And Your Host…
Hosting for his fifth fourth time, Ryan Gosling occupies a unique position. On the one hand, the superstar actor is essentially part of the family at this point, a can’t-miss ratings (and virality) grabber so at home in Studio 8H that he and the show feel comfortable goofing around. And on the other, he is an irredeemable giggle-puss whose inability to keep it together you’re either going to find adorable, or infuriating.
I fall mainly into the “It’s cute” camp, to my shame. Unlike, say, a Jimmy Fallon, Gosling has charisma, and never seems to be milking his propensity to break for a cheap pop. The guy literally just can’t make it through a sketch without losing it at least a bit, the mitigating factor being that Gosling rarely seems as self-impressed as a Fallon at his own rascally charms.
In his breakout role in Crazy, Stupid, Love, Gosling played with expectations that someone who looks like him—co-star Emma Stone’s character asked if he was Photoshopped—could be funny. By now, everybody knows he’s both action figure- (or Mattel-) attractive and a big goof, so he and the show run with it, despite—or, who are we kidding, because of—how his breaking plays for an audience.
It should be infuriating how bulletproof the Project Hail Mary star (yes, he gets in a plug) appears to be, even as he violates Lorne Michaels storied “This isn’t The Carol Burnett Show” aversion to such undisciplined shenanigans.
Right up top, Gosling’s monologue prods at the actor’s ego by having him get flustered because next week’s host and competing heartthrob Harry Styles is in the audience. Again, in a lesser host’s hands this would be the sort of false modesty schtick that’d smack of fake humility. But Gosling sells the extended gag, as the synergistic use of “Sign of the Times” in his upcoming sci-fi movie sees him balking at the planned musical number where he sings the song in front of Styles, and is flanked by a number of sexy alien dancers. Like much of what Gosling gave us tonight, it was adorable in spite of itself.
The Best and the Rest
The Best: In an episode where the host’s charm was the main attraction, I’m giving the top spot to something more conceptually based. (Gosling was pre-taped here, so any giggles could be edited out.) The fake ad for one of a pair of competing psoriasis medications loses a couple of points for swiping its rhythms from “Happy Fun Ball,” but I still love me a straight-faced commercial parody that escalates into ominous, unspoken terrors. (Remember, kids, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.)
As always, the production is part of the joke. The ad’s initial verisimilitude to ubiquitous Big Pharma ads with their alarming side effects read out in reassuring tones here gradually hinting that the (actual) drug in question may, in fact be sentient—and plotting something. (The stated guess that psoriasis may be the entity’s food was genuinely unsettling in context.) The ramp-up led to one of those “nine out of ten dermatologists recommend” testimonials, with the reveal that that lone dissenter scribbled something on a wall before shooting himself in the head the parting suggestion that we are in the grip of forces beyond our ken.
The Worst: “Wedding Tradition” is Exhibit A in the ongoing trial of SNL host Gosling. As the first post-monologue sketch, it was already a bit shaky—putting Mikey Day and Sarah Sherman front-and-center as a newly married couple stubbornly restating the premise of the sketch in confused outrage is basically designed to infuriate me and suck the air out of the room.
But, man, this could have been something with a host presiding over it not incapable of a little discipline. Gosling, to be fair, made it a full 1:48 before the tickle-bug got him. Still, the sketch was riding on the antagonist being an imperiously chaotic weirdo whose discovery of the “clink glasses means mandatory kiss” tradition sees him grown increasingly drunk on his newfound power.
Gosling has it at the start. His wedding guest (in a sparkly suit and braided rat tail) reacts to the explanation of the ritual with an underplayed, “They have to? Interesting…” (His eyebrow-raised, repeated, “They have to,” while putting his hand portentously on an unseen fellow guest’s arm only serves to promise a necessary restraint that’s not coming.)
After his initial smirk transitions to a full-on snorting laugh in anticipation of making Day’s groom kiss his bride’s “poozy,” the jig is truly up, leaving your enjoyment of the abortive sketch up to your tolerance for Gosling’s cutie-pie giggle-fits and euphemisms like “poonis.”
The Rest: You can’t manufacture a Stefon.
The passing notes sketch hinged on an onscreen announcement that neither Ashley Padilla nor Gosling knew that the contents of the embarrassing classroom notes had been switched between dress and air. It’s not the sort of winking audience conspiratorial gag the show’s done so calculatedly (as far as I remember), and while the conceit plays into Gosling’s habit of getting all silly, I toss a flag on the play.
