Spirit Halloween slams ‘irrelevant’ Saturday Night Live after season 50 premiere sketch

The offending sketch in question plays as an uplifting commercial spoof of the store, which is America’s largest Halloween retailer.

Spirit Halloween has a spooky response to Saturday Night Live‘s recent sketch about them.

The seasonal retailer retweeted the sketch, which debuted in Saturday’s season 50 premiere, on Monday with the caption, “We are great at raising things back from the dead @nbcsnl.” The tweet also included a picture for a fake costume resembling the ones the Halloween store actually sells for “SNL 50: The Anniversary Season,” which is described on the packaging as an “irrelevant 50-year-old TV show.” The fake costume is said to include: “dated references,” “unknown cast members,” and “shrinking ratings.”

The offending SNL sketch in question plays as an uplifting commercial spoof of the store, which is America’s largest Halloween retailer. In it, employees from Spirit Halloween hilariously tout the company’s raison d’être: “We don’t see a dead-end town. We don’t see an abandoned Kmart. We see a spirit, a Spirit Halloween. Since 1983, Spirit Halloween has been helping our struggling communities by setting up shop in every vacant building in the country for six weeks and then bouncing. And thanks to us, what used to be a condemned AutoZone where a murder happened is once again a thriving business… where a murder happened.”

Spirit Halloween - SNL

“Spirit Halloween” – ‘SNL’.NBC

The spoof also claims the store is “providing vulnerable communities with the things they need most: wigs that give you a rash, single-use fog machines, and costumes of famous characters tweaked just enough to avoid a lawsuit.”

As an example of the latter, the joke ends with a little girl asking a store employee played by Chloe Fineman if they have a Taylor Swift costume. “You bet,” she tells the girl before handing her a costume packet (not unlike the faux SNL one that Spirit tweeted out, above) for a “blonde singing woman.” When the girl points out that the costume is not Swift, Fineman perfectly deadpans, “And neither are you.”

The SNL season 50 premiere featured host Jean Smart and musical guest Jelly Roll. In addition to the Spirit Halloween sketch, the episode famously featured a cold open in which Maya Rudolph returned to play Vice President Kamala Harris; Andy Samberg showed up to play her husband, Doug Emhoff; Dana Carvey played President Biden; and Jim Gaffigan popped by as Gov. Tim Walz. Current cast member James Austin Johnson was back as the show’s resident Donald Trump, while Bowen Yang filled the shoes of the former president’s current veep pick, J.D. Vance.

Watch the full Spirit Halloween sketch in the video above.