Saturday Night Live kicks off with the chaos engulfing the United States House of Representatives. Three-time loser Jim Jordan (Mikey Day) is frustrated over his failure to secure the speaker role and is consoled by fellow Republican laughingstocks George Santos (Bowen Yang) and Lauren Boebert (Chloe Fineman), the latter calling in her condolences from a showing of Aladdin while getting felt up.
Finally, the big man himself, Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) waltzes in. Jordan is upset that the former president endorsed him only to ghost him, to which Trump responds: “I prefer the Jordans who win.” He further explains that he doesn’t like Jordan because of “The lack of the jacket. You don’t look good. You look like the night manager at a two-star steakhouse.”
There’s been a lot of Republican nonsense over the past few months for SNL to catch up on, enough so that you’d think they’d spread it out over a number of sketches. So, it’s disappointing that they decided to roll through most of it in such a sloppy, rushed fashion. And for as much this sketch ostensibly makes fun of Jordan, it actually goes easy on him, considering all of the skeletons in his closet. This is an issue SNL has when it comes to almost every Republican outside of Trump, Mitch McConnell and Rudy Giuliani.
Bad Bunny pulls double duty as host and musical guest. The Puerto Rican singer and rapper addresses concerns over his abilities in the former capacity due to English not being his first language, before explaining that “I do whatever I want.” He delivers a good chunk of his monologue in Spanish, stopping to have the production team change the closed captions from “[Speaking Spanish]” to “[Speaking a sexier language]”.
He’s joined on stage by fellow Latino superstar Pedro Pascal – who returns after hosting last season – there to translate and give advice. Pascal tells Bad Bunny to make self-deprecating jokes and show embarrassing pictures of himself, but the host is too cocky and cool for either. It certainly seems like the show is aware of Bad Bunny’s weaknesses and is prepared to throw in lots of help to keep him protected.
At an underground rap battle, Bad Bunny goes to battle with Day’s nervous MC, Walter Whiteboy. Whiteboy decides to cut his opponent off at the knees by dissing himself first, dropping self-eviscerating bars about his white trash upbringing, his incestual relationship with his first cousin, getting catfished by his own dad and his extra testicles. This is Day’s show all the way, with Bad Bunny doing little more than standing around and reacting.
Next up is a pre-filmed Spanish historical drama. Bad Bunny and Marcello Hernandez play a king and prince, greeting a returning explorer (played by a guesting Fred Armisen) from his trip to the “New World”. He’s brought back some never-before-seen wildlife, fruits and veggies, and tobacco – all of which gross the royals out (at least until they try the tobacco). There are some decent lines here – Hernandez describing a llama as “a horse but worse” and a pumpkin as a “herpes melon” – but nothing never rises above a chuckle. Kudos to the show for letting it all play out in Spanish (with English subtitles) though.
Hernandez and Bad Bunny team up again for the next sketch, playing actors on a telenovela. Their intense fight scene is ruined by a third actor (Punkie Johnson) with a small walk-on part who doesn’t speak Spanish. Everyone is confused by how she got hired given that the role called for a Latina actor, until she explains that her name is Latina Jefferson. Then, out of nowhere, Mick Jagger shows up as their on-screen father. It’s very fun watching Jagger ham things up in a Spanish accent, but the sketch ends so abruptly as to make your head spin.
A new Please Don’t Destroy short sees Bad Bunny drop in on the guys in a “full-ass Shrek costume”. They assume he wants to do a Shrek sketch, but he actually wants them to do a read-through of a feature-length Shrek movie he wrote. The boys reluctantly go through with it. Bad Bunny is hardly any better an actor in these pre-filmed sketches than he is live, not that you’d know it from the reactions of his fans in the audience, performatively hooting and hollering for his every line read no matter how stilted, jumbled or flat. But the show is more than happy to oblige the audience their fandom, giving them – for the second week in a row – a megastar to introduce the first musical performance. Last week it was Taylor Swift. This time out it’s Lady Gaga.
Following Bad Bunny’s first set, it’s time for Weekend Update. Michael Che invites on Jada Pinkett-Smith (Ego Nwodim) to discuss the revelations in her buzz-worthy new memoir about her marriage to Will Smith. She says that despite being separated for years, they’re in a good place, noting that “nothing makes me feel stronger than publicly cucking my millionaire husband”. Che wonders why she doesn’t just get a divorce, to which she responds, “If we got divorced, he could mess around and end up happy.”
It’s a pretty brutal skewering of Pinkett-Smith – and, to a lesser extent, Will Smith – but after their Oscar antics of two years ago you can’t say they don’t have it coming. Still, you’d think the show could heap some of that savagery on to even more deserving targets like Jordan and Boebert.
Hernandez reprises his role from last season as dutiful son Luis, bringing his latest (white) girlfriend, Casey (new featured player Chloe Troast), home to meet his aunt (played, of course, by Bad Bunny in full drag). His tia is overly protective, but not nearly as much as his hot-blooded mother (Pascal), who makes a surprise appearance. Pascal is very good in the role and there are some solid jokes about Latino culture (using store-bought cookie tins to store random household items gets a big knowing laugh), but he feels somewhat reined in having to share the spotlight with the host. Pascal’s episode last season was by no means a classic, but he was very game in that role. Seeing him here, it makes you wish he had duties this time around too.
An inspirational drama in the vein of The Pursuit of Happyness serves as the foreground for an array of insane behavior on a subway train, including fistfights, flashers, and a “big-ass rat” attack.
Then, following Bad Bunny’s second musical performance, we find ourselves in a convent, where the nuns are shocked to learn that one of their number is actually a man who’s been sleeping with almost every woman there. The answer is obviously the one played by Bad Bunny, who is at his worst here. However, bad as he is, the regular cast are worse, each of them mugging it up to the nth degree. Things are slightly redeemed when Jagger – who can actually act – shows back up towards the end.
The final sketch takes place at the corporate headquarters of Burt’s Bees, where a small group of employees worry about layoffs in the face of a new merger, but are continually interrupted by Bad Bunny’s co-worker, who just wants to talk about his daughter’s recent engagement and her nice new fiance, Jeff. It’s a mistake to give Bad Bunny this much dialog this late into the episode, as he is incapable of delivering it without seeming like he’s about to break. It also doesn’t help that this is by far the weakest sketch of the night, with its nothing premise and complete lack of focus.
This was a bad episode, with much of the onus landing on Bad Bunny. It’s important to note that it’s not his fluency in English that hampered him – the show deftly handled that by giving him a lot of Spanish material and giving much of the heavy lifting to other guest stars. It’s that he seems to find the very idea of himself doing comedy in and of itself the funniest thing imaginable, coming off like the high school jock who gets pulled on stage for a skit during an assembly. If you’re one of his diehard admirers, maybe that energy is infectious, but for everyone else, it’s agonizing to watch.
On the other hand, SNL has made some strides over the last two seasons to engage more with Latino audiences, with this being the second season in a row with an entire episode geared towards us. That has to count for something.