When John Mulaney first did the same trick to Bill Hader with Stefon, it was a private joke between two pals, one of whom knew how an unplanned rewrite would produce a desired outcome (and make poor Hader, a noted anxious over-preparer, have to think on the fly). The breaking there—as known as the sneak attack strategy became—was as genuine as this without being so cutesy about it.
Padilla, as nimble an improviser as there is, rolled with the bit nicely, her own inevitable chagrin transformed into mostly stifled, in-character giggles. Gosling actually seemed a little thrown, his cozy expectations that everyone would laugh along with him not perhaps being as okay with being the butt of the joke. Maybe this was the writers’ way of getting back at the guy for ruining their sketches (or at least getting bigger laughs) with his corpsing. If so, well played, nerds.
The whole breaking thing came to a head (a one-eyed one at that) in the “Cyclops” sketch, for better and worse. First up, I’m going to state my uncomfortableness with the suspiciously specific voices chosen by Gosling, Day, and Kenan Thompson for their “simple” fantasy heroes and move on.
As the three conquering heroes—in genuinely Emmy-worthy prosthetics that Gosling kept on to introduce the second Gorillaz song—must face the riddles of two beautiful and immortal treasure guardians (Padilla and Veronika Slowikoska), it’s all “dumb guys are dumb” jokes as the three mighty ding-dongs can’t figure out the simplest of Gollum-style puzzles. (They rhyme and everything.)
The main joke pales next to the valiant attempts of Padilla to rein in what sure looked like some extensive ad-libbing on the part of the three monster-men. That joke (dumb guys dumb!) is okay—there’s a stubbornness to their rock-headed answers that’s amusing. But it’s clear that somebody, either at dress or live, spotted that Padilla’s guardian’s attemps to halt the cyclopses from approaching the ornate cave door with a series of exasperated “Stop!”s was the real show and leaned into it, hard.
There’s a school of thought that SNL doesn’t take advantage of its live status to loosen things up like this. I get it—part of the joy of seeing comedy live is in watching talented comic minds figure out a scene in real time. But Saturday Night Live under Lorne Michaels has always been about control, perhaps a holdover from the long, long ago industry skepticism that a bunch of hippie types could pull of a live, 90-minute show. Nowadays, SNL is a comedy cruise ship, its massive production bulk and cumbersome legacy making nimble risk-taking, well, too much of a risk.
Were all those added “Stop!”s pre-planned? I’d like to think not. The show could use a little looseness, even if it messes up the show timing.
The other pre-tape mined the Willy Wonka franchise for some filigree on an old joke, that being that this lovable chocolatier (here a baker) is employing slave labor. (Something the original Roald Dahl book was far more problematically explicit about.) It’s exquisitely mounted stuff, complete with a sickly sweet musical number, but there’s hardly a surprise that there’s a dark secret a-lurking behind all the prancing and cupcakes.
When the twist comes, it’s suitably over-the-top, as the Oompa-Loompa stand-ins (the Poppin’ Fresh-look Dodeedees) have begun to commit mass suicide, with one revealed to have hanged himself in the doorway the excited children were preparing to enter. The explanation (from Kenan’s seen-it-all handyman) that this is just part of the creatures’ mating cycle shifts the joke onto Gosling’s Wonka substitute, as Kenan asks, “Don’t you know anything about their culture, society, or religion?”
It’s okay, even if making the same joke about a very old pop culture subject doesn’t especially justify the sketch’s existence.
‘Weekend Update’ Update
We’re in another illegal war (Trump’s second, for now), so “Update” did a whole minute’s worth of Iran jokes before moving on to Timotheé Chalamet. But I kid the fake news segment of a nationally broadcast comedy show Donald Trump absolutely hate-watches every single week.
Actually, I don’t. Colin Jost and Michael Che are Colin Jost and Michael Che, lending the same smirky expertise to jokes about funny airplane seats as they do about the looming shadow of authoritarianism. I’d like to think that Trump and his goons literally picking off late-night comics one by one all around them would lead to some go-for-broke actual giving a crap, but what Jost and Che do is popular as hell, so what do I know.
