Nikki Glaser Hosts Another Thoroughly So-So SNL Season 51 Episode

It seems like the only time Saturday Night Live bothers with the monologue is when a stand-up hosts these days. Not that the monologue was ever (but for the rarest exceptions) anyone’s must-see part of the show, but man has it gone from afterthought to chore in the past few years. Luckily, first-time host Nikki Glaser was given the hand-held mic for her good-not-great set, at least reminding viewers that this up-top intro to the week’s guest star is a thing.

Glaser’s star has only risen since her early successes as celebrity roast assassin and host of her own short-lived Comedy Central series. Squeezing competition shows and Golden Globes hosting duties into her busy headliner schedule, Glaser’s comedy is of the edgy and outspoken white lady genre, recently cutting down her stand-up peers that accepted huge paydays to legitimize Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. (Including one SNL alum who made a cameo tonight.) And while her monologue wasn’t given the blank check for stage time some other big name comics have gotten on SNL, it was assured and funny.

Buttons pushed: the looming Epstein files (twice), sex trafficking (evolved as a woman’s fear from “good old fashioned rape—not a career”), and sex (jokes about sticking her manicured fingers up her boyfriend, plus slipping in the word “tits”). Like a former SNL host, recent Riyadh sellout, and outed sex creep host before her, Glaser also did a bit comically speculating upon the roots of pedophilia, so we’ll see what sort of blowback that gets. All in all, a solid set, although for avowed SNL Glaser fan, not the knockout she was perhaps hoping for.

In sketches, Glaser was likewise more solid than stellar. Fumbling a few lines and never quite taking over the pieces she was centered in, she more often set up the regular cast than got big laughs on her own. Not a bad outing, certainly, but you can always tell when the show has recognized they don’t have a sketch powerhouse on their hands for the week.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: As my estimable pal over at the AV Club summed up in his review of last week’s Miles Teller-hosted show, this iteration of Saturday Night Live‘s ensemble is lacking in go-to belly laugh star power. On the one hand, I’m all for an ensemble of talented, lower-register character comics taking a run at an SNL season, and this cast has some genuinely great examples in Ashley Padilla and James Austin Johnson. On the other, the show is still writing as if they have some guaranteed sketch-stealing stars to turn to, which has left pretty much every show so far feeling rudderless and underwhelming.

Sketches aiming for the cheap seats fall flat when you’re counting on, say, Mikey Day and Sarah Sherman to launch them there instead of a Will Ferrell or a Kristen Wiig. But while I don’t think the SNL formula can survive without someone—anyone at this point—seizing the show and hurling it onto his/her back, it does elevate someone like James Austin Johnson, who can inhabit a subtler, character-driven sketch like the airliner one late in tonight’s show and, yes, make it soar.

The sketch, with JAJ’s smooth-voiced pilot using the shutdown-caused flight delay to fill the passengers in on his halting text relationship “from the apps” over the loudspeaker, is precisely in Johnson’s wheelhouse. His pilot never overreaches for a laugh as he explains in businesslike purr how his awkward stabs at playful sexy banter are going over. Contrasted with the mugging from passengers Sherman and Andrew Dismukes (who do crack each other up, at least), JAJ’s earnest underplaying as he sends out a call for advice from women passengers, “nice gays,” or perhaps a “Billy Dee Williams”-esque wise African American to help him recover from sending a Shining GIF in response to his date’s text about hopping in the shower is yet another little master class in servicing a premise.

JAJ’s mandatory Trump cold opens always threaten to chop him out of the bulk of the first half of every show. (That neck prosthetic alone must take an army to remove.) But that usually allows this invaluable character guy to quietly shine after Update, and this one was another subtly brilliant little gem.

And since we’re talking JAJ, for the 1-B top slot tonight, I’ll toss in the mechanical bull sketch, largely as a rebuke to what’s coming later. The set-up looked tiresome—drunk bachelorette party rides mechanical bull and disaster ensues. But dammit if this didn’t go off in the sort of unexpectedly absurd direction a lot of other sketches tonight could have used. With drunk blonde woo-girls Glaser and Sarah Sherman hopping on for an ill-advised tandem bull ride, we first cut to operator Kenan, whose dilemma comes with spotlight to heighten his conflicted inner monologue about whether or not it’s worth it to watch two bombed babes bouncing on his company’s property past its safety rating.

And then, after the expected crash, the sketch literally takes off, as the women and their steed go on a series of cross-country (and eventually cross-time and -dimensional) adventures, complete with visits to Galileo’s workshop and I think Cthulhu’s dimension, all while being occasionally pelted with wheels of cheese, fish, and buckets of water. It’s like ’90’s SNL in the most complimentary way, a prop-heavy setpiece sketch literally throwing everything in the prop room after the dopey concept.

