Tom Hanks returned to TV on Saturday night after beating coronavirus.
The
Hollywood star hosted
Saturday Night Live from his kitchen, as the US
comedy show relaunched after a month-long hiatus.
Tom and his wife Rita Wilson received hospital treatment after testing positive for Covid-19 while working in Australia last month, but have since returned to the US after a period of self-isolation.
Opening the show, he said: “It is good to be here, though it’s also very weird to be here hosting Saturday Night Live at home.
“It is a strange time to try and be funny, but trying to be funny is SNL’s whole thing.”
Tom joked that he had to get used to learning his temperature in degrees Celsius, where 36 was good but 38 was bad, “like Hollywood treats female actresses”.
The way the world is now using video conference calls to keep in contact was at the centre of a lot of the sketches on the show.
All of the usual cast members were appearing from their homes, with Kate McKinnon joking: “Live from Zoom. It’s sometime between March and August.”
One sketch featured a mock Zoom work meeting, where Kate and Aidy Bryant played a pair of inappropriate receptionists. Aidy was stopped just in time when she brought her laptop with her into the bathroom.
“I used my licence as toilet paper and now I don’t know my own birthday,” Aidy said.
After recovering from coronavirus, Tom Hanks urged his social media followers to obey social distancing and stay at home guidelines.
He tweeted: “Sheltering in place works like this: You don’t give it to anyone – you don’t get it from anyone. Common sense, no?
“Going to take [a while], but if we take care of each other, help where we can, and give up some comforts… this, too, shall pass,” Tom added. “We can figure this out.”Since Tom and Rita first went public with their diagnosis, a number of other high-profile stars revealed they too had tested positive for coronavirus, including Idris Elba, James Bond actor Olga Kurylenko and former daytime TV presenter Fiona Phillips.
Idris specifically said that seeing Tom and Rita’s announcement inspired him to share the fact that he’d also been diagnosed with Covid-19.
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