Bad Bunny Kicks Off Saturday Night Live‘s 51st Season

And Your Host…

Bad Bunny ushered in the first show of Saturday Night Live‘s next 50 years (perhaps with Lorne Michaels calling the shots from his cryo-pod) right in the middle of a busy week for the music mega-star. Apart from being picked to play this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, BB also found himself the inevitable target of aggrieved white people of the sort the Donald Trump era have emboldened to say out loud the sort of racist trash they at least used to mostly mumble under their breath.

Bunny threw to a clipped-together montage of Fox News yammering heads cheering the NFL’s choice, dodging the fact that the theme of MAGA loudmouths everywhere ranges from “He doesn’t even sing in English!,” to “I don’t even know who this [multiplatinum Grammy winner] is!” (That Bad Bunny’s condemnation of the Trump administration’s escalating ethnic cleansing in the guise of immigration enforcement is the transparently real reason behind all this is just part of our shared American hellscape.)

Regardless, that’s a lot for anybody to cope with while hosting the premiere of a live comedy institution in his second language. And as has been the case with BB’s two hosting gigs, the guy handled it just fine. In his monologue (with a cameo from none other than Bad Bunny fan Jon Hamm/”Juan Jamón” himself), Bunny closed with an extended thank you in un-subtitled Spanish, cheekily telling people that they’ve got until the Super Bowl to bone up.

That said, SNL does have to work around a host whose English skills are more than capable but not especially nimble when it comes to live TV comedy. The guy is endearing as hell, and clearly enjoys throwing himself into the deep end in sketch after sketch, but those sketches are tasked with finding the right pitch and pacing to accommodate the host. Paired with pal Marcello Hernandez more often than not, Bunny was game, charming, and a little off the beat at times. Which would be less of an issue if the sketches tonight were decent—which almost entirely they were not.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: I can’t start out the season with a copout, so I’ll pick Jeopardy from a truly forgettable lineup of sketches tonight. Is it ominous that the first proper sketch was a game show? Or that a plain Jeopardy sketch when Black Jeopardy exists signals a certain lack of ambition. Yes on both counts. But this one had a few things going for it. Andrew Dismukes stepped up as host, a thankless sketch template that some very few performers have turned into gold. His Ken Jennings was faced with putting a positive spin on contestant Bad Bunny’s inability to do the whole jeopardy Yoda-speak question/answer thing and he brought the right mixture of incredulousness and helpful enthusiasm to carry the premise along. (Him calling Bunny “bud” came off as endearing rather than condescending.) And BB was more confident here than elsewhere, his character’s game confusion similarly enjoyable. When Jennings says a chipper “Sure, why not?” to Bunny’s Double Jeopardy wager of a million bucks, everybody involved is overjoyed when the guy accidentally backs into the right answer, and so was I. Like a lot of tonight’s sketches, this was nondescript but more or less pleasant? Anyway, I didn’t feel like I could leave this top slot blank in good conscience, so congrats!

The Worst: I’m loathe to put the high school sketch here, mainly because of Ashley Padilla. With Heidi and Ego gone, I’m excited to see if Padilla will get the airtime she deserves—I’d call her one of the best pure sketch actresses SNL‘s seen in a while, and she’s good here, even if the sketch halts and bumbles along. With Marcello’s emo student’s disturbing class drawings bringing in dad Bad Bunny for a conference, Padilla’s principal goes immediately smitten, downplaying pictures of her head being sawn off and a rocket shooting out of her butt. Tasked with a pretty dire little nothing of a premise, Padilla’s still enough of a performer to imbue the thing with a smidge of presence, which is really the only thing the sketch has going for it.

The Rest: Kind of odd that back-to-back sketches tonight featured Sarah Sherman and Chloe Fineman paired up in a restaurant setting. Of the two, I’ll give the edge to the overstuffed but just silly enough to work sketch where a catchup brunch among four friends (Mikey rounding thing out) sees Bunny ignoring everyone in a snit because they don’t share his enthusiasm for KPop Demon Hunters.

(Note here: I have not watched the Korean Netflix hit, so please refrain from corrections about the eternal battle between Huntr/x and the Saja Boys. I am old and my to-watch list is long.)

Bunny gave his petulant KPop fan a funny edge of snippiness (“What else are gonna save you from demons, you idiot?”) as his diner gets lost in musical reverie (thanks to visiting singers Rumi, Mira, and Zoey themselves). And there are enough little absurd touches around the edges, with Sherman revealing that an unfortunate layover saw her ensconced in the Epstein files, and(shades of that Friendly’s commercial) spitting up blood once Bowen Yang‘s visiting demon singer gets her under his spell. (Always a good night for Sarah when she’s possessed.)

