And Your Host…
Throughout the writing of this review, my critic’s brain was warning me, “Do not overrate this episode just because John Mulaney is here” on repeat. You’ll have to wait until the end to see if I heeded that advice, but damn, was it great to have John Mulaney in the house.
Season 52 has been like watching a scrappy but fundamentally flawed baseball team flounder under the weight of sloppy errors and a creeping case of talent-lack. John Mulaney coming in to host is like that team drafted Shohei Ohtani, but only had him for a week—they’re unfathomably, unequivocally better while he’s there, and all fans can do is hope his example inspires the team to play above their weight for the rest of the season. John Mulaney is so far beyond his initial “can you believe this guy’s hosting?” first-gig jitters that the former SNL writer—in his seventh go-’round—is firmly ensconced among Saturday Night Live visiting royalty. So, yeah, this episode benefitted, is what I’m saying.
This season has labored under some underwhelming hosts (athlete, blank space, embarrassment, underused newcomer, unfortunate clout-chasing), and the writing has done little to suggest that this iteration of SNL can thrive without outside assistance. Thankfully, Mulaney is a show unto himself, raising all boats right from the host-driven cold open to the Mulaney-centered 10-to-one slot with the sort of beaming, confident aplomb only someone truly at home can bring. In his goodnights, Mulaney thanks pal and fellow former SNL scribe Simon Rich, suggesting that the pair worked together on some material for the show, so that’s another all-star in the mix. (If Mulaney’s Ohtani, Rich is, I don’t know, Mookie Betts? Look, I just miss baseball season.)
The episode puts me in mind of (warning: old SNL guy reference) the time Bill Murray came back to host during the infamous Season 6, where the presence of an original cast star—for one week at least—made Saturday Night Live feel like itself again. I’m not comparing a middling Season 52 to the notoriously loathed Jean Doumanian year, but I’m saying that this show was an uninspired mess before Mulaney got here, and—for one night at least—it was a genuine pleasure to watch all the way through.
Mulaney’s monologue was not only Mulaney’s signature, nigh-flawless craft on full display, it also seeded various themes that cropped up throughout the sketches tonight, another hint that Mulaney was much more involved in putting this episode together than most hosts. When later sketches (or “Update”) nodded toward Baby Boomers’ self-centered selfishness or RFK Jr’s nepo-incompetent lunacy, Mulaney’s groundwork on the topics bloomed bigger and funnier. Mulaney joked that him being there felt like there was no host at all that week, and that’s truer than it sounds—this was the John Mulaney show, in the sense that he was the unquestioned centerpiece that everything flowed through. And that made everything around him better.
The Best, and the Rest
The Best: I’m in the rare position of having to cull a lot of contenders for the top spot tonight. In the end, I’ll take “Sister,” the ad parody that strikes so deeply into so many cultural and gender dynamics that its sure to get shared among families without comment for years to come. With a smug Mulaney driving the pitch-perfect parody of those commercials where aging children worry about what to do about dad, the sketch pivots brutally into its pitched solution—Sister, “the live-in 24-hour healthcare provider that’s also your sister.” With the mere touch of your phone to text “Dad fell,” Mulaney promises smilingly, your sister will break her lease, fly across the country, and quit her job to do the tedious bottom-wiping you, her elder male relative, can’t be bothered with. Citing “years of internalized sexism” that convinces her “caretaking is her responsibility and not yours,” your sister will absorb your doddering dad’s snipes about her weight as she scrubs his floors and deals with endless administrative tasks while you make infrequent visits to undermine her attempts to get your cantankerous father to obey her doctor-advised meal prep. (“He can have salt!,” Mulaney’s brother yells contemptuously during one of his infrequent visits.) Toss in the side-benefit “Your sister’s husband,” who gingerly attempts to head off his wife’s masochistic self-sacrifices for her own good while ultimately enabling them in helpless resignation, and you’ve got a biting, insightful, potent little bullet for sisters everywhere to deploy this Thanksgiving.
The Worst: To quote Schmidt when Nick asks him about The Pepperwood Chronicles, “No notes!” (I also miss New Girl.)
