In a rare and surprising example of restraint, this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live avoids diving straight into The Thing, save for a brief mention late in its cold open. Instead, the show opens with a new episode of Fox & Friends that sees morning talkshow hosts and rightwing stooges Steve Doocy (Alex Moffat), Ainsley Earhardt (Heidi Gardner) and Brian Kilmeade (Mikey Day) lob softball questions at supreme court justice Clarence Thomas (Kenan Thompson) and wife Ginni (Kate McKinnon).
Justice Thomas is cagey about his recent hospitalization, while Ginny – AKA, “the Yoko Ono of the supreme court” – unconvincingly denies her role in the Capitol riot, even as she can’t help but call upon “a tidal wave of biblical vengeance to wash away the Biden crime family all the way to Gitmo.”
After a brief tirade about Disney “turning your kindergartener gay” from the network’s resident wino, Judge Jeanine Pirro (Cecily Strong), the hosts are visited by former President Trump (James Austin Johnson), calling in from bed at Mar-a-Lago. He rambles about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars (“I did see slap, I enjoyed slap, I was very impressed with my Hitch”), before outright copping to his part in the insurrection (“In many ways it was an intentional planned coup, yes”) and its cover-up (“I was too busy with phone call, and burner phone and coup.”)
This cold open suffers from the same lack of narrative and thematic cohesion that most Fox News segments do, but Johnson’s movie-obsessed, definite article-allergic Trump continues to prove a winner and crowd pleaser.
The night’s host is standup comic Jerrod Carmichael. Straight away, Carmichael says he’s “not gonna talk about it …” before going on to do exactly that, even if he never says what “it” is. Instead, he talks about how it feels like we’ve all been “talking about it for so long”, asking, “Doesn’t it feel like it happened somewhere between Jamiroquai and 9/11?”
Despite his reticence, he says Lorne Michael told him he had to discuss it, because “The nation needs to heal”. He’s flabbergasted that Lorne would put that onus on him, given that “has to be the least famous host in SNL history”. Still, he uses the opportunity to introduce himself and promote his new HBO special Rothaniel (in which he comes out as gay), although when it comes to the burden of national responsibility, he passes the buck to former president Obama.
The first sketch of night is a game show called Is My Brain OK?, which tasks contestants with identifying simple things they “definitely knew before Covid”, such as normal items like wheelbarrows (guesses include “bicycle”, “farm bicycles”, and “wheelmonkey”), days of the week, the names of close friends, and ways to start everyday conversations. It’s a clever idea that attempts to coast on its cleverness, but the funniest bits are just Sara Sherman acting like a weirdo.
Short Ass Movie is a new musical number from Pete Davidson, musical guest Gunna, Chris Redd and Red Rocket star Simon Rex. In it, they rap about how their short attention spans render them incapable of watching any movie longer than 90 minutes. It’s a ploddingly obvious bit of guy humor that doesn’t even track with the examples they give: we’re expected to believe modern day bros can’t hang with Heat but will happily toss on Eraserhead? Please. Rex salvages it some with funny bars about his love of the Ernest movies and a good dig at Davidson’s interminable comedy vehicle The King of Staten Island, although his appearance is so random as to be baffling, especially when you consider that his recent breakout came about in a movie that runs at 128 minutes.
On Shop TV, sassy southern hosts (Strong, Day) welcome a dollmaker (Carmichael) to show off his latest toy: Riley Rainbow. Things are going smoothly up until he changes the doll’s dress, revealing a giant, rainbow-colored bush sprouting out of her crotch. He explains it’s not what it looks like – a “vagafro”, as one angry caller refers to it – but simply “the end of the head-spool inside … it’s an anchor point, any dollmaker will know that”. His explanations are unconvincing, but the doll proves a hot item with the home – or in the case of one caller, prison – audience nonetheless.
Following this, the show finally gets around to addressing the elephant in the room. Carmichael play a seat filler at the Oscars who happens to land a seat directly behind his hero Will Smith (Redd) right as Chris Rock is taking the stage. Smith’s intense friendliness before, during and after his violent outbursts gradually reveal the depths of his insanity. It’s not a particularly brilliant take on the story, although Redd’s full-throated delivery of “Get my wife’s name out your fucking mouth!” earns some big laughs, as does his near breakdown when talking about his infamous interview on wife Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Red Table show from 2021.
Gunna takes the stage for a performance of Banking on Me, before Weekend Update gives almost the entirety of the first news rundown over to the Oscars debacle. Michael Che says he understands where Smith is coming from, noting “You can’t expect him to sit there and watch another man jump all over his wife … without signing an NDA.” He’s also tired of pretending that everyone knew about Jada being diagnosed with alopecia: “As much as we heard about Jada and Will’s personal lives, you can’t expect us to retain everything. It’s like Kanye saying, ‘Don’t act like y’all didn’t know about my psoriasis!’”
Meanwhile, Colin Jost is befuddled that the Oscars let Smith stay just because Chris Rock said it was OK: “So now we just ask the victim right after they get hit in the head, ‘Hey, you cool if the guy who just attacked you hang around for a while? You don’t want to make him mad again.’ I can’t believe the Academy has a worse concussion protocol than the NFL.”
They eventually move on, with Jost inviting on the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn. She defends asking supreme court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson (Strong) “What is woman?” and doubles down on her sensationalist questions by wheeling out on of those “big, stupid, dumbass boards and big, stupid, dumbass pictures” that her ilk love to use. Strong’s Blackburn impersonation is utterly indistinguishable from her Marjorie Taylor Greene, although that probably says less about her than it does the Republican party.
Che returns one last time to the Oscars controversy by bringing on OJ Simpson (Thompson) to give his take. He tries to see both sides of the issue, genially noting “they both seem like good guys”, although he’s quick to fly off the handle at several points, such as when Che mentions the academy considering taking away Smith’s trophy. Outbursts aside, there’s nothing here that matches the real OJ’s video on the subject for sheer weirdness or shamelessness.
Next, a family and two mortuary assistants gather at a seaside cliff to see to the remains of their departed grandfather. The family expects a standard scattering of ashes, only to watch in horror as the morticians toss their loved one’s full cadaver over the edge. A hilariously simple sight gag, it’s a pity that the sketch couldn’t have ended on it, because the remainder drags on awkwardly.
That same awkwardness runs throughout the following sketch, which sees Kyle Mooney play an awkward tourist who gets way too invested in a friend-of-a-friend’s boring story about a New York lunch.
Gunna returns to the stage and, along with Future, performs Pushing P, before the show closes out with a pre-filmed sketch about gay-friendly baby T-shirts with slogans such as “Future Twink”, “Little Les”, “No Kink at Pride” and “I Heart Kristen Stewart”. It’s no less insufferable than the performative types it’s poking fun at, but at least it’s over quickly.
After skirting around the big story of the day for the first half of the episode, SNL certainly gave it plenty of attention during the show’s back half. They did a decent job of things too, at least when you consider how bad it could have been. The show was very clear in taking Rock’s “side”, going about as hard at Smith as they seem willing to go at anyone outside of rightwing politicos. No doubt many will take umbrage with this, but you had to expect SNL would stand up for one of their own.
That said, there was an air of grim inevitability every time the subject came up, even outside Carmichael’s monologue, with the way in which our social media-driven culture utterly exhausts any given story within days or even hours of it occurring bringing into question the very necessity of Saturday Night Live’s continued existence.
