And Your Host…
First things first: If Debbie Harry volunteers to introduce your first Saturday Night Live musical number, you’ve got the goods. The rock legend even wore a “RODRIGO 1” T-shirt during the goodnights, for crying out loud.
That said, Olivia Rodrigo—the singer-songwriter and former child star (shout out, Bizzardvark?)—wasn’t the most natural choice to pull the decreasingly rare host/musical guest double-duty this weekend. Sure, she had appeared in a sketch back in 2023, and “Drivers License” was the focus of a genuinely great sketch that, thanks to music licensing, can’t be shown any more. But, the welcome theatricality of her SNL musical performances aside, Rodrigo doesn’t exude conspicuous screen presence.
She’s not bad, even if SNL‘s 51 years of practice hasn’t perfected cue card sight lines for first-time hosts. Like a lot of performers who’ve been in the business since kindergarten (the young Rodrigo’s first TV ad featured in the monologue), she as host was a practiced pro, hitting marks and competently filling out mostly secondary roles in between the musical numbers she was booked to promote in the first place. But fading into the background of sketches fronted by some uniformly strong cast outings wasn’t a bad thing, either.
Rodrigo’s best showcase was, unsurprisingly, musical, as she leapt into another of Dan Bulla’s “Midnight Matinee” short films as a dreamy teen whose lyrics extolling the retro wonders of her super-cool bedroom gradually reveal that she’s been installed as the prime exhibit in a human zoo on the planet of some bug people. Ariana Grande similarly excelled in the Bulla-verse’s “My Best Friend’s House,” straight-facedly crooning a heartfelt anthem that turned into an exposé that her friend’s dad is a serial murderer, and here Rodrigo’s time as the No. 1 attraction to some CGI bug people is just as exquisite.
Specificity in comedy is an underrated quality, with tonight’s show dropping several sketches like this where the observational asides aid the whole construction. Here, Rodrigo’s teen extends her adolescent longing right to the bugs ostensibly keeping her captive, appreciating the rapt attentions of crowds when she goes to the bathroom “like it’s a dolphin show,” and sharing a tender moment with the lone bug protester holding a lonely vigil against her imprisonment.
Poor James Austin Johnson gets liquified in his boxer shorts once Rodrigo politely declines to take part in the bugs’ human mating program, and the detail that the bugs have “Sweded” up a VHS copy of A League of Their Own (“There’s no crying in Earth ball,” cries bug Tom Hanks before his human disguise melts away) for their captive’s enjoyment is just the perfect absurdist touch. Utilizing your non-actor (any more) host’s musical talents so well is a must-have, and this one has it.
The Best and the Rest
The Best: Ashley Padilla is now the star of Saturday Night Live. Ensemble it may be, but SNL always sees someone (or maybe two someones) from each era rise to undeniable prominence, and these days it’s Padilla.
Unlike some other past focus-pullers, Padilla doesn’t seem to be in this position through ambition or will so much as sheer, undeniable talent. Like JAJ (an equally stellar sketch performer), Padilla is an actor first, imbuing her characters almost invariably with a grounded singularity of being that makes their bananas actions feel like an outgrowth of deeper, fruitful madness.
The restaurant sketch takes a while to set up, as wedding-invited exes Ben Marshall and Rodrigo each dragoon a seatmate to make the other jealous. Rodrigo picks Tommy Brennan, a nice guy all too willing to boop her nose with cupcake frosting as part of the charade. Marshall meanwhile has the bad judgement to select Padilla, a middle-aged weirdo whose similar willingness to join in the game comes yoked to both buried acting ambitions and a deep well of undiagnosed weirdness.
Padilla plays a buttoned-down oddball better than anyone—her face slips instantly into the sort of performative self-amusement that anyone with functional kook-radar would flee from. But Marshall’s heartbroken dude is a jealously competitive dullard, so he reluctantly finds himself slathered in Padilla’s entire plate of mashed potatoes (her way of outdoing the frosting), stripped to the waist (“Oh, you have nipples like my son’s!”), and trying desperately to assure aghast onlookers that his supposed date’s boisterous reactions were not to a “gay joke.”
I’ve compared Padilla’s whole vibe to Kristen Wiig’s, and tonight I’ll toss in another compliment by throwing Kerry Kenney-Silver into the mix. Padilla goes big but specific, turning what could be mere look-at-me exhibitionism into something too real to be ignored. When Marshall, trying to outdo Brennan’s shoulder rub on Rodrigo, offers up a massage, Padilla delightedly assents before recoiling at his touch and exclaiming that she had no idea what he was proposing. (“I thought they were something different! Oh my God!”)
