Saturday Night Live's final episode for 2025 finally dropped on December 20, and it was a highly anticipated one! Wicked star Ariana Grande served as the host, with Cher as the musical guest.
The 79-year-old legendary singer performed two songs from her 2023 Christmas album, "DJ Play A Christmas Song" and "Run Rudolph Run," and fans had thoughts galore.
Many of them wished she'd have joined in on some of the sketches like her inclusion in the emotional Delta Lounge skit, such as one fan saying: "No way Cher is here and wasn't part of believe in black santa sketch? Lol," referencing a courtroom sketch from the latest episode parodying her song "Believe."
Others were just enthralled to see a performance from the hitmaker, as one commenter wrote alongside the YouTube upload of one of her performances: "I never watch the musical guests clips – but it is CHER!!!! Singing Christmas!!!"
However, there were quite a few who suspected whether Cher was actually lip syncing to her songs. "I don't mind the lip synching cuz she actually can sing and do whatever she wants at this point," one fan posited, with another also saying: "It's not lip syncing if you don't even synchronize your mouth to the lyrics."
None of the fans actually seemed to mind, though, with some reasoning that her performance was more than likely a hybrid mix of lip syncing and live singing, to account for audio delays into an earpiece and the physical exertion that comes with dancing. In Cher's case, her tracks also incorporate the vocoder (a voice modulation tech that she herself popularized with her 1998 mega hit), requiring further use of reliance on alternate techniques.
Lip syncing on SNL
Lip syncing has a fraught history on SNL. While several artists often sing along to pre-recorded tracks to provide more seamless performances, especially when dancing is included.
However, explicit lip syncing is reportedly not allowed on the NBC sketch comedy show, especially after the 2004 incident involving Ashlee Simpson.
In 2004, in an episode hosted by Jude Law, Ashlee was the musical guest, successfully first performing her top five hit "Pieces of Me," but before she and her band could transition to her second song "Autobiography," a vocal audio track for the former song accidentally began playing instead.
The singer awkwardly began dancing on stage to account for the mishap, and her performance was strongly criticized at the time. The incident is now seen as one of the most notorious moments in SNL's history, although Ashlee has since laughed it off and continued to perform.
Other highlights from the latest SNL
Ariana, on the other hand, received near unanimous acclaim from netizens online for her monologue, which included a parody of Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," plus her comic timing in a majority of the sketches, playing on holiday classics like Home Alone and Elf on the Shelf.
Bowen Yang, meanwhile, had an emotional send-off, his final performance after shockingly revealing he'd be exiting the show midseason, crying through his performance of "Please Come Home for Christmas" in the Delta Lounge sketch, joined by Ariana and Cher.