Marcello Hernández: SNL’s new secret weapon is unique in multiple ways.

In a September 2020 podcast interview, two years before he would join Saturday Night Live and cement his status as a rising star in comedy, a then–largely unknown Marcello Hernández cited Jerry Seinfeld as his comic idol, saying, “I want to be the Hispanic Jerry Seinfeld.” He pointed to Seinfeld’s style of observational humor, as well as his advice on how a struggling comedian should approach his career: “Seinfeld says that the amount of years you’ve been doing comedy is your age in comedy,” explained Hernández, who at the time of the interview was approaching his fifth year in the field. “If you think long term like that, like you’re just gonna do this forever and get as good as you possibly can at it,” he said, “nothing can stop you.” In comedy years, Hernández was only 6 when he was hired as an SNL cast member for the show’s 48th season—and 25 in actual years, making him not just young but the show’s resident young person. What makes Hernández unique is not just that he’s a zoomer—although SNL makes full use of that, expertly deploying him in youth-oriented sketches like “Crown Your Short King” and “Dune Popcorn Bucket”—but also that he’s the first cast member whose material is so consistently intertwined with his Latino identity. “I was lucky enough to be the only person at the show that could write in Spanish, and it just gave me this great opportunity.” This wasn’t the first time someone had written a Spanish sketch for the show; former Latino cast members Fred Armisen and Horatio Sanz wrote and starred in a handful of Spanish-heavy sketches throughout the 2000s.