If anyone watched SNL this weekend, they would have noticed two things: Paul Rudd is like, the coolest guy in the world, and Justin Timberlake dances pretty well in high heels.

Here's one of the better sketches of the show (although we also loved the Samberg/Rudd "Everyone's a critic") where Justin rubs his butt all over Beyonce and we think, "How did Lorne Michaels figure out that weird dream we had back in 1999?"

Since Vegas is already paying off bets on Obama winning the election, the only thing left to gamble on is by how much the Illinois senator will win by. Or, if you are in a particularly risky mood, you could place your money on which candidate will appear on Saturday Night Live on November 1st.

John McCain hinted at an appearance, but won't confirm or deny anything, for fear that a no-show would equal another Late Night disaster of Letterman proportions. Barack Obama has already appeared on the show, the same time last year, for a sketch about Hillary and Bill hosting a Halloween party, but so far there isn't any confirmation about a repeat performance this year either, although rumors abound.

So far this season, all the guest-guessing has paid off: look what happened when the people clamored for Tina Fey, Sarah Palin, and Mark Wahlberg (all in the same episode, no less!). But Lorne Michaels refuses to confirm any appearances until he gets them "in the building," because at this point there have been so many cancellations (who? who??) that it's making the NBC producers look silly. Heaven forbid anything concerning SNL appears farcical.

In the wake of an awkward and unnecessary Sarah Palin appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend, news comes that Lorne Michaels, who recently donated $4,600 to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, may have coaxed the Illinois senator into appearing on SNL the Saturday before the election:

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Saturday Night Live is becoming a Kuafman-esque Ouroboros, with pretend feuds leaking out onto the stages of Jimmy Kimmel and the like, so you can no longer tell who is actually mad about their SNL caricatures, and who is just pretending to be mad so they can show up for a cameo. And that is totally fine, according to Alec Baldwin, who took out some space at Huffpost to declare his support of Lorne's decision to have VP nominee Sarah Palin drop-in for a cameo this week.

Except, no one said it was a bad idea Alec. So just chill out

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The media has a terrible habit of comparing their serendipitous successes with horrific human tragedies. When Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston split up in Jan. 2005, Us Weekly's Kent Brownridge (then Jann Wenner's No. 2, and now the head of OK!) said, "For a celebrity weekly, this is our tsunami," before rushing to print a 40,000-word book on the break-up. That was, of course, one month after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean created devastating tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people in 11 countries. Brownridge apologized the very next day.

Then, in the summer of 2005, back when Gruner + Jahr still had a U.S. presence, then-editor of Fast Company John Bryne described the countdown to a decision about which mags would survive — G+J was selling four titles to Meredith, but ended up keeping FC and Inc. — as "kind of like being in a hostage crisis." TOTALLY THE SAME THING!

So how does Lorne Michaels, the Saturday Night Live executive producer, feel about the way things have transpired in this presidential election, which he has reaped for comedic gold?

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Rather than work out his late late night routine at comedy clubs, incoming NBC show host Jimmy Fallon will ramp up his nightly shtick on the Interwebs. Sometime this fall, he'll be unleashing material 450 percent less amusing than anything posted on FunnyOrDie.com. Lorne Michaels, Fallon's boss at Saturday Night Live and now his Late Night executive producer, will "post [the clips] at 12:30 every night, so people will begin to look for Jimmy at that time." They'll also learn to post the harshest criticism Fallon has ever seen at 12:31. [NYT]

Lorne Michaels isn't sweating any of the racial controversy for having Fred Armisen play Barack Obama.

Armisen, of Venezuelan and Japanese descent, sat with a Hillary Clinton-playing Amy Poehler during their Saturday Night Live debate skit, and will reprise his role of Barack Obama this week. It's sure to upset some, like the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan who rhetorically asked, "Call me crazy, but shouldn't 'Saturday Night Live's' fictional Sen. Barack Obama be played by an African-American?"

(For what it's worth, Obama's father is Kenyan, so by that logic, shouldn't he be played by an African?)

Nobody had a problem, Howie Kurtz notes, when Darrell Hammond played the Rev. Jesse Jackson, or even when Armisen played Prince.

The issue comes down to minstrelsy: Is Armisen's impersonation of a black man rooted in the deplorable American tradition of white (and black) actors dressing up as exaggerated blacks? SNL's makeup crew looks to have powdered his skin a different color. Is that blackface, or just a necessary impersonation technique?

Or why not sweep the whole issue under the carpet with a full-proof decision?

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THE BRILLIANCE OF LORNE MICHAELS Returning from the writers strike with four new episodes, the SNL exec producer says: "Our competition isn't other television shows. It's Guitar Hero." [AP]

This just in: Maya Rudolph unquits SNL, after a long "agonizing" decision in which the network execs showered her with giant sacks of money and incentives, got down on their hands and knees and literally begged her to stay. [TVGuide]

Earlier: Saturday Night Live Loses Its Multipurpose Ethnic Performer

• Dave Zinczenko and Kate White swap spit in Men's Health and Cosmopolitan, leading to all sorts of fun body image issues.

• NYT's new newsroom violates Jeff Jarvis' prophecy. (The company's tech support and payroll will still be handled in Norfolk.)

• Why won't anyone pay attention to the nasty legal wrangling going on at Dealbreaker.com?

• Atoosa Rubenstein: Still a media darling.

• Lorne Michaels is the last to know what NBC is doing with his SNL.

• Who cares about ratings with those blue eyes of his? Not CNN, who's said to be re-upping him for $50m over 5 years.

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If you're anything like us (which, if you are, we highly recommend not publicly admitting) you get the majority of your news from Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment. Which is why we're taking this latest news out of Rockefeller Center especially hard.

After 9 years, Tina Fey is leaving the NBC weekend staple. The head writer for SNL and comedic "newscaster" for Weekend Update will depart in order focus on her new sitcom, 30 Rock — which stars Desaree Bradford torture victim Alec Baldwin.

Producer Lorne Michaels will surely have a tough time replacing the talented writer, who wrote the screenplay for Mean Girls and is set to contribute to the screen comedy Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill.

We wish her good luck with her new show — the least she can hope for is better luck than Lorne Michaels had with Sons & Daughters.

Tina Fey leaving 'SNL' to go solo [Marisa Guthrie, Daily News]

We were with you here, folks. We also didn't think Saturday Night Live could suck any more than it already does. Horatio Sanz. Need we say more? About the only funny thing coming out of SNL these days is David Spade's upcoming appearance this morning on Martha to reenact his Martha Stewart skit.

But the new cast is about to suffer another blow with Tina Fey's extended absence thanks to motherhood (she popped one out last Saturday) and her "Weekend Update" replacement going unnamed as yet. Meanwhile, Maya Rudolph is also out on maternity leave, which means Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers to make Lorne Michaels chuckle.

But the real question is: Will Tina Fey be ready in time for the Emmys? And will she fit into her dress?