“Saturday Night Live” fans “Believe” Cher was lip-syncing on the show this weekend.
The 79-year-old pop icon was the musical guest on the sketch comedy program’s final episode of the year on Saturday, taking the stage to sing “DJ Play a Christmas Song” and “Run Run Rudolph.”
But viewers of the show accused Cher of lip-syncing during both performances.
“Cher just did one of the worst lip syncs I’ve ever seen on SNL, which obviously makes her even more iconic,” one fan wrote on X.
Someone else replied, “It was so bad like her mic was down by her waist at some points, her not trying to hide mate made it that much more campy.”
“cher that mic was nowhere near ur mouth for 80% of that snl performance nOT THE LIP SYNCING,” a different viewer tweeted.
“cher is absolutely not singing live rn #snl,” another fan said.
“why the funniest thing on snl so far is cher pretending she singing,” added another viewer.
Someone else tweeted, “who cares if she’s lip-syncing, SHE’S CHER B-TCH.”
Other fans compared Cher’s performance to Ashlee Simpson’s infamous 2004 lip-syncing controversy.
“Cher doing a hell of an Ashlee Simpson impression on SNL. Gotta imagine society has moved past pretending any of these people actually sing at this point, but it’s kinda wild how pissed people actually were about that,” one viewer said on X.
“What in the Ashlee Simpson was that Cher performance just now? #SNL,” another fan tweeted.
A different account wrote, “Oh, Cher. This is the worst lip syncing on #SNL since Ashlee Simpson.”
Another fan added, “We can all forgive Ashlee Simpson – after watching Cher lip sync horrendously on #SNL tonight. What was #Cher thinking?”
In 2004, Simpson, 41, was outed for lip-syncing while serving as the show’s musical guest.
She had performed her famous song “Pieces of Me,” but when she came onstage to perform her second song, “Autobiography,” the wrong vocals played from the earlier song. Simpson reacted by panicking, dancing to try to cover it up and quickly walking offstage.
Simpson reflected on the fiasco in a February 2024 interview on the “Broad Ideas with Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen” podcast, explaining that she “learned a lot” from the controversy. She also noted that she had been 19 or 20 at the time.
“I feel like it was a humbling moment for me,” she said. “I had the No. 1 song. It was, like, everything was about go, like, somewhere and then it was just, like, whoa. The humility of not even understanding what grown-ass people would say about you, awful, awful things.”
Cher joined host Ariana Grande on this weekend’s “SNL,” which marked Bowen Yang’s final episode as a cast member after 7 seasons.
The “Believe” singer last appeared as the musical guest nearly 40 years ago, back in 1987.
However, she has made occasional appearances on the show several times since.