The Rest: The other filmed piece is the other contender for top spot, as “Gettin’ It Done,” paired Mulaney with Jeremy Culhane. As Culhane’s Food Network travel show interrupts its glib visit to a Rhode Island brewery with host Culhane and Mulaney’s trembling, buzzed-on-IPA kiss, the piece allows both performers to pull back from the expected stereotypes and play out a lived-in little microdrama amidst all the Guy Fieri-esque flash editing and jabber, making for a genuinely sweet and oddly impactful sketch. With Culhane’s host only pausing in his practiced flow to ponder Mulaney’s bearded brewmaster’s mused, “Why did it have to be you?” after their second reluctant, beery smooch in the icy walk-in, the piece plays its characters’ dilemma—pardon—straight, right up ’til the conclusion when a sobered up Culhane claims it was just the beer talking without breaking stride. A nifty, tonally assured, and flawlessly performed playlet in the guise of an ordinary pop cultural takeoff. Outstanding.
The plane crash sketch worked mainly to show how old templates can be revived with the right performance. Mulaney’s survivor has clearly, along with his fellow, head-bandaged male passengers, been to Turkey for bargain cosmetic work, and he is just as clearly hiding that fact. That’s the joke—simple, direct, a little SNL hacky. But it works because Mulaney’s here, channeling his character’s mulish insistence that his strategically wrapped and denuded scalp was the result of a series of unlikely, cabin-wide headrest fires and not—repeat not—whatever vanity surgery reporter Ashley Padilla is hinting at. Mulaney’s performing vibe here is “confident reality denial,” and the host sticks to his guns with such beady bullheadedness that he can claim the doctor who did all the head bandaging isn’t there because the passengers ate him with the assurance of a man who simply will not concede an inch of weakness. (The way the questioned men ask, “Say it again for me?” instead of answering Padilla’s questions is spot-on aggressive denial.) There are a few lesser touches (Jane Wickline’s one female passenger got a TBL, while Ben Marshall’s had his lips done and Kam Patterson’s Eric Adams pops by for some formerly topical grifting), but this is a prime example of a so-so sketch lifted by a great host.
“Weekend Update” Update
Even though he doesn’t appear on “Update,” you can feel Mulaney’s hand guiding the jokes. Naturally the show was going to do some stuff about Friday’s complete air travel meltdown because Donald Trump put a sycophantic failed reality show clown and a semi-literate belligerent ding-dong in charge of our transportation infrastructure . But Mulaney having already done solid jokes in the cold open and monologue about everything from that cluster-f**k to Jensen Huang to RFK Jr made the show’s often bleary satire feel grounded in something like a unifying plan. Jost and Che’s jokes weren’t as good as Mulaney’s, but that’s not exactly a huge criticism.
Jost got off, “Jensen Huang had a midlife crisis so bad, you might lose your house in his divorce,” while Che countered by getting his signature shocked response to some pretty solid dark comedy. To Mississippi’s Scott Colom’s victory over Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, Che zinged, “Or, as it was reported in Mississippi, ‘Black man savagely beats white woman.'” And to the lawsuit complaining that Trump’s latest ego-monument will block the Kennedy and Lincoln Memorials from being visible to each other, Che nailed his target, joking, “Something tells me those two aren’t big fans of clear sight lines.” All good stuff, all drawing additional strength from the idea that there was a satirical throughline to work off of.
Mulaney’s packed schedule tonight left room for only one correspondent, with Tommy Brennan getting some needed screen time doing the sort of holiday song Jane Wickline traditionally gets. It was sort of a more pedestrian Adam Sandler Thanksgiving ditty—nothing groundbreaking about dealing with barely suppressed family resentments and political arguments over the turkey—but it certainly wasn’t bad or anything. The best part is clearly some Brennan stand-up material, as he broke the song to tell a brief anecdote about how his taciturn father reacted to his sister’s coming out that was especially funny and well observed.
