ESince the news started somewhere around November 2016 in high gear, Saturday Night Live has struggled to address it all within the designated political setback of the cold open sketch. Instead of choosing one story and really going into it, the writers chose to think of a situation broadly enough to work in three or four main topics.
This week we open a news program in Minnesota in the evening. Two white anchors (Kate McKinnon and Alex Moffat) struggle to get on the same page as their black colleagues (Kenan Thompson and Ego Nwodim, Chris Redd appearing on probation as a defender) while awaiting trial on Derek Chauvin’s death DMX, reported. and Prince Philip, the Matt Gaetz sex scandal and Paul Pierce’s dismissal from ESPN. Reading the stories varies between the racial divisions.
The core is healthy: they understand events in the same way, but the white newspaper people respond with moderate hopefulness produced by a life of privilege, while their black equivalents have every reason for cynicism. (“We’ve seen this movie before,” Nwodim argues why she’s sure Chauvin will walk.) But this difference is not joked by a premise, but only spread on the screen. This is an appropriate setting for an evening that reaches its lowest points if you want to make cultural comments about simply reaping the laughter.
Carey Mulligan’s monologue revolves around her perception as a serious actress, a recurring theme on an evening that sees her stuck in not one, but two parodies of the stern face she’s so used to playing. She explains in a subtle way that during the pandemic break during production, she released her spear energy from her children’s bedtime stories, now populated by swarming dragons and grieving princesses learning to live again.
She tries hard, but more often than not, she is simply not funny, rather than ironically pointing to her discomfort. Case in point: a quick joke with her husband, Marcus Mumford, that pops up but does not even go over the subject, a recent dismissal of a bandmate in light of the discovery that he is a Republican wing.
The following two sketches enliven worn-out templates – the games program and the advertisement – with absurdism that makes Mulligan look good. In the first, she is a contestant who can not get the hang of “What’s wrong with this picture?”
The out-of-whack element in each image could no longer be clear, but she and her teammates extract every other possible answer from their rotting brains. An illustration by a doctor delivering a baby under a watch with letters instead of numbers provides the answer: ‘The mother has only one leg, the baby has no problem flying. ‘To Mulligan’s honor, she’s giving the line to the deadpan commitment that makes the sketch work. The same goes for a faux ad promoting an IBS medication, in which she lies down to a bathroom during a children’s music contemplation and comes to a halt while everyone reacts in horror to the fecal wreck. Mulligan has her pleasure and warns the one witness to ‘keep the fuck shut’.
Mulligan and McKinnon interpret the best sketch of the night as classmates as they prepare to take their relationship to the next level, an exciting but terrifying prospect for McKinnon’s barely pubescent son, Josh. He calls his still nerdy friend Jason (Aidy Bryant) and this is where the flesh of the sketch lies, while one awkward goofball coaches another through a fumble with the undeserved confidence of a pickup artist. The bracket-clad Bryant proudly says, “I give you my hat!” is the pure, self-evident kind of comedy that makes the show spin.
Then we see another of the hip hop parodies that is seemingly obligatory when a rapper is the musical guest. Kid Cudi joins Pete Davidson and Chris Redd for Weird Little Flute, a trap for piccolo monsters. This is a one-joke concept, which relies on a vending machine from Timothee Chalamet. The sketch can only represent three examples from decades of songs, a limited view emphasized by Cudi’s introspective, emotional performances. Performing Tequila Shots through a grid of blue and red lasers and Sad People while wearing a floral dress – a tribute to Kurt Cobain, the same for his saturated jersey in the first issue – he continues to push his genre into sensitive new directions.
Weekend Update has a reasonable relationship between fog and mist, with early injury over the Gaetz Venmo payments and the Coca-Cola boycott that Donald Trump encouraged. Per Michael Che: “I suspected Don Jr. would have the coke problem!” The guests go two for three, starting with Barack Obama of Redd and Bruce Springsteen of Beck Bennett to share some of the hilarious banal chatter they perfected on their podcast. The writing for Pineapple, one of the strippers of Paul Pierce’s video, falls back on tired stereotypes with a low ball. (“Stripper brain!” She giggles and realizes that she said something stupid.) The best is Bowen Yang as the iceberg that sank the Titanic, a famous person who did a desperate PR rehab tour during which he rather ‘ a hyperpop nu-disco album. Between the ridiculous song snippet and the magnificent headpiece, it’s a clear high water mark for the night.
This is followed by the lowest valley, a Star Trek spoof in which Mulligan, Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman play nurtured members of Gen Z who scurry around in the modern workplace. They speak in phrases that betray an old person’s idea of a young man, all ‘literally poisonous’ and ‘stop igniting me’, that their false attention to suicide is an unnecessarily nasty punch line. It is unclear why Saturday Night Live would do anything to alienate a market he had to so badly retain. When the piece ends with the annoying, needy, jargon-spitting twenty things thrown out of the sky to die in the frozen vacuum of space, it begs the question: why would anyone tune in to a show where they are clearly not welcome? is not?
It’s a strange transition for the next sketch, a parody of lesbian period drama apparently set on cinephiles, which made Portrait of a Lady on Fire a sleeping sensation. Mulligan never goes far enough to provoke the silliness. The pseudo-trailer for Satan’s Alley of Tropic Thunder did it better with Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr. as monks in a forbidden romance, a clearer idea of such oppression that such films are shed for the time being.
Mulligan enchants her a little better than a conscientious wife writing to her husband at sea in a Ken Burns-like History Channel program. The joke continues to develop with Mulligan, who goes from excessive toughness to closed cocaine samples, suggesting she killed his parents. It manages the debauchery that is endemic to the final sketches of the night, better than the actual last, with Mulligan and Bryant as female stocking sellers trying to join teens on their label L’eggs. Your enjoyment will depend on whether you see comedy in the flesh color of pantyhose.
Mulligan looks relieved at the end. She was a strange fit as host from the jump, and although it has yielded pleasant surprises in the past, her presence feels more like a plan of her Oscar campaign than anything else. If her quest was to keep her name in the voters’ minds while showing that she is nice and good on her feet, the mission was accomplished.