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For her seventh time hosting “Saturday Night Live” (the most times ever for a woman, NBC says), actor Scarlett Johansson closed the show’s historic 50th season.

It was a night that didn’t deliver any news on the rumors that Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost of “Weekend Update,” or his co-host Michael Che, would be leaving the show. Instead, the two engaged in their joke exchange ritual, and multiple guest stars showed up in sketches, including Mike Myers, Gina Gershon and Emily Ratajkowski in a video piece, and musical guest Bad Bunny.

Johansson did her usual ace job throughout the show, bringing her crisp delivery to sketches about a New York morning show where puns about hard-news stories land very badly, a Please Don’t Destroy video about a vacation flight to Newark Airport (it also lands badly), and a barroom sketch about two men (Marcello Hernández and Bad Bunny) who commiserate in Spanish about the terrible relationships they’re in with characters played by Johansson and Ego Nwodim.

The trio of sketches were followed by another video chapter in the “Bowen Yang’s Not Gay” series, in which Johansson has an affair with Yang before finding out how many other women he’s having sex with, including Gershon, Ratajkowski and cast members Nwodim and Heidi Gardner.

After a strong “Weekend Update” finale featuring Johansson in the joke exchange, the show took a hard dive with four sketches in a row that just didn’t work. There was a very dated and awkward elevator sketch about Mike Myers running into Kanye West (now Ye, played by Kenan Thompson), one about intimacy coordinators who don’t know how lesbians have sex, a TV interview panel in which female actors get asked more personal questions than their male co-star, and a gross-out season-ender about Victorian women eating disgusting foods including eels and BLTs (bunnies and little turtles).

On top of the bad run of sketches, Johansson was cut off while giving a tribute to Lorne Michaels as the show ended on broadcast and Peacock with no closing credits or cast hugs (the full goodnights were later posted online). That’s no fault of Johansson (who received a bouquet of roses and a kiss from her husband before that goodbye snafu), but it was a sloppy way to end an otherwise strong season of TV featuring a host who’s always proved solid.

Musical guest Bad Bunny, who appeared in the bar and Newark airport sketches, performed “NUEVAYoL” and “PERFuMITO NUEVO” with RaiNao.

The majority of Season 50’s cold opens have leaned on James Austin Johnson’s uncanny President Trump impression, and the finale followed suit. The president’s recent Middle East trip was the topic, with Trump having some friend time with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Emil Wakim). “We are vibing,” Trump said, “dipping our fingers into various goops and spreads,” although he says he ended up eating at a mobile McDonald’s set up for him nearby. Trump addressed the $400-million plane he wants to accept from Qatar (“It’s a pre-bribe”), saying he prefers it to flying an American plane. “No thanks, sonny. Have you seen what’s going on … screen is blank. Newark!” Trump narrated himself breaking the fourth wall by going out into the audience and commenting on the attractiveness of women in the front rows and promised audiences they wouldn’t forget him while “SNL” goes on summer hiatus. “I’m everywhere, even in your dreams, like the late, great Freddy Krueger. See you in the fall if we still have a country, right? It’s a coin toss.”

In her monologue, Johansson led the cast in a song with lyrics about the show set to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” “Sing us a song, it’s your monologue / sing us a song tonight. / ‘Cause we’ve made 50 years of great memories / every Saturday Night.” At one point it looked like Joel himself might join in when Johansson announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joel… wrote this song!” The host took audience questions while still singing and jokes were made about a surprised Sarah Sherman finding out she’s leaving the show (it was a joke). The cast (with Jost and Che absent) concluded the song with, “The 50th season is through / it lasted forever / we did it together / and we got to spend it with you.”

Best sketch of the night: Let’s go home for some soup made from cow feet

Two men (Hernandez and Bad Bunny) on dates at a bar with women they don’t particularly want to be with (Nwodim and Johansson) get into a fight at their girlfriends’ urging, but instead they tell each other in Spanish about their problems and become friends. The two realize they’re both attracted to volatile relationships and will probably end up back in bed with the women they should break up with. The subtitles are on point and the attempts by the girlfriends to chime in with Spanish (“Nipple crazy cafeteria!”) also work nicely. For some reason, a couple of men (Andrew Dismukes and Johnson) sit at another table and serve as the sketch’s Greek chorus.

Also good: ‘Is something going on at Newark?’

The Please Don’t Destroy boys are visited by Johansson, who asks why they’re so down. “Are you sad the season’s over and you only did like two videos?” she asks. The actor invites them to fly first class with her and a Lonely Island-style rap video is interspersed with the reality of the situation: They’re on a very bad flight to Newark airport, which has been having some problems. There are some great visual jokes like a prayer symbol on the overhead panel and a Microsoft blue screen of death on the TV panels. But then Bad Bunny shows up as an air traffic controller who helps save the day all alone and on his first day at work. It might say something that the two best sketches this week featured Johansson as well as Bad Bunny; he didn’t get a chance to host this season but did a great job in 2023.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Did Lorne Michaels know about this?

Miss Eggy (Nwodim) returned with another fire monologue similar to the one from last month, but it was the traditional joke exchange, in which Jost and Che force each other to read racist and/or embarrassing material that is taken to new heights (lows?) each time. Jost was forced to tell the show’s producer, “Retire, bitch, let me run the show,” while Che was given the line, “I haven’t been that excited since I saw a white woman drinking unattended.” Jost had to ridicule rap feud master Kendrick Lamar and with Jost’s wife sitting next to him, Che was forced to apologize and say about his time on the show, “I’ve told thousands of jokes and gotten dozens of laughs,” and of Jost, “I love you.” But it was Jost who got the worst of it, getting tricked into saying the name Nick Kerr, son of Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, and applying lipstick to tell Michaels, “I’ll do anything to run this show.” If this is the last time we see Jost and Che as “Update” hosts, at least we’ll know they left no depths unplumbed.