The actual topical jokes aren’t terrible so much as they bounce along on the same peppy above-it-all wave the anchors have been surfing for so long. Jost’s lead-in mentions that fired (sorry, transferred to a made-up new job) ICE queen Kristi Noem was recently called out in Congress for calling the innocent Americans her goon squad straight-up murdered in the streets “domestic terrorists” to please her cult leader and his slavering yahoo base. But he tosses in jabs about her cosplaying habit, a sex joke, and Diddy, just to assure viewers he’s not that invested.
There’s a wash of glibness obscuring the tougher jokes that makes “Weekend Update,” as ever, as much about Jost and Che’s respective personas as any real world story they choose to joke about. Che got more of a response to another “Trump has dementia” zinger than one about America’s success rate when ousting world leaders on shaky justification. (Cue photo of Osama Bin Laden behind Che, as reminder of the CIA’s work in Afghanistan.) I can’t blame the boys for chasing what works, but they could also make smarter stuff work.
I love having Thompson’s guaranteed few minutes of airtime on my TV each week, but his preacher character here wasn’t anything special. Instead of bringing the inspiration and uplift Che was supposedly looking for, Pastor Update (backed by James Austin Johnson’s grinning Teddy on guitar) mused instead about green room snacks and Che’s porn habits at work. Mildly amusing enough to make me suspect the good pastor will be brought back, sadly.
Recurring Sketch Report
While it should, by virtue of its straight-faced strangeness, be in the ten-to-one slot, the hotel sketch finds itself in the recurring category by the thinnest of margins. (Martin Herlihy got one of his short films squeezed in last.)
As far as sketch templates go, the “running through your incidentals” hotel premise has usually worked out. The collision between deadpan bureaucracy and flummoxed customer creates a natural comic tension, with the wild card question of which party is the loony offering up some variety. (Honestly, this barely counts as a repeater, but this season has been blessedly free from overdone premises, so I’m claiming this territory.)
This time, the customer is the weird one, at least at first, as departing guest Gosling disputes the extra charges related to… the Goo-Goo Man. This raises many questions. Who is the Goo-Goo Man? Why is there a special Goo-Goo Man pricing package and rewards card number. (Gosling’s is an impressive 3.) And, naturally, is the Goo-Goo Man a sexual thing? (Itemized charges for “tummy time” and “cuddle car” could go either way, honestly.)
I love this sort of joke, where normality splits open to gradually suggest a whole bananas world lurking just underneath. (A funny lean-in gag sees fellow Goo-Goo Man enthusiast Jeremy Culhane wearing the same Goo-Goo Man accessories and thanking Gosling for his service.)
What kept this one from scaling the heights of absurdity mountain was two-fold. For one, Gosling—stop me if you’ve heard this—can’t maintain. It’s not as egregious as other times tonight, but a real, locked-down deadpan irritation was what this sketch needed. Also, it would have been better served if someone other than noted over-actor Sherman were playing the straight role—Day may have been around playing the concierge, but Sherman was doing a Mikey Day, hammering home the absurd premise by essentially exclaiming, “This premise is absurd!” at every turn.
I hate a missed opportunity. The Goo-Goo Man deserved better.
Political Comedy Report
First, congrats to Jost for sketch 300. (Mostly for “Update,” but still.)
Now to the requisite Cold Open, where the surprisingly effective casting of Jost as former Fox News blowhard and accused blackout rapist turned Secretary of Defense-turned-War Pete Hegseth continues. As ever these days, there’s a disconnect between reaction to a passably funny political impression and to the genuine horrors the actual person represents.
Hegseth, with his chest full of white supremacy and frat douche disdain for the press, stewardship of the world’s largest military bureaucracy, and international law, is a clownish monster. Saturday Night Live winks at the monstrousness to favor the undeniable buffoonery of Jost’s Hegseth doing keg stands and asking baffled journalists, “Gaylord says what?” like the stunted middle-school bully he is.
While Jost’s Hegseth preens like a fading jock pissed off he’d get arrested for swirlies in boorish adulthood, the actual article presides over a simpleton macho policy of crappy action movie tough talk that treats the wanton murder of children (brown children at least) as cause for beer-crushing celebration and copyright-infringing edgelord memes.