Recurring Sketch Report
Is Kathy as good as it was the first time? No—Ashley Padilla does her damnedest to bring the same lunatic focus to her ostracized office weirdo, but the original was, like Kathy herself, so doggedly, maniacally determined to wring from us our grudging but explosive response that it wasn’t going to have the same impact. (That Padilla’s Kathy seems to care whether her tremblingly annoyed coworkers—her eyes keep darting back and forth between Mulaney and Kenan—weakens her.) Still, Padilla has taken an SNL staple, the workplace nutcase, and made something impossibly new and funny out of it. There’s nothing as majestically ballsy as her initial outing’s 15 repeated, identical questions, but here, “You talkin’ transpo?” still sends her frozen colleagues into similarly amusing paroxysms of bottled up irritation. Mulaney, leading the way with a rageful, “Those are ringtones—why don’t you go to hell!,” makes a fine foil, the lurking volatility under the comic’s practiced stage affability a potent weapon when properly deployed. And the kicker—Kathy, fishbowl beverage in tow, recurs unexpectedly to ask her one question during the inevitable musical sketch much later in the show—is the sort of format-busting gag SNL should do much more of. (I still fondly recall that one season when Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon’s characters kept eerily bleeding into the commercial bumpers.)
The BIG MUSICAL NUMBER is the one recurring aspect of Mulaney’s hosting gigs that I keep wishing the show would leave behind, even if they’re never anything but fun. (And expensively ambitious.) Born from the glory that was “Diner Lobster,” the goof that Mulaney has to front a New York-themed Broadway number about the city’s fringe foibles is the sort of running gag that’s become to big to actually fail, but too unwieldy to truly takeoff at this point.
Here the launchpad is the recent ban on Central Park carriage horses, with Mulaney’s driver exhibiting the signature Mulaney brand of to-camera mugging and sly commentary. (He can’t fathom why people would object to the age-old practice other than “animal cruelty and human murders.”) With passengers Marcello Hernandez and Kam Patterson in tow for one last ride, we get drive-bys of Little Shop of Horrors, Funny Girl (Veronika Slowikoska showing off her serious pipes as New York’s last marathoner), Annie Get Your Gun (Tommy Brennan’s pedicab driver asserts his dominance in the “running over pedestrians” race), Kenan’s singing cloud of weed smoke (sorry, my Broadway knowledge fails me), The Sound of Music (“Park Slope cuck” James Austin Johnson and smarting billionaire Culhane singing “A Boy Named Mamdani” from a manhole), and a crowd-shaking turn from the returning Bowen Yang as “Mary Todd Lincoln Tunnel.” I maintain that “Lobster Diner” worked partly because of how focused the parody was on its one source musical, but while these elaborately mounted anthology productions are more chore than inspiration at this point, it’s not like I’m made of stone or anything—fun stuff.
Political Comedy Report
It’s always bracing when the host comes out for the cold open—there’s a sense that at least the guest is fully engaged with the whole enterprise. And the rapturous applause that greeted Mulaney being the first face viewers saw was borne out by a Trump-less roundtable of tech billionaires being unsuccessfully taught by Mulaney’s CIA handler how to spot the sort of honey trapping foreign spies that prey on male egomaniacs to undermine national security and the stock market at the same time. Jeremy Culhane brought back his try-hard, tone deaf Elon Musk, Jane Wickline played Dario Amodei, Ben Marshall was Sam Altman, JAJ did a chillingly on-point Peter Thiel, and Andrew Dismukes donned the creepy Meta glasses for Mark Zuckerberg.
As Mulaney’s barely-concealed contempt sums up his assembled charges, these are the “bug-eyed little weirdos” literally in charge of the world, presented here (in the sort of accuracy its impossible to call too obvious) as a cadre of stunted, self-impressed manboys whose self-regard has convinced them of their own, magnetic invincibility. Mulaney’s the perfect person to ride herd over this gaggle of blinkered, insufferable oligarchs, his overweening contempt coupled with bureaucratic obligation with such tension that he finally just breaks out a spray bottle to spritz a jabbering Musk like a misbehaving cat. The impetus for the meeting is NVIDIA ex-CEO Jensen Huang’s downfall after being outed as a serial adulterer (most notably with a Chinese spy, all but guaranteeing U.S. secrets are Chinese government bulletin board fodder) , with the exasperated Mulaney vainly attempting to drum into these fellow plutocrats that no attractive woman or man would ever want them for their personalities.
