Saturday Night Live opens with Joe Biden’s (Mikey Day) press conference following his meeting with Xi Jinping. The US president brags about the “total win” of a meeting, in which he secured “more pandas” for America, only to immediately undo his accomplishment by calling the Chinese president a dictator.
After dodging a question about the border, he brings out one of those aforementioned pandas (Bowen Yang) to distract the fickle press. The panda is frightened about a potential second Trump term that could lead to a civil war, but not enough to endorse Biden in the election.
A real shrug of a cold open. It feels like SNL is just treading water until it can put Biden and Trump in the same room.
Jason Momoa hosts for the second time. The Aquaman star excitedly speaks about his love for his native Hawaii and his environmental efforts to protect the ocean. And…that’s it. There’s zero in the way of performance and two or three humorous lines (it would be charitable to call them jokes) at most.
Masters of the Pen is a PBS show about iconic authors. Today’s episode is on Wizard of Oz author L Frank Baum and features newly-discovered footage from the early 1900s of Baum (Michael Longfellow) sitting on a public bench, writing. The hosts of the show try to study the footage for clues about Baum’s process, but passersby keep interrupting, walking into center frame and acting silly. As with the cold open and the monologue, there’s nothing interesting, clever, or memorable to found here.
After a music video about the much-memed male obsession with the Roman Empire, Momoa plays a bouncer at a popular Miami nightclub who is unable to turn people away without calling them ugly.
Momoa is affable as the big dumb lug, and his bad Cuban accent is somewhat entertaining, but there’s a lot of drawn-out set up with zero payoff.
The Hudson News Thanksgiving Week Airport Parade comes to us live from Newark Airport (“everyone’s third choice”). This year’s rollcall of frazzled travelers include a couple on their last Thanksgiving trip together, a TSA agent shouting the same thing (“Laptop out the bag!”) several different ways, a gentle parenting father and his out-of-control, evil child (the kid actor calling James Austin Johnson a bitch gets the biggest laugh of the night so far), Momoa’s sleazy, drunk pilot, and the star of the show: a woman who’s about to go viral for claiming one of the other passengers isn’t real.
A new Please Don’t Destroy short sees Martin and Ben try to console a freshly dumped John, even as all they can think about is the ramen they want to order for dinner. While still containing their share of laughs, the PDD videos this season have been noticeably less zany and surreal than past ones.
Following musical guest Tate McRae’s performance, it’s time for Weekend Update. Their first guest is Representative George Santos (Yang), hot off a scathing House report that he spent campaign finances on clothes, Onlyfans accounts, and cosmetic surgery. The bitchy serial liar pretends to field calls from celebrities, takes credit for inventing gayness and the cups game, and uses a baby like a cellphone. Given that Santos’s time in the spotlight is likely drawing to a close, you’d think SNL would want to use the character a bigger sendoff, but this will have to suffice.
Later, Michael Che brings welcomes Golden State Warrior and professional menace Draymond Green (Devon Walker), recently suspended for choking an opponent during a game. Green is entirely unapologetic about his actions – “I can’t wait to do it again,” he exclaims – and thinks he should be given leeway since “I was trying to kill him. So if you think about it … I showed restraint.”
The third and final guest is the night’s backup musical guests Remember Lizards (Johnson and Andrew Dismukes). The duo often get confused for the much more popular Imagine Dragons, with whom they share a similar name as well as a musical genre: “Uplifting, kid-friendly hip-hop/arena rock with a pump-up edge.” They play some of their tracks, ostensibly a “worse version” of Imagine Dragons songs (although it’s actually indistinguishable from the real dreck). A decent send up of a specific type of pop music, but not nearly as barbed as it should be.
Next, a married couple (Dismukes and Chloe Fineman) prepare for a visit from the wife’s ex-boyfriend, recently rescued after being stranded on a desert island for five years. She expects her former flame to be “all messed-up and frail,” only to discover that he’s turned into a suntanned, windswept god of a man. It’s not long until Momoa is shirtless, prompting Dismukes to follow suit. The image of their two very different physiques seated next to each other on a small couch makes for a decent visual gag, but this sketch was clearly designed to brook more swoons than laughs.
Untold: Battle of the Sexes is a new Netflix documentary about 70s tennis player and brash feminist icon Charna Lee Diamond (Sarah Sherman). Years before Billy Jean King took on Bobby Riggs, Diamond threw down an open challenge to play any man who thought they could beat her. Unfortunately for her, her opponent ended up being Ronnie Dunster, the largest man to ever play tennis. Dunster’s first serve sends the tennis ball straight through Diamond’s stomach and his second decapitates her. The best sketch of the night and a welcome return of Sherman’s brand of body horror comedy.
The final sketch sees Momoa as a cab driver giving a lift to Kenan Thompson’s holiday traveler. The driver takes a bad news call from his doctor on speaker phone, much to the horror of his passenger. He learns he has high cholesterol, herpes, something called “hepatitis gold”, pants-flooding incontinence, and a negative penis (as in, negative in length). This one is noticeably low energy, but Momoa does a good job switching over to deadpan delivery.
After two strong episodes in a row, this latest SNL was a noticeable stumble, although hardly any kind of disaster. Momoa is an affable enough host, but he’s only as good as the material he’s given. Hopefully, he has better stuff to work with when he becomes a three-time host in the future.
