Jon Hamm Helms a Consistently Funny Saturday Night Live

And Your Host…

It’s amusing to think back to a time when Jon Hamm had to convince us he was funny. While he was being all charismatically leading man dour on Mad Men, Hamm’s initial few SNL monologues fell into the genre of “serious actors trying to show they can be silly.” Now, with a long string of appearances in everything from 30 Rock to Bridesmaids to that time he voiced a talking toilet proving that Jon Hamm is, at heart, a big ol’ handsome goof, there’s no room for a Hamm-hosted SNL to sneak up on us. (I remain angry at us collectively that we will never get a Hamm-and-Fletch cinematic universe.)

In his fourth hosting gig, Hamm was assured, confident, and, well, a big ol’ handsome goof. As he reminded everyone with a mid-monologue montage (or whatever it’s called when your 14 cameo appearances are all played at the same time), Hamm’s got plenty of Saturday Night Live service time under his belt, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’d be so at home, but the guy was just start-to-finish delightful all night. Bringing out SNL frequent flier Kieran Culkin to do his own cameo (“Mad Men was better than Succession,” Hamm mutters in a bit of prestige TV one-upmanship) mocked the tired form while playing around with it like a Harlem Globetrotter.

Unlike those earlier appearances, Hamm had nothing to prove when it comes to comedy cred, so he just slotted into sketches and premises with ease. It’s fun to imagine a timeline where struggling actor Jon Hamm wound up nailing a 20-years-ago SNL audition and is now rivaling Kenan for longest-tenured and most enjoyably coasting cast member, with tonight’s Hamm seamlessly integrated into sketch after decidedly above-average sketch. He joked in the monologue about his presence reliably taking a medium sketch to a “marginally better than medium sketch,” but there wasn’t much medium on display.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: Not a dud in the rundown tonight. My actual favorite gets its own 10-to-one review slot below, so I’ll toss a game show in the top spot here. Guess! The Correct! Answer! (the artless title echoing my complaint about the low-effort nature of game show sketches on SNL in general) finds Hamm’s contestant smilingly spelling out his concerns that something he says or does will go viral and destroy his otherwise prosperous and happy life. They do.

Michael Longfellow is a great fit for this sort of thing, his gimlet-eyed mischievousness signaling that some fiendish trap is going to be sprung. This time, though, it’s Hamm’s contestant who digs his own man-trap, as the password-style game sees him immediately revealing far, far too much about himself. As noted, game show sketches are sketch template 101, the need to explain the rules doing away with any sort of effort on our (or the writers’) part, but Hamm’s earnestly prosaic opening statement that he’s got “not much to gain and a whole lot to lose” is just nakedly on-the-nose enough to be funny.

His resulting confessional answers are likewise embroidered with enough straight-faced detail to get the laughs, too. Mikey Day’s questioner hinting about “micro-aggressions” elicits Hamm’s eager answers with rapid-fire aplomb (“Something that’s racist.” “Me!”), ramping up as they go. (“Something small and racist.” “My penis!”) Hamm’s wealthy dentist reveals his morning drinking, his alarming fantasies about his daughters friends (“Hyper-sexual daydreams” is his attempt to get more specific), and it’s all topped off with a fart and an Urkel quote, just to ensure that virality he was worried about. With Longfellow sniping from the periphery (“They left a while ago,” he notes when Hamm asks where the other contestants are) and Hamm’s unblinking commitment to his character’s televised self-destruction (“Do I still get to be a dentist?”) this game show’s an unexpected winner.

The Worst: Nope.

The Rest: It’s rare that the Please Don’t Destroy formula thrives outside of its backstage origins, but the police bit works out nicely thanks to Hamm and some well-judged escalating absurdity. After Ben Marshall’s mustachioed detective lays out a missing persons case, his offhand promise of pizza for the all-night investigation is the instigation for Hamm’s cop to indulge his inner petulant six-year-old. “Pizza!” he exclaims, incongruously for the mood surrounding a missing woman, Ben’s scolding only seeing him sink into a tetchy sulk, even though it’s his birthday. (It’s not—he had his 50th last week at Dave and Busters but not everybody was invited, so be cool about it you guys.)

