Melissa McCarthy is no stranger to appearing on Saturday Night Live, both as an announced host and in a cameo capacity. She’s made more than a dozen appearances over the last fifteen years and is clearly someone those working on the show trust to get laughs. As such, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when she was one of the famous faces to show up last night in the Five-Timers Club sketch to support Jack Black, but it was a surprise when she also popped out from behind a curtain in a second sketch later in the night.
The second sketch was probably the most outrageous thing the show ran during the episode. It featured Jack Black as a creepy AirBNB host who wanted to stay and hang out with the guests. Midway through, McCarthy was introduced as the wife of his deceased sister and occasional lover. To everyone’s horror, the two proceeded to rub up against each other and put lotion on the guests. You can watch the madness below…
McCarthy and Black don’t exactly have identical senses of humor, but they’re both willing to jump in the deep end and completely sell out for a joke. They share that ability to double down and double down and double down on physical jokes, and they each have a good sense of how long to linger with something if it’s really hitting. You can really see that in this sketch when McCarthy keeps going back to the raspberries she’s blowing on his back.
That willingness to do anything, as well as their popular and prolonged careers, are ultimately why both McCarthy and Black have entered the Five-Timers Club. The show clearly likes working with hosts who aren’t self-conscious and are willing to try things. Both McCarthy and Black have an ability to be low key funny in a more sharply-written and relatable way and high key funny in a more over-the-top and flamboyant kind of way. This is obviously a case of the latter, though there are plenty of SNL examples of the former too.
As for the Five-Timers Club sketch, it should surprise no one that it turned into a musical performance at the end. Before it got there though, we also got cameos from Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Candice Bergen and musical guest Jack White, who also made an appearance in the country song sketch later in the night. The crowd seemed to love it, and it was nice to see Black officially induced, given he’s also made cameos and appeared as a musical guest during his storied career.
You can catch a new episode on April 11th when the show returns with its next guest host Colman Domingo, who will be doing the monologue for the first time inside Studio 8H. I can’t wait.
