Well, here we are again.
The last time an episode of Saturday Night Live followed the election of Donald Trump, it embarrassed itself by having Kate McKinnon play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah while dressed as Hilary Clinton and offer a tearful vow to keep fighting.
It looks like more of the same at the start of this episode, with the cast gathered on stage, solemnly addressing the audience about Trump’s return to power and the lack of guardrails keeping him from taking revenge on his enemies.
However, this is all a misdirect, as revealed when they collectively address Trump himself: “We … have been with you all along. We have never waivered in our support of you, even when others doubted you. Every single person on this stage believes in you. Every single person on this stage voted for you.”
James Austin Johnson shows up and debuts his new creation, “hot, jacked Trump”, while Dana Carvey comes out as dancing, jumping buffoon Elon Musk, who brags about how he’s “running the country now.” (Maya Rudolph is nowhere to be found, which is probably for the best.)
While this cold open is preferable to that godawful one from eight years ago, it’s hard to take the disingenuousness as genuine: after all, SNL was more than happy to have both Trump and Musk host before, and well after their reprehensible natures were on full display.
Bill Burr returns to host for the second time. The comic initially avoids talking about the election, jumping right into a standup routine about the flu and vaccines (“If you get it, you side with the evil pharmaceutical companies, if you don’t you’re aligned with people who don’t wear shoes on an airplane”). However, he eventually does crash right into the orange elephant in the room, putting the blame for the election’s outcome squarely on women: “You’re 0-2 against this guy … enough with the pantsuit, it’s not working … you don’t win the office on policy, you gotta whore it up a little! I know a lot of ugly women – feminists – don’t want to hear this…”
This is definitely not what a large percent of the show’s audience wants to hear, and Burr struggles to get the live crowd on his side, although he mostly brings them around by the monologue’s end. I expect the larger reaction across social media will be less forgiving.
The first sketch takes place in a fire station, where a mental health expert runs a series of Rorschach tests to a group of macho firemen. Most of the guys just see everyday things like trees and butterflies, but Burr’s firefighter sees sexualized drawings of cartoon characters, such as the hero of Monsters Inc in wedding lingerie “grabbing onto his little green ass”, Olaf from Frozen running away with Elsa’s top, a jacked Snoopy wearing a red speedo and “walking Charlie Brown like he’s his dog”. The drawings of these scenarios are funny, but it’s the specificity of each that get the biggest laughs.
A commercial for Buffalo Wild Wings sees football fans having Sunday fun at the chain restaurant, save for Burr’s angry, miserable Patriots fan. He complains about his wife (“[she] says I bring tension to the house”) and his lot in life (“I was born white 50 years too late”), before getting into a fist fight with his grown son in front of his young granddaughter. A solid portrait of a certain type of douchebag (Dave Portnoy popping up on the guy’s phone screen is a nice touch).
Then, Burr’s blue-collar father teaches his son about 80s sex rock by way of a greatest hits CD of his favorite band, Snake Skin, “three mid-40s Jewish guys from Long Island singing about slamming nah-nah”. The cuts to the band’s live performances and Burr’s stilted performance give this one a janky feel.
The Janitor is a parody of Good Will Hunting. Michael Longfellow’s MIT custodian solves an impossible math problem but can’t figure out how to clean up a giant puddle of barf. Intermittently funny – such as when Kenan Thompson’s furious college president starts beating Longfellow with a belt – it goes on too long. And while there’s nothing wrong with SNL parodying an older film here and there, would it kill them to send up a current one every once in a while, like they used to?
Next, two young men (Andrew Dismukes, Devon Walker) call their fathers (Thompson, Burr) to check up on them. The emotionally distant dads are only able to express their concerns about mortality through football and cars (“I think my car just wants to be closer to your car, because my car’s car died around the age your car is now”). As with the previous sketch, this one is draggy, and the switch between goofy comedy and fake sentimentality becomes quickly annoying.
Musical guest Mk.gee performs his first set, then its time for Weekend Update. Colin Jost notes that “on Tuesday we learned Democrats don’t actually know how to rig the election,” while Michael Che, drink in hand, can’t believe he let “white liberals and their goofy confidence” convince him “that rural Pennsylvania would pick the black Indian lady”.
Their first guest is a woman who can’t find something in her purse (Ego Nwodim). She’s there to talk about active listening skills, even though she’s obviously very distracted rummaging through a giant handbag that contains a dead goldfish, an unfiled election ballet, a gun, and the thing she was looking for all along: a smaller purse. Nwodim is good as always, but the audience just isn’t into it (this is true of the show on the whole, but their silence is more pronounced here).
Later, Che introduces his ex-neighbor Willie (Thompson), a perpetual optimist who hopes to cheer everyone up, even though all his life stories – chucking batteries at Jackie Robinson, dog fighting, suicide attempts – are terrible. Like Nwodim, Thompson is fine, but the vibe is just off.
A new couple (Sarah Sherman, Mikey Day) celebrate how nothing weird has happened on their first date, until they notice that everyone else in the restaurant is bald. This leads to a surreal musical number where the proud baldies celebrate their way of life. It’s a surprisingly big production that makes good use of nearly two dozen extras.
At a trauma support group, Bowen Yang’s jerk throws things off by belittling everyone else’s stories (even as his own are trivial), eating all the doughnuts, and burning his fellow members with cigarettes. Burr’s turn as a flouncy grief counselor is good for some chuckles, but Yang and new cast member Ashley Padilla are off, missing cues and breaking for no reason.
Mk.gee plays his second song, before the episode wraps up – as so many of late have – with a dinner party at a restaurant. The jovial mood is completely broken when one member of the table (Padilla) tells, and then retells, a long, awkward, terribly unfunny joke about “four beautiful dogs” who try to locate the smell of poop in their house. The sketch pretty mirrors the overall episode; both are filled with dead air and discomfort.
On the one hand, you can’t really blame the show or Burr for this (even if he had to know his opening material wouldn’t go over well), being how dark the national mood is so. But anyone counting on Saturday Night Live to rise to the occasion and deliver truly scathing satire will be disappointed. Then again, I doubt any such person exists. The show’s political material in the lead-up to the election was exceedingly lame, so why would we expect different in its wake?
