You just knew that this week’s Saturday Night Live would open with President Joe Biden’s Speech of the Union address and the Republican response from Alabama’s junior senator, Katie Britt.
After an amped-up Biden (Mikey Day) sticks it to the angry Republicans in attendance, including the silently mopey speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and obnoxious heckler Marjorie Taylor Greene, he turns things over to Britt (Scarlett Johansson), whose response is sure to “help me more than anything else I can say here”.
Backdropped by her “strange, empty kitchen”, the self-proclaimed “scariest bitch in the Target parking lot” delivers a shockingly violent monologue about a made-up sex-trafficking incident, before making her pitch for Trump, all while vacillating between utterly unconvincing theater kid, Home Shopping Network pitchwoman, “weirdly seductive” temptress, and the steely villainess from Get Out.
Johansson is an inspired choice for Britt, sinking her teeth into the role and turning in a real performance. The best cold open of the season, the only knock against it is that it could have gone longer.
Josh Brolin hosts for the third time. The actor recites the “super creepy” poem he wrote to his Dune co-star Timothée Chalamet before reading a new, even creepier poem dedicated to a visibly unnerved Kenan Thompson. He follows this up by stripping down to his undies and taking one of his regular ice baths in front of everyone. It’s all very scattershot, but Brolin is so effortlessly charismatic that he makes it work.
In the first sketch, two armed criminals rob a bank and find themselves pitted against two of the customers: a married couple (Brolin and Heidi Gardner) with a kinky role-play fetish. Much to the dismay of the robbers and their fellow hostages, the freaky pair attempt to turn their fantasy into reality. Not 10 minutes after his monologue, Brolin strips down to his underwear again. The edgy premise is promising, but Brolin and Gardner go a bit too big.
Next up is an R&B duet from Andrew Dismukes’s and Brolin’s airplane passengers. Dismukes can’t access his Kindle or afford headphones for his seatback screen, so he lives vicariously through Brolin’s flyer, who’s just trying to enjoy the sci-fi film Ad Astra. A headscratcher of a premise, this falls flat, although a brief bit that sees Dismukes and Brolin argue over the plot of the underrated Brad Pitt space thriller and the rules of Sudoku is good for a few chuckles.
A support group for “people pleasers” sees its members talking circles around themselves and each other as they fall into the same toxic patterns again and again: one guy agrees to go out to dinner with his boyfriend even though he’s already eaten, another proposes to his girlfriend even though he meant to break up with her, and another admits to over-tipping for their terrible new haircut. Musical guest Ariana Grande pops in as yet another desperate people pleaser and practices asking her boss for a raise, but the whole exercise devolves once the others get involved. More clever than actually funny.
A neighborhood wine and cheese party get hijacked by one guest after the hosts’ normally shy cat Tiger chooses to cuddle up with him. Overwhelmed with emotion because he takes this as a sign that he has good energy even though his job involves “closing down nursing homes and turning them into Top Golfs”, he becomes dismayed when the cat abandons him for the lap of another. This leads to a violent freakout that has Brolin trashing the set, fighting with the cat puppet, and getting in a knife fight with Dismukes. Like the opening sketch, the over-the-topness of it all makes it all a bit grating.
At a society ball in 19th-century Vienna, Brolin’s aristocrat attempts to secure a politically advantageous marriage to a duchess by showing off his new invention: a precariously placed tower of shrimp cocktails. Brolin declares “if anything happened to my shrimp tower, I would obviously kill myself”, but instead he defenestrates the duchess as soon as she comes within an inch of his creation. In the end, it’s he who accidently knocks it over, leading him to follow through on his promise. Brolin’s comic timing is much better displayed in this pre-filmed segment than the live sketches thus far.
On trashy daytime talkshow Shonda, guest Jasmine complains about her lazy boyfriend Jerry, who she suspects of two-timing her even as he relies on her to take care of his every needs. The audience is on her side until Jerry rolls onstage, revealing himself to be a paralyzed senior citizen whose neck was broken when Jasmine slammed down on his head during oral sex. This is too much for the audience, who one by one flee the studio in horror. The initial reveal of Brolin as the unfortunate Jerry is one of best gags of the season.
Following Grande’s first song, it’s time for Weekend Update. Colin Jost praises Biden’s Sotu speech, saying “Sleepy Joe finally woke the hell up,” even as he recognizes that the bar was very low: “The New York Post’s headline was just: He’s Alive. That’s like a headline you see about bigfoot.” Michael Che, meanwhile, grits his way through a series of groan-inducing jokes before the segment abruptly ends without any character guest spots or a second round of headlines.
The PBS show Movie Musical Masterpieces celebrates Oscar weekend by looking back at one of the few musicals to ever be nominated for Best Picture: Moulin Rouge. We are shown never-before-seen footage of the original, longer centerpiece medley between Ewan McGregor (Bowen Yang) and Nicole Kidman (Grande), which features a ridiculous mashup of the birthday song, Barenaked Ladies’ One Week, Oasis’s Wonderwall, The Wheels on the Bus, Shania Twain’s I Feel Like a Woman, and other questionable choices. Speaking of questionable choices, one has to wonder why the show would choose to parody a 23-year-old film instead of any of the ones nominated for Sunday’s Academy awards – or, for that matter, the giant blockbuster Brolin is currently starring in.
It seems like the next sketch might actually cover some of that ground, as it features Brolin’s depressed sandwich maker drifting off to the tune of Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For? (from the Barbie soundtrack) after his loyal customers tell him they’re sick of his subs. Ultimately though, there’s no real link between the sketch and Barbie.
Grande performs her second set, then the episode winds down with the latest appearance of Ego Nwodim’s brassy lawyer Lisa (one of the few recurring characters to feature these days). This time out, Lisa is part of her sister’s dinner party at a sports bar. She offers to cover the bill, only to flip out over the automatic gratuity. Before long, she’s knocking over all of the food and drinks and demanding the restaurant “Cook MY meat!” As has happened in each of the Lisa sketches, she makes the rest of the cast break.
Another mostly mediocre episode, this one had a few more bright spots than usual. Brolin’s energy was infectious, if often a bit much, while Johansson’s appearance was perfect. A small improvement on the past several episodes, but an improvement nevertheless.
