Paul McCartney’s season‑final appearance on Saturday Night Live didn’t end with the curtain call: the show uploaded a post‑credits bonus performance after it went on vacation, sending the host credits into an impromptu encore.
On the broadcast, McCartney and his band closed the show with The Boys of Dungeon Lane’s "Days We Left Behind," Wings’ "Band on the Run" and McCartney II’s "Coming Up" during the end credits. After the curtain call he stayed on stage for a surprise return, singing the Beatles classics "Help!" and "Drive My Car."
The encore turned into a comic moment when Will Ferrell — who was hosting Saturday Night Live for the sixth time since leaving the cast in 2002 — climbed onstage and joined McCartney and Chad Smith for "Help!" Ferrell used a handheld cowbell as a direct callback to his long‑running "More Cowbell" sketch, and Smith sat in with the SNL band to play drums.
McCartney also appeared earlier in Ferrell’s opening monologue and in a sketch as a nonsensical British mechanic, and at one point the musician confused Ferrell for Smith during the monologue — a gag that leaned on the extended public joke about the pair’s uncanny resemblance. The broadcast also included a surprise cold open in which Ferrell appeared as the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.
The set list and staging mattered in two immediate ways: it let McCartney plug new music and remind viewers of decades of work in one hour, and it converted the season finale into a brief promotional platform. The Boys of Dungeon Lane arrives May 29, and the inclusion of its track "Days We Left Behind" in the end credits made the upload serve a practical push toward that release date.
Still, the night’s tone kept swinging between reverent and absurd. A legendary songwriter closed the show with album cuts and Wings and McCartney II hits, then returned to sing two Beatles songs with a sitcom‑style guest cameo. The collision felt intentional — a veteran artist leaning into SNL’s comedic chaos rather than standing apart from it.
The looseness produced real friction: McCartney’s momentary confusion of Ferrell for Chad Smith highlighted how comfortably the program mixes music and sketch comedy, but it also underlined how quickly a live broadcast can turn into a running joke. Ferrell’s cowbell, Smith’s drum fills and McCartney’s return after the credits made the finale less a tidy bow and more a playful afterword.
In the end, the uploaded post‑credits clip answered the obvious question the moment raised: this was not a stray curiosity but a staged coda — a promotional nudge for an album arriving May 29 and a convivial sign‑off that leaned into Saturday Night Live’s history of mixing high‑profile music guests with broad, comedic spectacle.
