Photo: Rosalind O’Connor/NBC
Surely, an episode of Saturday Night Live featuring two separate dogs in two consecutive sketches can’t be all bad, right? Right?
Indeed, it can’t. That’s just science. But last night’s SNL came close enough to handily claim the title of this season’s most dismal episode so far. It made the previous week’s middling Shane Gillis-hosted effort look like a gut-busting romp in comparison.
There was a moment in the opening monologue that telegraphed the mess to come. Host Sydney Sweeney made a joke rehashing the non-troversy around a MAGA-hat cameo at her mom’s birthday party in 2022, and its punchline was a bad pun. A horrendous one. Now, it’s not that bad puns are inherently unfunny; it’s just that their success depends on context and delivery and how clear the badness itself is the joke. But when Sweeney contorted the word “Idaho” to sound like an uncomfortable evasion — “I-dunno” — she attempted to both sell the sweatiness of the wordplay and take it at face value. It tanked. The issue isn’t with the host, though, but the writing. Nobody could make that joke work, and this misfire set the tone for an episode that never quite figured out how best to use Sweeney.
It’s hard to believe this is the same team that built a consistently funny show around Sweeney’s Euphoria costar, Jacob Elordi, back in January. Although too many sketches in that episode revolved around Elordi being a stone-cold Adonis, none was quite as over-obvious and joke-light as the one in which Sweeney plays the world’s most successful Hooters waitress.
Elsewhere, the show pitched in Sweeney’s strike zone and failed to connect. In one sketch, she played a riff on her White Lotus character, Olivia, an over-it Zoomer whose every utterance is withering. (They even outfitted her with eyeglasses in the sketch.) The character’s SNL counterpart is a social media sleuth whose catchphrase — an impossibly bored “Found him” — gets more grating with each repeat. It goes nowhere. In another sketch, she plays a bombshell high schooler à la Euphoria’s Cassie, but the twist is that she inexplicably has the hots for the school’s new basketball star, Air Bud. This one similarly fails to build on the premise after establishing it, even with the help of one preternaturally patient pooch.
By the end of the “Air Bud” sketch, I felt bad for the dog. By the end of the episode, I felt bad for the viewers.
Here are the highlights:
John Higgins does some capital-A acting as he and his PDD cohort grieve a recently deceased friend in this sketch. Ben Marshall and Martin Herlihy come across like guys in a comedy show pretending to be bereaved, but Higgins looks like the real thing. His acting helps ground us in reality before the deflating revelation that the cause of their friend’s death is “a donkey kicked him in the nuts so hard he fell into the Grand Canyon.” And just when the gang’s sadness takes a backseat to the many other preposterous details of their tragic loss, they conjure authentic-looking sadness while Sweeney watches loud footage of the goofiest death in history. All in all, it was the most original Please Don’t Destroy video in some time.
Originality is mainly what this sketch has going for it as well, even if the results are not quite as successful. What if a Judge Mathis-like daytime courtroom show had 17 judges, for some reason? That’s the sandbox this sketch plays around in. Ego Nwodim is such a delight as Judge Carlotta, who presides over her trial with the glee of a hooked spectator; she almost doesn’t need the comedic fireworks of 16 different types of judges around her to make this sketch work. The Hollywood Squares–like setup makes for a fun visual, though, and Judge Woof suggests that the Air Bud Cinematic Universe might have one more place left to go.
The best part of seeing Bowen Yang play an aggressively straight dude is that he barely changes anything about himself in order to do it. He may fistbump coworkers and make out with Gina Gershon, but he’s mostly just his usual self. As his portrayal of the fuckboi lifestyle gets more cartoonish — jetting off to Paris with a hot lady on each arm — so do the nods toward Yang’s actual orientation, like taking PrEP. As a bonus, this sketch might mark the first time the show has ever alluded to Yang’s long-running podcast, Las Culturistas.
A stingray from a North Carolina aquarium has apparently had an immaculate conception, leaving scientists stumped. Nwodim dons a massive, tent-like getup with gold hoop earrings to play Charlotte. We’ve barely had time to digest this wild costume before Charlotte starts assuring everyone she is not actually a virgin and that Michael Che is, in fact, the father. Nwodim sells every ridiculous line with an upbeat inflection and impressively straight face and extracts big laughs from the studio audience. Between this desk piece and her turn in the “Big Bench” sketch, she easily snatches this episode’s MVP honors. And just to bring it back to puns for a second, “Okay, NatGeo — that is NatGeo business” is wordplay done right.
This may be the first time I’ve broken up a Weekend Update proper and a guest’s desk piece separately in this section. Truly, though, it would have been too much of a stretch to put any other sketch in the fifth slot, especially not in an episode where Che and Colin Jost go on an epic run of their regular “seen here” jokes to commemorate Mitch McConnell’s retirement from Senate leadership. Hang this bit’s jersey high up in the SNL rafters.
• Of all the chyron gags in the cold open, the best had to be “Jean-Pierre: ‘You Know Biden Was Smashing.’”
• I love that Sweeney’s 5-point plan for success, as seen in the monologue, has a headline in Impact font.
• The “Makeup Artists” sketch is the second of the night to feature a catchphrase — “Shooot” — that turns grating through repetition.
• Musical guest Kacey Musgraves’s quilted coat is a 10/10.
• The back binder clips at the end of Heidi Gardner’s “Woman Who is Aging Gracefully” is an inspired visual joke.
• Is “700 k-cups” a common issue people have when staying at an Airbnb? Environmental concerns aside that sounds like more of a convenience than a problem. This incongruous joke is one of the many that make the “Airbnb design commercial” feel like a squandered premise.
• Speaking of squandered premises, how does that Airbnb ad nod to the infamously grim Glasgow Wonka experience — one of the most talked-about moments of last week — without building the entire sketch around it?
• It says everything about the final sketch of the night that the most notable thing about it is a cameo from Sweeney’s Anyone But You costar, Glen Powell, even though Powell didn’t do anything. Oof.