‘Saturday Night Live’: Justin Timberlake, Jimmy Fallon open 40th anniversary with history

Tonight, “Saturday Night Live” aired its 40th anniversary special, and they made a very clear decision to cram as many references as humanly possible into a super-short amount of time.

With that in mind, how could you not bring in Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon for a rousing opening number? This actually felt a little bit more like a “History of Rap” segment from “The Tonight Show” / “Late Night” than anything else that we have seen on “SNL” over the years. With that being said, this perfectly made sense when it comes to an opening. These two know how to give a killer performance already! We’ve seen it a variety of times.

The only way that we can describe this is awesome, especially when we had the Sister Mary Katherine appearance thrown in here. It was funny, it was quick, and above all else, it was self-deprecating. This was a chance to actually see these two guys mock the institution of a musical number during the opening monologue. Typically, this is not a great sign for the rest of the show.

Were Fallon and Timberlake the best two people to open the show? We could see people claiming that they wanted someone a little more old-school to appear, but we were fine with this. This sort of opening keeps the young demo invested, and it’s not like these two were complete strangers to the franchise. Fallon was a huge part of it for many years, while Timberlake is a member of the five-timers club.

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