‘Saturday Night Live’ preview: Hopes for Carrie Fisher tribute; a Pete Davidson sighting!

Comedy fans, rejoice — “Saturday Night Live” is back in action this weekend. The same apparently goes for Pete Davidson.

While we’re not sure how much media coverage this got over the past two months, Pete was noticeably absent at times during the end of 2016. It’s not entirely clear where he was, but it’s also not our place to pry on it. For us, we’re just glad that he’s back given that the show is always funnier when he’s around. (For those of you who didn’t know that Pete has tattoos, we figure that the video below is certainly going to be an eye-opener.)

Other than the presence of Pete, host Felicity Jones, and musical guest Sturgill Simpson, there’s really not too much in this promo to write home about. The first bit is a “Saturday Night Live” joke that’s barely even much of a joke at all; it’s more of a reminder more so than anything else that the actress was in “Rogue One.” She was great in the movie, but won’t tonight be a good time to let everyone know that she can also do other things?

Now that we’ve said that, let’s be totally contradictory and talk about “Star Wars” for a little while longer. We don’t want the show to be all about the movie franchise, but there is some eerie timing to the episode. Jones was hired as the host long before the news broke of Carrie Fisher’s passing after Christmas Day, but this is also the first show back since that happened. Both actresses have a connection to the franchise, and it would be nice to see her honored in some sort of way. It’s not something we would expect the show to spend a tremendous amount of time on, given that Fisher was hardly a constant presence in the studio. Yet, she did host many decades ago in the height of “Star Wars” — if you haven’t seen footage of that, there is a video that you can check out over at the link here.

Even if it is just a mention, or the uttering of a quote, any acknowledgement from the show tonight would be nice and also super-classy. While “SNL” may have its moments of gross-out humor and silliness, we know that there’s a big heart somewhere in there, especially with the current regime. (Update: We’ve now heard that the show is replaying Fisher’s episode later tonight.)

Let us know your expectations for Jones’ show tonight below! We’ll be back later to discuss matters further with our full review. (Photo: NBC.)