Hamm is the chief attraction here, the unfolding of his seemingly straight-laced copper’s inner childish loon happening with unerring timing. (“Can we start over? Let’s just focus up and find this missing dog.” “It’s a missing girl!” “Whatev—oh my God, is she okay?”) When the madness proves contagious (John Higgins’ cop shoots off his gun into the ceiling at the prospect of a meat lover’s pizza, pausing to note, “I realize immediately I shouldn’t have done that”), it doesn’t muddy the premise so much as pile up one amusingly weird topping after another. (Man, pizza does sound good right now. But not Hawaiian. Seriously.) Even the punchline swerve is terrific, as Marshalls’ attempt to steer things back to the missing woman is dramatically interrupted by an offscreen female voice saying a quavering, “Hello..?” (Yes, I saw where it was going, and no, it didn’t stop me from appreciating how much fun this all was.

The one commercial parody tonight was a knowing jab at commercial cliches. A herpes medication spokesperson (Hamm) somberly tells potential sufferers that they’ll know if they caught the affliction because of the sudden onset slow-mo affecting their otherwise carefree activities like “dancing in an outdoor beer garden with string lights,” or “winning a carnival game on the first try.” You’re also in trouble if your wine and cheese gathering has one smiling person of four separate races.

Scanning the flood of TV ads for recurring patterns is a time-honored SNL parody theme, so Hamm further warns about the telling appearance of a woman in a generic football jersey hugging her glum husband (erectile dysfunction), a happy little kid showing mom her drawing (clinical depression), and a close-choreographed musical number in a business setting (diabetes and/or diarrhea). Capped off by the underwhelming name of the drug (Herpastopper) and Hamm’s own realization that he’s very slowly rock-climbing, and this is another excellent piece of lovingly crafted proof of how you can make smart, silly art from meaningless, mind-numbing commercialism.

Hamm and Yang make a terrific team as a pair of gay dads who, to the befuddlement of their couples friend group, did not have an infant daughter as of the previous night. All the group’s understandable queries are met with high dudgeon by Hamm and Yang (“Okay, you’re not allowed to ask us that”), even though the duo were headed out the previous evening to a rave named Bulge Dungeon sans baby. One of the benefits of Trump’s dreaded diversity and inclusion when it comes to SNL at least is how having an openly gay star like Yang frees the show up to do this sort of thing. Hamm’s straight and all, but having the out-and-hilarious Yang at the center allows a sketch about two alarmingly weirdo gays who may or may not have kidnapped a child (“Well, we like to think of it as she stole us,” Hamm notes happily) without the queasiness that would come if it were two straight dudes.

There was a welcome strain of underplaying amidst some conceptually strange sketches tonight. The other couples (Mikey Day, Sarah Sherman, Heidi Gardner, Andrew Dismukes) don’t hammer the joke home, their interrogation of their friends emerging with the timidity of those perhaps a little wary of what they might hear. Honestly, it’s as if somebody backstage, with similar gentleness, suggested that maybe, just for one episode, the show didn’t have to spell out every single joke and premise for the hypothetical slowest viewer. As in the final sketch of the night, oddball details emerged without over-much explanation, as when Yang huffily lists all the languages he claims to know, dutifully citing English, French, AP French, Navi, The Sims‘ gibberish, “Black-ish, Grown-ish, and singing.” No further questions.

Weekend Update Update

All the tariff-bashing carried over to Update, with Jost’s best going after Trump’s all-caps “BE COOL” social media post to furious/panicked 401k-holders (“This is the global economy. It’s not like we got too high and we’re trying to get through dinner with our parents”), and Che’s rebuttal to Trump referring to his reckless tariff spree as America “taking medicine to fix something.” (“Yeah,” Che noted, “but this feels like we took a whole bottle of medicine with a glass of vodka and laid in a warm bath.”)

Say what you want about Che’s penchant for prodding those darned ladies (a joke tonight about setting a new AI sex doll to the lowest intelligence setting for best results for example), but the guy knows how to flick a joke so the audience can’t feel the cut until a beat too late. A sight gag about Musk’s infamous Hitler salute (which it 100 percent was) got some rewarding gasps, as did a punchline about child workers getting an employee discount on those American-made cellphones Trump’s advisers keep promising are coming.

