Sarah Sherman Didn’t Just Play Chad Maxxington on Weekend Update — She Turned a Cut-for-Time Bit Into Peak Male-Form Chaos
Some Saturday Night Live characters feel fully deranged the moment they appear. Sarah Sherman’s Chad Maxxington is one of those characters. In the cut-for-time Weekend Update piece, Sherman shows up as a 21-year-old “looksmaxxing” influencer to explain how men can achieve the “peak male form,” and the sketch instantly turns into the kind of grotesque, hyper-specific chaos that was practically built to spread online. The official SNL clip frames the segment as Chad stopping by the desk to explain “the art of looksmaxxing,” while InsideHook noted that the sketch arrived at exactly the right moment to parody a trend already weird enough to sound fake.
What makes the bit hit is that Sherman does not just explain the trend — she weaponizes it. LateNighter’s write-up says Chad Maxxington arrives under “a not-insignificant amount of latex rubber” and immediately tells Colin Jost he is “framemogging” him into oblivion, which is exactly the kind of phrase that sounds both ridiculous and weirdly plausible in the manosphere-adjacent internet world the sketch is mocking. Reddit reactions show that line landing immediately with viewers, along with other grotesque details like the “neck nut” and Chad’s aggressive fixation on male bodily perfection.
That is the real joke engine here: not one punchline, but a whole character built out of overconfident nonsense, pseudo-scientific internet jargon, and body-horror visual choices. InsideHook argued that the sketch made “excellent use of sound effects,” which matters because Chad is not funny just because he says bizarre things. He is funny because every part of the performance — the prosthetics, the posing, the terminology, the noises, the way Jost visibly suffers beside him — is designed to make the audience feel trapped in the same cursed male-optimization rabbit hole. It is a parody of internet masculinity that works by making the whole idea feel physically revolting.
The other reason the sketch feels bigger than a disposable cut-for-time extra is that it fits perfectly into one of Sherman’s strongest Weekend Update traditions: tormenting Colin Jost. InsideHook explicitly places Chad Maxxington in that line of bits, and NBC has repeatedly highlighted Sherman’s Update appearances as showcases for her ability to turn Jost into the straight-man victim of increasingly unhinged characters. Chad does not just pitch bad advice — he makes Jost sit next to it, absorb it, and react in real time, which gives the segment an extra layer of humiliation that helps it travel online.
That is why this sketch stuck. It is specific enough to feel current, disgusting enough to feel unforgettable, and structured around a central image viewers can instantly describe to other people: Sarah Sherman as a horrifying internet alpha-male ghoul explaining “looksmaxxing” to a visibly miserable Colin Jost. The official clip has already racked up major YouTube views, and for good reason. This was not just a cut sketch. It was the kind of cursed little Update visit that feels designed to be replayed, quoted, and passed around with the same reaction: what on earth did I just watch?