And I’m not even going to speculate on how she got that dollop of mashed potato to fall directly into her raised champagne flute during a disastrous toast. It was perfect, and so was she.
The Worst: Influencer culture wormed its way into a couple of pieces tonight. Look, I’m not the target for sketches winking about what the kids are saying/doing/vaping on the YouTubes and so forth, but SNL keeps foisting content-based content like this on me whether I like it or not, so I soldier on like the “unc” I am. (I’m 100-percent sure I used that wrong.)
The “Update” piece where two apparently real-life internet thingies named Alix and Alex gibberish their way through their (again, apparently) actual feud depends on Michael Che not knowing what the hell the nearly identical blondes are talking about. Veronika Slowikoska and Chloe Fineman no doubt researched their impressions dutifully, and mocking the vapid self-promoter industry isn’t an irrelevant endeavor, but I’m with Che, albeit less amusedly.
Pitched half toward those people who are somehow invested in this not-at-all manufactured-for-clicks kerfuffle and half toward old SNL viewers who can chuckle at those darned kids, the resulting desk piece is as assiduously performed as it is just clicks and whistles to old ears.
Jumping to the final sketch of the night, we see once more SNL assuming a fluency with internet nonsense, as a brisk fake home security ad promises better protection through video virality. Dispatching an army of TikTok types to corner escaping burglars with eagerly answered questions about “sloppy tops,” getting your back blown out, and other things that certain viewers will recognize.
The joke about Kam Patterson showing up to do risqué crowd work to amuse Jeremy Culhane’s thief was at least a novel way to once again work the struggling featured player into things. Points off for SNL once agains squeezing a so-so pre-tape into the 10-to-one slot when there was a perfect live weirdo sketch just sitting there right before it.
The Rest:Another sketch where Rodrigo’s talents got a nice workout, “Busted” is a nifty little piece where one couple’s competing accusations of infidelity unfold in a Lin-Manuel Miranda-style book number. Like a few others tonight, the sketch benefits most from a pile-on of weirdo detail. Escalation starts slow (Rodrigo name-checks the Friends as alibis), ramps up with boyfriend Marcello Hernandez forced to admit he uses their elderly dog’s pet stairs to climb into bed, and leaps to loopy new heights as burglar JAJ, tired of waiting out the fight in the couple’s closet, is confronted by both wife Jane Wickline (emerging from under the sofa cushions) and closet mistress Fineman.
When landlord Kenan Thompson shows up to complain about the noise while eating his nightly snack of sticky rice and berates the couple for that dog they’re not supposed to have, the groove has completely taken over. Sure, Rodrigo gets busted for cheating “like, a bajillion other times,” but everybody—landlord and burglar, and cheating partners alike—is too into the song to care. Pretty infectious all around.
Apparently inspired by that viral video supercut of how the Dynasty staircase was a reliable plot device/deathtrap, the throwback ’80s nighttime soap sketch featured a sight gag I wanted to love more in execution than I did in concept. With every conflict between Rodrigo’s swoop-haired interloper and her snooty would-be in-laws taking place right at the head of an ornate staircase, well, you can see where this is going.
The resulting falls (after an awkward close-up to hide the transition) see person after supercilious rich person tumbling down a staircase so steep and treacherous that I first thought there must be stunt people involved. The post-sketch pull-out revealed the gag (tilted camera, moving bannister façade) but alert viewers should have spotted the actors effortful flopping, a collective near-miss that should have been riotously funny but was just okay. Kenan’s butler, first seen plummeting alongside his untroubled tray of champagne flutes, gets the killer kicker, finally pushing the opportunistic Rodrigo down the stairs with a surprise, “I do, bitch,” as she contemplates who inherits the mansion.
I dunno—physical comedy live needs to be almost impossibly clever and graceful if you’re trying to pull off an illusion like this. This one made the effort, but didn’t have the guile.
‘Weekend Update’ Update
Colin Jost and Che did their thing. The best lines got the uncomfortable reactions they were gunning for. To wit, Che: “Legal experts are saying that this week’s Supreme Court ruling has taken a wrecking ball to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But if you ask Black people, it felt more like a fire hose.” And Jost: “The movie Michael earned $97 million its opening weekend, which the most a music biopic has ever grossed. But it didn’t even crack the top 10 grossest weekends involving Michael Jackson.”
