SNL saw the internet losing it over HBO 's Harry Potter reboot and, naturally, grabbed the low-hanging fruit: Black Snape. The show took the viral meme and ran with it on Weekend Update, which is both very SNL and a preview of the headache this series is going to have for the next decade.
So what actually happened?
Not long after the new HBO Harry Potter trailer dropped, memes about "Black Snape" exploded on X. A lot of it was standard meme-factory chaos; too much of it was just blatant racism. The focus was Paapa Essiedu being cast as Severus Snape. SNL skipped its previous week, then came back and dove right in.
On Weekend Update, Kam Patterson showed up as Snape to vent about one particular first-year. Colin Jost asked how his week was going, and Patterson-as-Snape went straight for the bit: Harry Potter is racist and obsessed with proving Hogwarts' only Black teacher is secretly evil. The joke (and the audience reaction) makes it clear where the meme is getting its juice.
"So somebody stole something, and the number one suspect is Black Snape? They didn’t even look at the white guy in the turban. He’s got a wizard on the back of his head."
The show posted the sketch on April 5, 2026, framing it as Snape responding to the new series' trailer.
What the sketch poked at (and why it landed)
- The running gag is that Harry is treating the only Black teacher at Hogwarts like a supervillain based on vibes, while ignoring Professor Quirrell literally wearing a turban to hide a dark wizard face-hugger.
- They also jabbed at J.K. Rowling's naming habits; "Kingsley Shacklebolt" got side-eyed for obvious reasons.
- House-elf slavery got dragged too, because yeah, the Wizarding World's HR department would be a war zone.
- The desk bit used "Sorcerer's Stone," even though the new show is using the original British title "Philosopher's Stone."
The uncomfortable part the sketch gets right
Essiedu being hired to play Snape should be as simple as "great actor, good fit." But we all know how this works in 2026: the meme machine strips out context and pumps out outrage. SNL surfing that wave doesn't create the problem, but it does underline it. There will be people pretending to be concerned about optics while just targeting the actor's ethnicity. That noise is already rolling downhill.
About Snape, the books, and that first-year suspicion
In the actual text, Harry hates Snape mostly because Snape openly despises him. Rowling writes Snape as an immediate target for reader suspicion in Book 1; it's intentional misdirection that pushes you toward the wrong culprit. The films softened that a bit because Alan Rickman ( icon) gave us a cooler, almost gentler take than the page version. On the page, Snape is meant to be loathed for a long stretch.
So the idea that Harry suspects Snape solely because he's Black is a bad-faith read. There's a whole narrative scaffolding that points you at Snape early, race aside. But here's the rub: online discourse rarely cares about scaffolding. It cares about clips, captions, and dunk counts.
What HBO has to navigate now
Between memes and real racism, the series is already framed by the "only Black teacher at Hogwarts" talking point. That puts pressure on the adaptation to be smarter and more precise than the films were with Snape, because nuance is going to get chewed up by the algorithm.
Do they need to tweak how early Harry targets Snape? Maybe. Not to cater to trolls, but to make sure the audience understands why Harry is wrong without letting the internet reduce it to a race gag. Optics and sensitivity matter, even when the text backs the character dynamics. If anything, the show has to underline the actual reasons Harry misreads Snape while still letting Snape be, well, Snape.
Bottom line
SNL did what SNL does: it jumped on a trending bit and got a few clean hits in, some fair, some cheap. The bigger takeaway is that Essiedu's Snape is going to be living inside a louder, messier conversation than the character ever had in the movies. If HBO sticks the landing, the performance will drown out the nonsense. If not, get ready for a long season of "gotcha" clips and zero context.