It’s one of those sketches built around a pop culture phenomenon that will alienate the uninitiated unless the sketch has more to offer than cameos and specific references. And this mostly succeeds thanks to the amusing commitment of Bunny’s character to his obsession and the piece’s own commitment to letting the weirdness play out.

In the second of the two restaurant sketches, Sherman and Fineman’s couple asks pal Andrew Dismukes for some sperm. Nothing wrong there, as the flattered but taken-aback pal asks for a few moments to think about the donor idea, only for Bunny’s nearby diner to make a pitch to fill in should Dismukes turn them down.

There are a few funny touches—Bunny prefaces his proposal with the get-to-know me fact that he thought The Sopranos ending was perfect. And his weirdo comes across as less creepy (what with offering two strangers his reproductive material) than earnestly bananas. It’s not high comedy, but I chuckled at his helpful offer that the women could use his “stuff” “in the front, in the back, wherever.”

But it’s all pretty thin (and I just heard how that sounds in my head—apologies), with a disproportionate weight of the laughs intended to be borne by a couple of silly haircuts. Bunny has an assertive bowl cut along with his sleeveless t-shirt, while Kenan Thompson (swooping in for his first scene-steal of Season 51) sports what I can only compare to a painted-on Charlie Brown forehead tuft. It’s the sort of detail you deploy when you know your sketch isn’t going to achieve lift-off on its own, and as much as I can listen to a beaming Kenan character state unequivocally, “When God opens the window, you take the sperm,” all night, it’s not enough. Same goes for the stinger (complete with Sopranos-inconclusive HBO credit—just keep piling on elements to see if anything sticks).

Marcello Hernandez was that stinger (his identically dressed weirdo turned out to be Bad Bunny’s hitherto unknown son), and he and Bunny teamed up happily throughout the night. The best of the lot was the “Washington’s Dream“-esque sketch where newly founded Iberian society decides on the rules for the new Spanish language. Reading from a ready scroll, Bunny’s leader and Marcello’s sidekick patiently explain to their assembled nobles that, of course, all nouns will have a gender based on completely reasonable criteria like “ocean is a boy because it’s fun but sometimes for no reason it kills you.” (Hey, English is no picnic either—try teaching that whole “‘i’ before ‘e'” nonsense sometime.)

It’s all amusingly low-key, with Mikey Day‘s Barcelona-hailing questioner having his head lopped off mid-lisp (nice prop Mikey head), and Dismukes’ noble gamely trying and failing to do the rolling ‘r’ tongue thing. And in lieu of luring the esteemed actor to actually host SNL, having Bad Bunny’s fellow Puertorriqueño Benicio del Toro of all people swing by to add in some more fiddly Spanish grammar at least goosed this one’s energy up a notch.

The Bunny-Marcello show kicked off with a commercial for ChatGPTio, an A.I. spinoff where Marcello’s garrulous Latin uncle answers everyone’s questions with opinionated nonsense. With Bunny along as his equally disreputable friend, the uncle offers up (occasionally pantsless) advice, peppered with judgmental takes familiar to nieces and nephews everywhere. (“How do I make vegan banana bread?” “You don’t!”) Marcello loves playing these kinds of roles on SNL (and is clearly delighted when another Spanish-speaker is hosting), and his energy helps, even if the whole sketch is clearly led around by the fact that someone realized you could add that “-io” to ChatGPT.

Weekend Update Update

Here’s to yet another year of me trying to find new ways to say, “Colin Jost and Michael Che are very good at amusing each other and occasionally us while saying very little of substance.” It was dispiriting when I heard that rumors of new Weekend Update anchors were unfounded, I have to be honest. Che and Jost are funny guys, and they can do Update in their sleep. Which they sort of do.

The whole fake newscaster concept wasn’t born with Saturday Night Live and Chevy Chase, but Weekend Update was the blueprint for what’s become an American comedy staple. Shame that the birthplace of the form has so largely neutered itself into a self-impressed game of one-upmanship and glib cleverness. Well, we’ll always have Last Week Tonight (at least until the next hypocritical right-wing pressure campaign claims John Oliver, too.)

I mean, the topics of the day did get a mention here and there. There’s a beyond-tentative peace brewing in Gaza, so Jost joked how Trump’s supposed peace plan looks just like that drawing/poem Trump made to noted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Zing. Che raised the specter of Trump’s scapegoating of trans people for the GOP-spurred government shutdown so he could throw to a photoshopped picture of himself with boobs. Yeah! Book bans led by fundamentalist censorship fetishists sweeping the nation lead to Jost putting up another photoshop of Che’s oft-banned tome about drawing Muhammad. That’ll show ’em.