Both solid, clever zingers on depressing, telling topics, the capture of our three branches by white supremacists and the ongoing whitewashing of an accused pedophile’s legacy, respectively. That’s what “Update” jokes are meant to do, although I remain annoyed that the Jost-Che iteration is so scattershot with the good stuff.
LateNighter is laying odds that both anchors might finally jump ship after this season, and, as solid at one-liners and audience baiting as Jost and Che are, I’m ready to get some new points of view behind the desk.
Recurring Sketch Report
The “Shop TV” sketches occupy a necessary position in the SNL formula—the broad, winking gross-out prop gag. Good ol’ Mikey Day is back, this time alongside Padilla, taking over co-hosting duties from a truly impressive roster of funny women before her. With the hosts plugging their chintzy shop-at-home wares with ebullient Southern fake enthusiasm, the joke is always that a new vendor’s product is unintentionally objectionable, sexual, or some combination of both, a fact that the sunny hosts vainly attempt to down-pedal in the face of—in this case—baker Rodrigo’s enormous chocolate butthole.
Naturally, it’s a chocolate lava cake with its signature steam hole at the top, but here’s to both the SNL prop department and the beleaguered Standards and Practices people who no doubt had a series of very serious email exchanges with Lorne during the week. (The legal wrangling over the exact contours of the cake’s “flavor wrinkles” and “crust creases” is a sketch waiting to happen.)
The goal of this sort of thing is to squick the live audience into loud, explosive disgust, so mission accomplished there. Especially when Day’s host very reluctantly sticks his pinkie in the “flavor hole” and comes out covered in peanut butter. Which he licks before recoiling when his request for a napkin is greeted by some ready toilet paper from offscreen.
What makes these sketches (a bit) more than the gross-out spectacle it assuredly is are the hosts’ attempts to maintain their squeaky clean commercial enterprise’s Jesus-y vibe (Johnson is on next to peddle his YA book series, Nazareth High) as one entrepreneur after another trots out unintentional atrocities. Padilla is Day’s best partner yet, with her chipper host joking about her teen daughter’s latest unsuccessful bid for emancipation (“You lost, punkin’!”), and riding over each successive disaster with bulletproof faux propriety.
Back to specificity, there are enough little flourishes around the edges of this deeply suspect cake sketch to make even the most upright viewer chuckle in spite of themselves. As ever, male callers are totally into the new product (“Asian,” one states hungrily to the hosts’ asking about his favorite flavor), while the unseen producer Odell continues his fine work by at one point blurring everything but the cake in question at the hosts’ command.
Political Comedy Report
Perhaps it was in recompense for his majestic promo work as Miranda Priestly that Johnson got a week off from the Trump Cold Open grind. I love the guy, and it’s a world-class impression, but it’s got to be a weight on your soul to channel someone without one all the time.
Instead, we got another round of Jost’s alpha-clownery as Defense Secretary, the blackout drunk and Nazi-tatted Pete Hegseth. Jost is clearly relishing his time in the actual sketch spotlight, and his Hegseth (here abandoning all pretense and swilling a comically giant scotch on the rocks) is some decent character assassination. Of someone with no character.
The joke is that it’s hard to out-bro a bro, especially one with the backing of a would-be dictator and the keys to America’s tanks, with Jost gleefully berating the “theater kids” of the assembled press with yo mama jokes and brazen war crime boasts. That the real Hegseth is about three percent less boorishly insufferable and juvenile in his contempt for the First Amendment, the Geneva Convention, and consent in all its forms makes parodying the guy a tricky proposition. Jost goes all-in, which is appreciated, even if the yawning chasm of potential global chaos and at-home fascist election-stealing lurks underneath.
The real headline was a big celebrity cameo, as Aziz Ansari bugged out his eyes to portray the similarly boozy and bombastic bonehead (and FBI director, since this is hell) Kash Patel. Leaving aside Ansari’s own checkered history with consent (see Jonah Hill’s cameo from a few weeks back for that trend), the casting was pretty inevitable but still a coup, and Ansari did his level best to out-ludicrous the allegedly about-to-be-canned Patel.
As with Jost’s Hegseth and pretty much any member of the current regime of sociopathic toadies, the goal is to use as much actual fact in the comic assassination. So Ansari’s Patel drops references to private jet abuse by himself and his lady friend, locker room beer swilling and so forth, all while injecting his impression with signature Tom Haverford-style clout-chasing and hedonism. The final joke about Patel wanting credit for busting the glass ceiling of “the first Indian to suck at their job” is a novel little twist, and, as with the sketch itself, jumps on the surface without breaking through to the very dark stuff beneath.