When she appeared for the first time on “Saturday Night Live” a year ago, “Abbott Elementary” creator and star Quinta Brunson gave one of last year’s best hosting performances, bringing great comic timing and characters to the show.

It was no fluke. Returning to the show for her second outing, Brunson proved just as adept at bringing her comedic sensibilities to an episode that featured an overall strong lineup of new sketches. There was only one retread and even that one, a reprise of the standout “Traffic Altercation,” was worth revisiting.

It’s interesting to compare Brunson’s just-as-excellent second shot to two other comics who hosted in Season 49 and Season 50: Nate Bargatze and Shane Gillis. While Bartgatze’s return was good, it didn’t quite reach the peaks of the first appearance. And Gillis, inexplicably called back into service after a not-great debut as host, was much worse the second time around.

But Brunson didn’t lose a step since last year; she was funny playing a time-traveling Harriet Tubman who, along with Kenan Thompson as Frederick Douglass, didn’t want to go back to the past in a “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” parody; went daffy as one of several bad employees at a leadership summit; played a model in an ad for Forever 31’s sad, oversized clothing; and one of “Two B— vs. a Gorilla” (the other was Ego Nwodim), about trash-talking women facing off with a gorilla at the zoo.

If that wasn’t enough, she played a joke-spouting old-time boxer, Jerry “Jackrabbit” Tulane, who stops being so funny after getting beaten up multiple times in the ring, and one half of a feisty and unexpectedly sexy “OnlySeniors” couple in an insurance ad.

Bruson scored again and again and even sang in the monologue; she should have an open invitation to return next season.

Musical guest Benson Boone backflipped before performing, “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else” and did not do a backflip before performing “Mystical Magical.” He briefly appeared on Weekend Update as an Applebee’s waiter, referencing his hit song “Beautiful Things,” which Boone didn’t perform.

Just as President Trump has dominated news cycle after news cycle this year, so has he commandeered the “SNL” cold open: once again, James Austin Johnson played the hard-charging POTUS, delivering a string of executive orders with creepy lord of darkness Stephen Miller (an increasingly vampiric Mikey Day). Trump signed orders to deport “Sesame Street” along with Elmo (“Brought to you by the letter L for El Salvador”), pardon J.K. Rowling for transphobic comments and bring back Columbus Day for Italian-Americans such as Tony Soprano, Benny Blanco (who is Jewish) and Childish Gambino (the stage name of Donald Glover, who is Black). Marco Rubio (Marcello Hernández) appeared for an order to keep Hispanic babies from getting their ears pierced, and Trump also made moves to make the New York Times Connections game easier, turn the word “Recession” into “Recess” and outlaw ghosts. “Every Christmas Eve, I get visited by three ghosts. I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Trump said.

Brunson began her monologue with jokes about the time she worked for a phone sex line (“By the end of my first week, I had only made $1.38.”) before landing on the topic of her song and dance number: her height. The 4-foot-11 actress said, “They tried to cast me as a kid on ‘Abbott Elementary’ and I wrote that!” Eschewing a microphone that was too high, she sang about the great things about being small, such as being a cheap date with wine. She was soon joined by another diminutive star: pop singer Sabrina Carpenter, who compared notes with her, asking, “When you read short stories, do they feel like novels?” Former NBA star Dwyane Wade towered over the ladies, but insisted he’s still short compared to other basketball players at 6-foot-4. “I just really want to be in the song,” he said.

Best sketch of the night: Don’t ask your parents too many questions about ‘OnlySeniors’

Brunson and Thompson play elderly parents whose kids (Nwodim and Devon Walker) find out they’ve got life insurance through a service that requires them to have sex and spend a lot of time naked for online fans. “We set up our camera and do stuff to each other. And watch the money just start pouring in,” they’re told. When they’re not interacting with their “Filthy little chat babies,” they’re spending time with their also-naked neighbors and (checks notes) sitting on cakes? In these uncertain economic times, it’s a business model that seems very viable.

Also good: Now you now the traffic-altercation sign language for Iraq

Mikey Day and Brunson faced off again in separate cars (but didn’t seem to recognize each other from last time) to battle with a series of hand gestures and facial expressions over bad parking on a ferry. Day’s character can’t forgive the other driver for parking too close, saying he needs more than half an inch, which invites a devastating response from the woman in the other car. Day’s daughter Quinn (Chloe Fineman) participates with over-the-line sexual gestures, prompting Brunson’s character to make gestures for a gardening tool as she tells him who he raised. Sure, it’s a repeat, but again it’s executed perfectly on both ends, with the only disappointing note being an appearance by Colin Jost, who’s trying to sell the real-life ferry he bought with Pete Davidson. It’s not that Jost is bad, it’s just that it couldn’t possibly live up to Mellssa McCarthy’s appearance when they did a version of this sketch with Martin Short.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: And now a word from Michael Longfellow

Sarah Sherman and Bowen Yang played horny barflys at Applebee’s who are sad about chain restaurants closing down. But it was Michael Longfellow’s declaration of not getting a Real ID that won “Update” this week. Longfellow said, “You already gave me an ID. If it’s fake, you fix it. The Pope is dead, let me mourn.” It didn’t quite follow, but Longfellow went on to joke about his light work schedule of 12 hours a week at “SNL” (“I’m just not in that much stuff this season.”) before making up rules for air travel including, “If the TSA touches your crotch, they have to keep going until you climax.” It’s true, Longfellow has been a light presence this season, but in segments like this, it’s clear he’s got a great command of his delivery. It will be nice if he’s back for Season 51 and gets more screen time to show off his talents.