SNL: Shane Gillis Drops an F-Bomb in a Dr. Seuss Sketch as Rosalía Performs En Pointe and in the Rain

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2026

Shane Gillis came back to host Saturday Night Live for the third time on Saturday night, and by the end of the show he was apologizing — twice. Midway through a Dr. Seuss sketch, the comedian let an F-bomb slip out live, and on the East Coast feed the word went out uncensored, an on-air mishap so rare it has happened only a handful of times in the show’s five decades. Gillis broke character, winced, and ad-libbed his way back on track, and by the sketch’s end and again during goodnights he was owning it: “Sorry about earlier.” Musical guest Rosalía, in her second SNL appearance, delivered the visual performances of the night — “Reliquia” sung standing en pointe for the entire song, and “Magnolias” performed in an on-stage rainstorm that soaked her white dress.

02 The F-bomb heard around Studio 8H

The slip happened during a “Green Eggs and Ham” parody, with Mikey Day as the Cat in the Hat refusing Sam I Am’s relentless breakfast pitch and Andrew Dismukes as Sam I Am. Gillis played the Cat in the Hat’s defensive son, rushing in to shut Sam I Am down on his dad’s behalf. As USA Today’s post-show account describes it, Gillis was mid-pushback when his character snapped: “Bro, it’s a non-starter. He said he doesn’t f—ing—” and immediately caught himself, exclaiming “Jeez! Like ’em.”

What happened next is what made the moment land. Gillis broke character, cringed at his own mouth, and waved to the erupting audience while the sketch scrambled to recover. Mikey Day saved the scene with an ad-lib scolding — “You’re a loser and you said a bad word!” — to which Gillis could only answer, “Yes, I did,” before closing the sketch itself with a line the night would come back to: “Sorry about earlier.” He apologized again during goodnights at the end of the broadcast.

On the show’s East Coast feed, the full word went out and was not muted, USA Today reported, and Deadline reported via SoapCentral that the censors failed to catch it on both the live broadcast and the stream that night. SNL later posted the sketch to social media with the word muted — the standard cleanup for a mishap this rare. As our preview noted before the show, Gillis’s return to Studio 8H was already one of the season’s most-watched bookings; nobody expected it to produce the season’s first genuine live-TV blooper.

03 The cold open: ’Operation Epic Fury'

The show opened with Colin Jost as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth welcoming the USS Abraham Lincoln home from “Operation Epic Fury,” riffing on Trump, Iran, and San Diego, where the ship had docked. Then James Austin Johnson’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crashed the sketch with flu-season absurdity and measles jokes before his “brain worm” reset him into a burst of physical comedy, per Bleeding Cool’s cold-open breakdown.

Jost’s Hegseth spent the open bragging over a deployment reportedly more than 300 days long — a homecoming speech dripping with the kind of dark, bureaucratic comedy the show has leaned into all season. The sketch set the tone for a night that swung between political satire and the kind of absurdist physical bits SNL does when it’s confident.

04 Rosalía, en pointe, for four straight minutes

If the night belonged to anyone musically, it was Rosalía — and she earned it in the most literal way possible. For her first performance, “Reliquia” from her latest album Lux, the 34-year-old Spanish singer stood en pointe — full body weight on the tips of her toes, the classical ballet technique — for the entire song, roughly four minutes, before a dozen dancers joined her at the very end as a strobe effect took over, Just Jared reported.

“Reliquia” translates to “relic,” and the song’s devotion to something sacred made the physical discipline of the staging land even harder. This was Rosalía’s second time as SNL’s musical guest, following her March 2022 appearance, and she clearly came to make the night hers.

05 Then ’Magnolias,’ in the rain

Then came the second act. For “Magnolias,” the closing track of Lux, an in-studio rain shower erupted mid-song and drenched the singer and her white dress, Just Jared reported. The staging was as deliberate as the first number’s pointe work: “Magnolias” is about her own death — a song she has said is an ode to Anandamayi Ma, an Indian saint, teacher and mystic, turning the idea of death into something beautiful.

“There was an amazing burial,” Rosalía told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about the saint’s funeral that inspired the song. “And so for me, I was like, wait — this is amazing to know that that happened. And I’m like, how would my burial be? Maybe it’s just about: please don’t be sad when I die. Just please have a party.” Singing about your own funeral while being rained on inside Studio 8H is a bold bit of theater, and the show went all in on it.

06 The rest of the night

Between the musical bookends, Rosalía popped up in a thought-bubble sketch encouraging Gillis to abandon his gravely ill mother’s bedside to go see a Jelly Roll concert at Las Vegas’ Sphere — the kind of deranged premise that only works at 12:30 in the morning.

Season context: this was the third episode of season 52. Last week’s episode had Dakota Johnson hosting with Turnstile’s musical guest debut, and the season opened September 26 with Jalen Brunson and KATSEYE. Now the show goes dark for two weeks of Halloween break, returning with its Halloween episode on October 31, per EW — meaning Gillis’s F-bomb gets a full two weeks to marinate in the discourse.

07 The club nobody wants to join

Uncensored F-bombs almost never clear the live broadcast, but Gillis is far from the first to join the club. SNL history includes Charles Rocket’s infamous 1981 slip, Jenny Slate accidentally swearing during her first episode in 2009, Kristen Stewart dropping an uncensored F-bomb during her 2017 monologue, Sam Rockwell’s slip in 2018, and musical guest Sabrina Carpenter’s two uncensored F-words during a 2025 performance.

The verdict on the night itself was strong. Former cast member Victoria Jackson called the episode “funny and smart,” and EW mused in its recap whether this was the best episode of the season to date. Rosalía’s night, meanwhile, continues a victory lap: seven nominations at the 2026 Latin Grammys on November 12, and Lux — her 2025 album — was named the best album of 2025 by Business Insider, Entertainment Weekly and Dazed. She wrapped her LUX European and North American tour in September. After Saturday night, she might want to add “weather control” to her résumé.

Season 52, Episode 3 — aired live from Studio 8H on Saturday, October 10, 2026, on NBC and Peacock.