easy to get into right now. Mulaney's advice is brisk: "We should change that a lot."

How does the sketch end?

The music lulls. Mulaney drops his boldest line yet, drawing the loudest backlash from the circle: "Hey, I think we should be Republicans." He follows it with a plain existential agenda: "I don't think we should die."

His closing plan targets the mythmaking itself. "Even though it's cold, and we can't hear any of the bands, and we're standing in mud and feces, I think we should say this concert was like incredible and life-changing."

The joke's mechanism is simple. Take the generational record — housing hoarding, the 1980s greed turn, the drug panic, the Adderall pipeline, curated nostalgia — and put it in the mouth of a stoned hippie in 1969. The satire lands because every prediction came true on schedule. Sketch comedy rarely files this accurate a retrospective indictment, and rarely this cheaply: one wig, some mud, and a well-placed "far out."