The Che and Jost Update excels at smirky button-pushing, even when they give themselves an escape hatch. Che’s joke about the new LeBron James Barbie doll’s beard having common ground with perennial boyfriend’s Ken (“beard,” you get it) saw Che responding to audience groans by noting, “I’m gonna cut that for air.” Che and Jost project an air of bulletproof wiseassery that can curdle into smugness at times, but which serves them very well tonight.

Plenty of Update tonight, as we got three desk pieces. Emil Wakim did a bit of sit-down stand-up, emerging after Jost’s item about lowest-ever American pride among young people waving two miniature American flags. “This was just to buy me some good will before the stuff I’m about to say,:” Wakim explained before doing a mostly tight three minutes. The “mostly” comes from the disconnect between Jost’s into and the actual material about Wakim’s preference not to examine his American privilege too closely. His own preamble nods toward the current spate of government kidnappings of outspoken people who look like him, but the bulk of the consistently funny routine is about being willfully blind to others’ suffering, which, okay, does obliquely connect.

Wakim is a very confident comic. He’s got an appealing delivery and a strong if unassuming presence, so when he connects the dots to suggest that modern Americans’ similar blinkered view of, say, the suffering of their immigrant food delivery guy would make them countenance slavery, it hits more acutely than it would from a more direct approach. I’m in on Wakim as a sketch performer, too—as underused as he is, he’s got a low-key charisma that draws the eye.

Sarah Sherman got to bash the hell out of Colin Jost, which seems to make everyone happy. This time she was playing Jost’s accountant, digging through her client’s tax return to accuse Jost of being a cokehead, an ICE deportation collaborator, an inveterate taint-waxer, and so on. She also suggests the anchor is an ungenerous lover with all the SNL interns he goes through, and that the back of the Update set hides his captive lady sex dungeon, something she apparently proves by climactically breaking her head through the wall in tariff-related frustration to reveal a pair of bound hands clutching at freedom. That’s fairly dark (and Sherman’s earlier joke about the consistency of omelettes made from her internal eggs is Sarah Squirm-gross), but as noted, nobody’a more obviously joyful at publicly mocking Colin Jost than Sherman. (Wakim got into the act, too, insisting that Jost refers to the white member of his interracial parents as “regular.”) If, as rumored, this is Jost’s last year behind the desk, SNL will have to retool an entire, reliable subsection of jokes.

Recurring Sketch Report

With Donald Trump flailing futilely against China’s economic behemoth, it was pretty much given that Bowen Yang’s Chen Biao would swan into Update to gloat. One of Yang’s earliest breakouts, the Chinese trade official never had more reason to cattily mock America’s trade policies, fueling another round of U.S. economy pińata. “Cool number, bro,” Biao eye-rolls at Trump’s escalating tariffs as he sarcastically ponders which country will be better suited to “endure hardship for the glory of their nation.”

The joke of Baio is how he’s sort of a dick about being right concerning how a 5,000-year old culture gripped currently by dictatorial economic single-mindedness views fractious American posturing as sort of cute. Mocking the threatened withholding of American movies as taking away “the one thing that distracts us from working even harder,” and pretending to care about the few American products China imports underscores the point that, amidst Trump’s ham-headed financial spitballing, China’s going to be just fine, thanks. Yang’s joke about J.D. Vance insulting all Chinese citizens as “peasants” got the only response it deserved, with Biao whipping out his own autobiography entitled Peasant’s Elegy, Biao putting Vance’s classist bullying airily in its place. And his jab at America being more and more like communist China by losing both money and human rights under Trump is, in Yang’s effortless snark, deft stuff.

Political Comedy Report

Okay, I’m gonna admit that I liked the cold open. James Austin Johnson’s pre-SNL Trump rode to giddy heights on just this sort of babbling, sing-song discursive riffing, and the sketch found some of that groove. Starting out with a somber retelling of the Easter-time tale of Jesus and those moneylenders, Johnson’s Trump soon strode into the frozen tableau mid table-flip to ramble on about Trump tanking the U.S. economy with his half-understood, insider-trading tariff scam.

As ever these days, the potentially button-pushing idea that Donald Trump would compare himself to Jesus Christ is defused by reality, in this case the fact that he actually does that quite a bit. And Johnson, freed from the need to yoke his ever-stellar impression to prosaic daily news talking points, actually seems to be having fun goofing on how uncomfortable his cast mates’ freeze-frame poses look. (He singles out Sarah Sherman’s wide-open mouth, but I kept chuckling every time I saw Michael Longfellow’s shocked Terry Gilliam grimace.)