Mulaney has a feast mocking such easy yet powerful targets—it’s a field day when comics realize they can punch up and down at the same time. Here, Mulaney’s line about it being a miracle that “people as pale and as strange as you have A: survived; and B: been given all the world’s wealth and power” is both a cheap nerd joke and a potent punch right to the heart of overweening billionaire egotism currently poisoning the Earth. When Bowen Yang arrives (to near Mulaney-level applause) as Huang to smirk, “Ladies, when you invite Jensen over, you know what’s about to go down—the S&P 500,” it’s clear that all Mulaney’s hard work to educate these supervillainous twerps that their unfathomable blood-wealth doesn’t mean they’re not also easily manipulated, egomaniacal, stunted monsters.
Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings
I think it’s Jeremy Culhane’s time to join the A-list. His tone-switching work in the “Gettin’ It Done” pre-tape was outstanding, and he got to smooch another dude when he and JAJ dueted in that manhole (shut it)—as he showed in last week’s one-shot on The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, the guy’s got a thing, and I want to see more of it.
But this was a Mulaney showcase. Some made their marks alongside him (Veronika got to belt one out, JAJ and Padilla were their usual rock-solid selves), but the ensemble took mostly a back seat.
Kudos to Tommy for getting the sort of desk piece featured players survive on.
10-To-Oneland Report
Mulaney opened the show with a killer, so why wouldn’t he close it out the same way? As the one long-haired hippie grooving to Sly and the Family Stone at Woodstock who can somehow glimpse the Baby Boomers’ grasping, reactionary futures, Mulaney picked up on his generational warfare from the monologue. His every accurate prediction about how the peace and love set will both mythologize their hedonistic idealism while perverting it at the expense of their kids landed especially hard thanks to Mulaney’s beaming malevolence. While his stoned comrades shrug off his suggestion that their generation “buy all the houses” and “fetishize money in an almost pornographic way,” Mulaney’s far-seeing figure pegs every single Boomer stereotype to the wall, their cultural shift to tut-tutting pleasure hoarders zeroed in on Regan-era sushi excess (“like raw fish dipped in liquid salt”) and culminating in Mulaney’s ominous, Thiel-esque suggestion, “And I don’t think we should die.” John Mulaney’s stage persona summed up in one demonically chipper characterization.
Stray Observations
- While not one of the usual depressing memorial cards before the goodnights, the final bumper saw Mulaney dressed up in quadruple tribute to Television guitarist and punk legend Richard Lloyd, who died last week.
- Look, Robert Kennedy has a physical ailment that makes him talk like that. So mocking his “various gargling sounds” (as a chyron punctuated one of Che’s jokes tonight) should be problematic. Except that Kennedy’s anti-science bullcrap is actually killing babies and enacting a creepy eugenicist “survival of the fittest” war on anyone who needs medical assistance not derived from leathery pushups, artificial testosterone and quackery. So screw that guy. (And here’s to Mulaney for tacking RFK wife and former actor Cheryl Hinds to Kennedy’s murderous ignorance.)
- It was also eye-opening to hear about Mulaney’s first-hand experience with the pre-MAHA/MAGA RFK, especially the part about him always being a nepo-fraus even in his supposed do-gooder days.
- Famously recovering addict Mulaney planted himself confidently in a lot of material centered on dope and booze. Just an observation.
- “Some of these beers don’t have labels and maybe nothing should!”
- A commercial playing Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind of Music?” That’s an excuse to link to my favorite sketch from Season 49!
- Jost is never happier than when he gets to slip in another “Biden is old” joke.
- “But for me and Blackie—and don’t worry, it is racial—this could be our final voyage.”
- “We just want to travel at the speed of walking but the entire time smell horse poop.”
- Apart from kicking ass as usual, Phoebe Bridgers pulled off a genuinely effective musical creep-out when a simple lighting change revealed her thematically devastating blacklight skull face at the end of “Still Standing.”
- Next Time (December 5, that is): Nobody’s buzzier than You Can See Everything‘s other Elizabeth Holmes, Amanda Seyfried, who hosts alongside musical guest Don Tolliver. See you then. Eat too much and have a nice Thanksgiving, you.