To repeat myself yet again: Either do satire or don’t. Either approach is valid. But if you do it badly, you come off as lazy in the best case, and cowardly more likely.

The only new hire who got much to do tonight was Kam Patterson, who got the coveted-by-all-featured-players desk piece as himself. The young comic with the iffy friends and the occasional anti-gay slur in his back pocket spurred Shane Gillis-style backlash when his hiring was announced, so Lorne gave Patterson a few minutes to try to charm away the controversy. It sort of worked—Patterson’s got charisma, and his youth and brashness is at least better understood in context of performance. And if he glided past some of the stuff (Trump support, association with the Kill Tony hack factory) people are actually uneasy about, him taunting Jost about Saturday Night Live‘s checkered history with race at least had some “new guy bites the hand that’s just started feeding him” juice to it. Joking-not joking that he uses the n-word “150 times” before he tells his second joke in his stand-up act and pointing to Che using it on-air as recently as a decade ago was similarly meant to ingratiate Patterson with a viewership skeptical of Michaels’ ongoing courting of the right-wing comedy demographic. Patterson’s hiring was calculated, as was this first appearance.

Bowen Yang got to don some prosthetics, so he was happy. So I was I, mainly, as his Dobby the house elf from the Harry Potter universe got in some shots at creator J.K Rowling’s anti-trans bullcrap. (This week attacking former child star Emma Watson for not being grateful enough to jump in with Rowling’s hate campaign.) Complete with a squeaky voice (and head-banging wardrobe malfunction), Yang, as ever, threw himself into the characterization, his terrified and under-duress Dobby mocking the breadcrumbs of insensitivity in Rowling’s work (“Wait, Cho Chang was Asian?”) while giving Jost and Che cues to make fun of each other, as is their greatest joy. It was more about Yang having a ball than being especially pointed, but at least Dobby got to show off some knockoff, Rowling-mocking merch along the way.

Political Comedy Report

I had some thoughts going into this season regarding which direction Saturday Night Live could take in a climate where an authoritarian government is unequivocally waging war against late night comedy shows. So I’m not shocked at how this first episode turned out. The cold open did poke the bear with a bit more specificity and boldness than I anticipated, although the complete absence of political material the rest of the night (Update barely notwithstanding) essentially provided the “I told you so” ammo I was hoping against hope I wouldn’t need.

Evidently, Lorne Michaels and SNL‘s tactic in a country where Donald Trump and his minions have taken down one late-night host, momentarily failed with another (not for lack of trying), and is currently co-opting everything from CBS News to TikTok with blackmail, economic pressure, and bad-faith smears is to take a few of the expected swipes up top and move on quickly in the hopes that the show will be left alone. I get it. I hate it. SNL‘s political courage has always been more self-aggrandizing myth than actual legacy, so expecting a 50-year-old show run by an 80-year-old millionaire with two other NBC properties to protect to go the scorched-earth route was the sort of wishful thinking I allowed myself—for a few minutes at least.

Here, Colin Jost’s Pete Hegseth was an easy target, after the former TV host’s simultaneously alarming and disastrously lame frat bro address to every assembled career military officer bombed so spectacularly in recent days. That Jost was chosen to channel such a strutting little creep was a natural (no offense, to Jost), and the opener plucked out the most relevantly ridiculous themes, with this Hegseth’s obsession with presenting a stunted little boy’s vision of military manliness emerging in all its un-self aware glory. “No fuggos, no fatties, no hair—hot, shredded hairless men who are definitely not gay!,” might not be verbatim what Hegseth ranted to a room full of actual service brass desperately trying not to choke on laughter/bile, but in Jost’s energetic performance, the joke landed again and again.

That James Austin Johnson‘s Trump made his inevitable appearance to continue the thought about late-night comedy shows being the greatest threat to America posed the ongoing question: how do you make this guy funny? You know, with shim etting masked thugs and American troops loose on Democratic-run cities—relentless, incoherent assaults on the Constitution, all non-white people, women, the LGBTQ+ community, the rule of law, and—allegedly—multiple underage girls on an infamous pedophile’s secret island?

JAJ is game, and talented as hell. He got SNL on the back of his Trump, and if the show has sanded that impression’s edge down, Johnson is still so plugged into the (let’s call it) mind of Donald Trump that he can’t help but bring the man’s yawning inner void into creepy focus. Here, apart from the requisite, winking references to Trump’s deteriorating health and egregious, multiple, self-enriching scams of the sort everyone’s just become numb to (Trump Rx, you’re next!), JAJ’s patter touched on those pesky Epstein files, his administration’s blatantly illegal attacks on Venezuelan civilian boats, and the like.