There’s plenty of horror happening in Donald Trump’s America, but it’s objectively funny to watch the real Trump implode, in a “holy sh*t, we’re on a flaming bus driven by a sundowning maniac and our money’s on fire” sort of way, so why not steer into the assh*le-bashing silliness. Johnson’s Trump pausing in his rundown of how his tariff chaos has diverted wealth “from the middle class to my buddies” to riff on supposed backstage drama is just funny. Emil Wakim wanted to play a historically more accurate savior, Mikey Day’s blue-eyed Jesus is musing on his mid-tier sponsorship money, and Ego apparently wonders if, like Kenan, she has the juice to just bail on the whole shebang. This sort of cheek goes a long way toward deflating some of the stiffness that usually marks the average deadly cold open.

As for the satire, there’s a palpable relief across pretty much all of late-night in watching Trump fall on his ass, a vibe that buoys things here. Johnson’s Trump conveys the babbling idiocy while never quote ignoring the malign intent behind it, a delicate comic balance that can downplay the evil when not handled correctly. Here, Trump’s face-planting economic blunder is so egregious that having him divert toward some casual anti-Semitism for Passover and joke about never mixing religion with commerce courtesy of his Trump-branded bibles emerge as just fellow ingredients in his signature toxic brew. The joke within a joke about the cultish insistence that Trump is actually playing “4-D chess” (“King me!”) niftily slips in another level, while the whole portrayal here coasts along on JAJ’s talents and some breezy schadenfreude.

It’s been rare for Saturday Night Live to go into Trump world beyond the mandatory cold open assignment, but the show actually managed to find a few funny new ways to incorporate politics into the show proper. The post-monologue sketch, Check to Check Business News,” delved into the divide between big-picture stock market effects of the Trump tariff debacle to the more relevant-to-most-people daily ones via a news show explaining the rising costs of boxed mac & cheese and a “big ass box of Bisquick,” and the need for a bubble-bursting side hustle. (Apparently Funko Pops are the new Beanie babies.)

Ego and Hamm are terrifically newscaster deadpan as the anchors, their lower-middle class concerns about eating so much Top Ramen that people think they’re Asian and how bar soap can be used for everything delivered in the perfect cadence—if news reports actually dug into such concerns over the need to interview economists and show over-the-cliff Dow Jones graphs. Kenan popped in as an expert extolling the virtues of off-brand products like Uncle Bubbly and Sergeant Munch cereal (“lower rank, lower price, flavor bad”), while Hamm and Nwodim make a fine team laughing off the idea that they’ll use Kenan’s tips to actually start paying off those student loans that Trump just ensured won’t be forgiven any time soon.

The fact that Mike White has finally broken through to the top of the mainstream will never not be delightful to me. (Seriously, the guy’s been turning out deliberately offputting and brilliant comedy-dramas since the turn of the century and it’s about time one of them got embraced by the general public.) The White Potus is another of the ubiquitous White Lotus riffs permeating the comedy zeitgeist, here with JAJ’s Trump essaying Jason Isaacs’ beyond-depressed Thailand vacationer alongside Chloe Fineman’s Parkey Posey-ized Melania, Marcello Hernandez’s left-out Marco Rubio, and the like. (Unexpected cameos from Beck Bennett’s shirtless Putin and Alex Moffat’s Eric were the sort of low-wattage nice surprise to enhance rather than detract from the main joke, and the same goes for Scarlett Johansson’s wisdom-seeking Ivanka, who bails once things turn too selflessly anti-capitalist.)

Now, do Trump and his coterie of scheming bigots and numbskull nepo hires map perfectly onto The White Lotus‘ tale of well-heeled Americans trampling over a forbearing tourist destination? Sort of—the blundering, me-only greed and self-centeredness check out, even if this Trump’s blanked-out despair over the financial mess he’s in doesn’t quite ring accurate. (If anyone can imagine Donald Trump harboring even a fleeting second of self-reflection or remorse, you’ve got one up on me.) And the joke about a McDonald’s branded prozac slider is a little hacky. But overall, this was a lovingly crafted bit of pop culture-politics integration. And, again, here’s to a perpetually slighted creator like Mike White finally getting the SNL hot button sketch treatment.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

On the down side, Jane Wickline and Devon Walker got lost amidst the cold open disciples and that was about it. And Marcello Hernandez was uncharacteristically light.