We’re under the heel of dim-bulb madmen—and women—as SNL similarly trots out begrudgingly sh*t-canned “homeland security” concentration camp-filler Kristi Noem for a good-bye poke. Padilla is above the material, mainly about plastic surgery, dog-shooting, and the fact that Noem’s been banging a married subordinate in a taxpayer-funded sex plane. (Okay, that last one’s tough to ignore.)
I get that the degree of difficulty here is high. Shoehorning literal fascist atrocities into SNL‘s traditional “look at this clown and his easily repeatable eccentricities” satirical formula just isn’t cut out for actual evil. The complacent crowd seems to eat up Jost’s Hegseth boasting about giving Iran “a purple nurple” and Padilla’s fired Noem consoling herself by claiming to “miss 100 percent of the dogs you don’t shoot.”
Meanwhile, Trump tramples the Constitution while Congress does nothing, Noem’s masked stormtroopers kidnap anyone non-white they can get their unfit-for-mall-cop hands on, and the U.S. spirals further into the demented apocalyptic fever dream of a legally-determined rapist and voluminously alleged child-rapist.
What’s my solution? I had some ideas, but those were fever dreams of my own. Saturday Night Live simply isn’t up to this moment.
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
Chloe Fineman’s complete absence last week and her low profile this week don’t bode well for her continued longevity on the show.
Slowikoska’s dedicated versatility is creeping up on me. Even in the cyclops chuckle-fest, she plugged away like a pro.
Kam Petterson is clearly being phased out, another sop to the manosphere blowing up in Lorne Michaels’ face. Wonder if Patterson will be brought back to host after he’s let go?
It’s Padilla’s show now, whether anyone admits it or not. I’m fine with it. (Without Gosling around, she’s usually a lot more together.) In the wedding sketch, her brief appearances were so lived-in, I perked up automatically.
Congrats also to Sherman, who hit her 300th appearance awfully fast.
10-To-Oneland Report
In retrospect, the bust-up of the Please Don’t Destroy team is likely to go down as a misstep. Ben Marshall isn’t making much headway as a cast member, while Martin Herlihy’s fitfully funny shorts keep reminding me why the trio’s teamwork played as well as it did.
The central theme of Herlihy’s pre-tapes is his self-important cluelessness. Here, once again seated smugly in an armchair, he introduces a premise (he pops up to shout “Lies!” at innocent diners’ self-serving fibs) before swerving into absurdity (Herlihy passing himself off at work as Colin Jost, thanks to some horrific prosthetics). Honestly, the effect looks as if Jay Leno concluded his Tonight Show back-stab by absorbing Conan O’Brien’s essence.) The transition is largely nonexistent, mainly serving to glory in that grotesque face (the makeup, not Jost’s actual kisser) as Herlihy prances about, besmirching his castmate’s good name.
Even the best turn (a panicked Sherman whips out a gun, unsure of which Jost to inexplicably shoot) is swiped from a much better executed Digital Short. Which is another way of saying that host Dakota Johnson calling the now-disbanded trio “the Loneliest Island” might not have been totally off the mark.
Stray Observations
Tonight’s In Memoriam card goes to a guy who was there from the beginning.
The post-monologue commercial break for Project Hail Mary featuring “Sign of the Times”” That’s some finely timed product integration, Amazon MGM and NBC.
I’m actually shocked at the restraint in not airing a can’t-miss Beavis and Butt-head sequel.
We need to talk about Gorillaz. To wit: is their music good enough to transcend the “virtual band” gimmick? I say yes, although relegating Jamie Hewlitt’s 2-D creations, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel, to background screens while plain old Daman Albarn and guests play live like dumb humans robs some essential pleasure from the whole experience.
It was cool to see Del the Funky Homosapien and Black Thought do their things in person, though. Not to mention second-gen sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar and legend Asha Puthli, for crying out loud.
Also, “Clint Eastwood” for the first number? It’s still a great (25-year-old) song (and was used in this week’s Gosling promo), but Gorillaz has a new album, and it’s not like anyone needs to be reminded who the band are.
Jost claiming that anti-vaxxer in charge of America’s healthcare RFK Jr. looks like “Walton Goggins after being put an air fryer” is unfair to both Goggins and a handy and convenient kitchen appliance.
Episode Grade: I give this one [stifles laughter]… an, um… [snorts uncontrollably]… B-Minus. [BWAH-HA-HAAAAA!!!]
Next Week: As you may have noticed from the monologue, Harry Styles is pulling double duty.