It’s fine—no doubt noted hate-watcher Trump has instructed his hand-picked FCC attack dog Brendan Carr (here, Mikey Day) to look into ways to f** with NBC, no matter the carefully measured nature of the gags. And I like the conceit of having JAJ’s Trump freeze time around him to act as commentator to an ongoing sketch, which is at least a more novel way to let Johnson do his thing freed from simply repeating a Trump press conference in all its impossible-to-exaggerate gibberish.

But the sketch became more about Saturday Night Live than anything else, as Trump mocked Jost opening the season in an actual sketch (“Poor Colin. We all knew they were never gonna let him do the whole opening by himself”), and tasked the historically more conservative SNL stage crew with “keeping an eye on Marcello” for him. As far as cheeky jokes about the indiscriminate ICE detainment of literally anyone presenting as Latino go, that one was moderately chilling.

But here’s the thing. Donald Trump is, as noted, actively looking to shut down his critics, of which Saturday Night Live is nominally one. Like all raving egomaniacs he can’t take a joke and he’s guaranteed watching. If that’s not an opportunity—if not a mandate—for a late-night comedy institution to rise to the occasion and really put its money where its long-manufactured reputation as rebellious satirical TV pioneers is, then it’s just not going to happen. Having this Trump jokingly imply that both he and SNL are “old and confused and yet still demand your constant attention” preemptively steals thunder away from your critics (like me), sure, but it doesn’t absolve you of actually doing the thing you’re going to get punished for anyway.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

After an eventful offseason filled with more than a few surprising changes, the Season 51 field is wide open. The old guard of Kenan and Mikey Day have settled into their emeritus roles, meaning they’ll pop in to liven up a scene but aren’t poised to take over a show. James Austin Johnson is hampered by having to peel out his Trump getup each week, but he remains my pick for the best actor on the show and I can only hope he doesn’t get Trump-burned. Chloe Fineman should benefit from Ego Nwodim and Heidi Gardner‘s exits, but feels more likely to stay in the mid-tier. I was surprised that returning featured players Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline stayed on the junior varsity (more so Padilla—sorry, but Jane simply did not figure in tonight’s premiere).

There’s lots of new blood in a still overstuffed cast but the season opener didn’t push anybody front and center apart from Kam Patterson, who got an Update piece as himself, mainly as an attempt to defuse the controversy caused by Lorne Michaels once more fishing from the right-wing well for a new hire. Ben Marshall getting plucked from the disbanded Please Don’t Destroy trio should give him a leg up, but that didn’t manifest tonight.

James Austin Johnson’s Trump mocked the show for having Colin Jost anchor the first sketch of Season 51, and it is pretty telling that Jost got the nod, resemblance to the smarmiest white supremacist defense secretary aside. (It’s sort of like when John Cleese left Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Terry Gilliam started popping up all over Season 4. It’s nice to see him, but it makes you recognize how thin the bench is. As for Jeremy Culhane, Tommy Brennan, and Veronika Slowikowska, hang in there—the first season is rough.

It’s a long season, and while experience teaches that it’s going to take some time for a new cast to come together and the pecking order to sort itself out through talent, luck, and the indefinable “it,” I’ve gotta say that tonight’s show didn’t suggest there’s a star waiting to seize the spotlight.

10-To-Oneland Report

Sometimes you get what you asked for and you stare at it and nod your head while thinking, “Well, that happened.” The Kid From Number 8 is… something. A parody of an actual, long-running Mexican sitcom that appears, from my cursory internet searching, to be more like a straight-ahead reenactment, the sketch’s beyond-broadness and alarming slapstick played to this unaware gringo like someone’s kids show fever dream. That the show indeed exists in a barely less exaggerated form doesn’t make the sketch any less deliberately abrasive and offputting, but here’s to Marcello, Bunny (in massive cheeks), Dismukes, Sherman, Chloe, and Kenan (plus a returning Juan Jamón) for bringing El Chavo del Ocho into the wider, English-speaking consciousness. Um, gracias?

Stray Observations

A commercial saw Jimmy Fallon boasting of hosting the KPop Demon Hunters’ first-ever live performance next week, but SNL stole your thunder, son.

Speaking of music, Doja Cat was a trip. Love a gleefully theatrical weirdo.

Patterson whipped out a small rock at the end of his piece. When I looked up the origin, it came coupled with an ableist slur. So that’s a thing.

“Our military is gay as hell! Gayer and yet has never been fatter. Make that make sense!”

JAJ’s Trump mocked the comics who took the cash to appear at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which I’d like better if I weren’t absolutely certain Lorne is planning to book at least a few of them to host this season.

Episode Grade: A not very promising C out of the Season 51 gate.

Next Week: Amy Poehler returns to save us all. Maine’s own Role Model provides the soundtrack.