Everybody else had themselves a show. Emil got a desk piece. Ashley popped in the 10-to-one sketch. Kenan stole a few scenes. Ego matched nicely with Hamm right after the monologue and Miss Eggy got a Trump shoutout in the cold open. James Austin Johnson had two Trumps, although one being on film meant he wasn’t in prosthetics all night.

Tonight was the ensemble at its best, really. No big airtime-hogging turns (Update notwithstanding) but plenty of finely observed, exceptionally performed little character touches throughout. It helps that the writers, too, seemed especially emboldened to play it weirder and smarter.

10-To-Oneland Report

Andrew Dismukes was at the center of this one, which makes me believe he wrote it. Another reason is that it’s a smartly strange idea of the kind the baby-faced weirdo traditionally excels in. Here he’s mainly playing straight as the moderator of an employee get-to-know-you seminar. Tasked with revealing their names and a single memorable factiod about themselves, the group chimes in with the usual pleasantries (one likes swimming, Mikey Day has a twin), until Hamm’s participant casually drops the fact, “My mom killed my dad naked on TV.”

Once again, it’s all about the Hamm, his guileless smile as he gently corrects Heidi Gardner’s misremembering (“Oh close, it’s was my mom that killed my dad naked on TV”) never wavering. The usual Saturday Night Live impulse is to belabor the joke in cases like this, but everyone here is blessedly restrained, the office-politeness only gradually ceding to equally gentle and understandable curiosity. I have to give it up especially to Ashley Padilla, who, despite being so completely thrown by Hamm’s revelation that she forgets both her prepared fact and her own name, nonetheless maintains the veneer of deliberate politeness. She then gradually exposes that she was less ruffled by Hamm’s outrageous story than she’s just kind of bonkers herself, something Padilla expresses with customary magnetic specificity.

When the group further ferrets out some of the details, it’s in that same underplayed manner, which only sustain the comic tension. (Rather than—again, no offense to frequent offender Mikey Day—stopping things dead to make sure we get it.) So when Hamm answers that the TV show in question was Jackass before moving on, his peers and we are only left dying for more. His further elaboration comes in a delirious string of unlikely search terms (Raven-Symoné was apparently in the mix), although he assured Day that any two hints will pull up the video. When the group finally does watch the fateful clip, their in-unison rollercoaster of responses takes the absurdity to its own loopy place. Living as it does according to its own mysteriously weird logic, this is pretty much all I could wish for a 10-to-one sketch.

Stray Observations

Speaking of cool weirdos finally getting some attention, here’s to The White Lotus‘ Jon Gries. From the editing, I couldn’t be certain if the fleeting glimpse of Gries’ [name(s) redacted for non-watchers] was just a clip from the third season or if he actually filmed a cameo. Either way, I’ve been a Gries-head since Real Genius, so congrats.

Lizzo’s just outstanding. right? The former host still managed to make her episode better with a couple of killer performances combining some striking showmanship (loved the angel wings rising from her Donna Summer dress) with her signature sparkling persona and talent. If Saturday Night Live wants to have Lizz pull double duty again soon, I’d be happy.

Lizzo’s t-shirt game was also on point, as she sported cutoffs emblazoned with “Tarrified” and “Black women were right.” Lizzo rocks.

“On Wednesday, trump announced he was pausing most tariffs for 90 days Now 90 days may not seem like a long time, but remember, trump has only been president for 82 days and it already feels like a goddamn decade.”

colin jost

“The U.S. Education department has launched a website in which students can report public schoolteachers who violate anti-DEI rules. So remember teachers, you’ve got to sleep with the white ones too.”

michael che

“Tesla is reportedly having trouble selling cyber trucks. Partly due to its slogan, Cyber truck: What if Kanye was a car?'” 

colin jost

Episode Grade: A gratifyingly all-around B-Plus.

And we’re off until May 3, when a returning Quinta Brunson hosts alongside musical guest Benson Boone.