Spirit Halloween jabs back at Saturday Night Live

You know what they say: hell hath no fury like a Spirit Halloween scorned. Now that it’s October and the iconic Halloween costume-and-decoration chain is popping back up around the country, Saturday Night Live kicked off its 50th season with some pretty rote jokes about the brand. Spirit Halloween carries “Wigs that give you a rash, single-use fog machines, and costumes of famous characters tweaked just enough to avoid a lawsuit” and creates “six-week jobs for some of America’s hardest hit perverts,” the pre-taped sketch proclaimed, to the prompting a snarky response from the actual store.

As noted in The A.V. Club’s recap of the SNL season premiere (which reviewer Jesse Hassenger gave a C grade), the sketch is “not exactly packed with revelations.” In fact, you can find more or less the same jabs in our coverage of Spirit Halloween: The Movie (which reviewer Jordan Hoffman gave a C- grade), or, like, from passersby on the sidewalk outside of any Spirit Halloween in the country on any given day. But perhaps the fact that these obvious jokes are repeated so often is why the SNL sketch was Spirit Halloween’s final straw. 

“We are great at raising things back from the dead @nbcsnl,” the brand posted on Twitter/X. The post is accompanied by a photo of a faux “SNL 50 The Anniversary Season” costume, described in oddly Trumpian terms: “Irrelevant 50-year-old Show,” it reads. “Includes: Dated references, Unknown cast members, Shrinking ratings.”

We are great at raising things back from the dead @nbcsnl https://t.co/TSlPALgKJ0 pic.twitter.com/EjrYa86Erz

— Spirit Halloween (@SpiritHalloween) September 30, 2024

A harsh rebuttal and, one might say, possibly an overreaction to a pretty toothless SNL sketch. But the truth is, getting into online feuds is a cheap and easy marketing tool for brands. That’s why you see things like Oreo beefing with The Weeknd and Dionne Warwick. By calling SNL “irrelevant” after getting name-dropped on the show, Spirit gets to extend the news cycle with a dozen “Spirit Halloween CLAPS BACK” headlines in Variety, Entertainment Weekly and, well, The A.V. Club. It’s a devious and effective late-stage capitalism strategy that not only boosts the store’s visibility but also elevates a middling SNL sketch—one that otherwise would have disappeared from our cultural memory like, say, a Spirit Halloween at the beginning of November.