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
My estimable LateNighter colleague Matt Solomon recently ran the odds on which current cast members are likely to survive ’til next season. At the bottom was Kam Petterson (at a daunting -400), but the first-year featured player did his level best to change those odds in his favor with a couple of juicy appearances tonight. I don’t care for Patterson’s whole right-wing bro-hang affiliations, or his casual use of homophobic slurs (no matter that he was doing some “edgy” bite-Lorne’s-hand-that-feeds-you schtick at the time). But he’s not terrible on the show—a little raw, but SNL could use a jolt of youthful energy.
His “Update” pieces have been at least energetic, tonight seeing his supposed cultural take on the breakup of Megan Thee Stallion and NBA star Klay Thompson turn into a naked pitch for him to be her rebound guy. (So to speak.) There’s a long history of marginal cast members making direct appeals during crunch time, and I dug Patterson getting to slip in an aside about him “not being in many sketches” but people claiming he’s “finding his voice more every week.”
And I agree, even if I’m not Patterson’s biggest fan. Getting to do some of the yahoo-adjacent standup as himself in the last pre-tape was another bold bid for re-employment. Again, even if I’m not sure how much knee-slapping, “Do you like to eat ass?” energy the show needs.
Jumping into Matt Solomon’s handicapping, I’ll agree that Patterson and Brennan are probably out, Wickline is on the bubble for the second year in a row, while Slowikowska and Culhane should sign new leases. Apart from the featured players, I agree that Fineman’s ready to move on, while they’ll have to drag Day and Kenan out by their fingernails.
10-To-Oneland Report
The rideshare sketch is going here, because I said so. One, the 10-to-one sketch should be live, for the added frisson of audience discomfort. Two, this was prime Dismukes, the current mayor of this territory.
Another point in this one’s favor is that, for a four-minute sketch, I had no idea where it was going until a quarter of the way in. Now, that could betoken a lack of focused writing, but here it’s nimble misdirection, as passengers Slowikowska and Rodrigo’s tales of clearly problematic party behavior and vodka swilling suddenly give way to obliging driver Dismukes’ bombastic Jamaican dancehall improv.
Dismukes loves social awkwardness, but it’s the way he mines that familiar territory that makes me truly appreciate what he does. The ladies react with expected, SNL-signature “Hey, that was weird” responses at first, but Dismukes’ cabbie turns out to be just as shocked as they are. More so, as he steadfastly protests that his impromptu lyrics about making them sweat like jerk chicken came out of absolute nowhere. “I have as much info as you do, can we just forget it?” he asks to downplay what’s just happened, before sincerely bemoaning the fact that he’s so good at another culture’s indigenous music that he’s going to have to change his whole life.
“I just realized I’m one of the most talented rasta MCs on Earth! I don’t want that for my life—I don’t want to be a white rasta guy!,” Dismukes exclaims, brushing off Rodrigo’s suggestion that he does not have to do that with an irritated, “I’m afraid I do!” His talent simply cannot be denied, people.
Stray Observations
- The one funny bit in the “Update” influencer bit was the onscreen “Michael Che: Enemy to White Women” chyron flashed in response to Alix/Alex’s accusations. “Apparently they have it ready all the time,” Slowikowska states.
- Rodrigo’s monologue song repurposing “Drivers License” into her new milestone of trying to get a Real ID saw her expertly perform a concept that wasn’t quite strong enough to get its own planet of the bug people treatment.
- Another regrettable side effect of the whole influencer theme was that toxic online douche-factory Barstool got not one but two shout-outs.
- No Trump tonight, but damned if JAJ doesn’t swipe every scene he’s in. His singing burglar’s got his own inimitable spin on the ongoing duet that elevates the joke.
- Bad staging as Fineman’s “Busted” mistress can be seen through the living room window, ruining the joke of her surprise emergence.
- I was wondering if Che would have a better take on the non-alcoholic beer subject that The Simpsons did. He didn’t, but claiming Coors’ new slogan for its 0.0% brew is, “Get custody back!” is a solid attempt.
- Episode Grade: An appreciative-of-the-effort B.
Next: Only two more episodes left in the season, people. Next week we get Matt Damon for his third go-round and musical guest Noah Kahan (his second).