And that’s all before we mention JAJ as a cowboy-costumed, guitar-crooning narrator, his inset presence musically accompanying the “two drunk bitches on a runaway mechanical bull” as they are unsuccessfully targeted as one of the Venezuelan fishing boats being illegally blown up by the Trump administration. (One of several welcome sideswipes aimed at ongoing horrors.) With a Johnny Cash storyteller’s sincerity, Johnson’s singing is the perfect, straight-faced accompaniment to the silly high concept, and another rare example of SNL allowing someone in the writer’s room to execute outside the norm.

The Worst: It’s not just that the prop didn’t work. The sorority sketch, where the news that guys are wearing “hyperrealistic” female masks to infiltrate all-women spaces doesn’t help most of a sorority’s members figure out there’s a dude in their midst, features Mikey Day (helpfully prying off his horrifying mask at the end) feigning ignorance while sister Ashley Padilla points and accuses.

And, okay, the one big visual gag where Day’s vape smoke was supposed to emerge through the mask’s eye-holes did not work. At all. It’s one of those live TV moments that’s going to be jeered at the morning after, for good reason, as it does undo the entire sketch. (To such a degree that it makes me wonder just how reliably the gag ever worked—that mask clings pretty snugly to Day’s kisser.) But I’m tiresomely vocal (if correct) about SNL‘s reliance on a sketch template where one character points and says, in effect, “Look, that person is doing something [outrageous joke premise no one else is noticing]! Why can’t anyone but me see [joke premise]?” Poor Padilla had what I call Mikey Day duty this time, and it’s hard to see this sketch getting beyond the beyond-tired comedy-by-numbers set-up even if that mask thing had played out like it was supposed to.

A sketch is a premise delivery system, but within that limited framework is a universe of possibility. The joke “guy in obvious mask infiltrates sorority” is a starting point. Where writers go with it is a measure of ambition and talent, maybe comedic courage. Saturday Night Live is so stuck in the “point out premise and hammer that one note” rut that it suggests a deep stagnation in the writing philosophy. Seriously, once you see the format in action, it stands out in a surprising number of sketches per week. You know, like…

The Rest: …the very first post-monologue sketch of the night. Premise: a family’s karaoke night reveals that brother and sister (and everyone else) are way too comfortable singing deeply inappropriate love/sex jams right into each others’ faces. Execution: new girlfriend attending her first karaoke night points and squeals (in essence, if not verbatim), “Hey, you people are way too comfortable singing love/sex jams right into each others’ faces.”

There are other ways to work off of this premise, is what I’m saying. But with inveterate over-player ham Sarah Sherman as the horrified girlfriend, there was little doubt which single note was going to get played, over and over. As the adult sibs, Glaser and Tommy Brennan never truly worked up the outrageous vibe necessary either, making this yet another number one sketch to let the air out of a Season 51 episode’s tires at the starting line. Little touches hinted at a weirder experience. Dismukes’ dad booming out a furious, “What did you say?” in response to Sherman’s objections jolted things a bit, and I appreciated his small-talk non-sequitur, “So Petey says you’re on Wegovy…” Plus Kenan did his thing, letting out a sputtering, “You say hey say what now?,” but otherwise it was all point out the premise.

SNL keeps trying to make animated shorts happen, so where are we on that as a group? Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day’s short was another stylistically unique, low-key cartoon bit akin to those that ended a few shows last season. In this one, a divorced dad attempts to bond with his video gamer 11-year-old during one of the kids’ visits, trotting out half-assed trips to a playground and a disastrous drone and football-catch outing. I liked it fine—there were more observational character beats than hard laughs, which isn’t a bad thing. And the deliberately minor grotesquerie of Leigh McG’s animation design underscored the pair’s awkwardness in the dad’s half-assed but sincere parenting rather than calling undo attention.

Long ago, SNL embraced its variety show format much more than it has in its later decades, and there was more room for, say, a Play-Doh man setpiece, or Penn and Teller’s magic, or a mid-show bit of Joel Hodgson prop comedy. And I’m all for the show breaking up the same-old with some new colors. But until SNL seems all-in committed to incorporating this sort of tonal and stylistic stuff into the rundown, their very occasional appearances feel more like filler.

If nothing else, SNL‘s habit of scooping up ephemeral pop culture trends keeps me on my toes. Apparently Jennifer Hudson has a talk show and her guests are required to, often awkwardly, dance their way to the stage. Such is the quickly-googled premise behind the drug commercial for celebrities terrified of this talk show ritual gauntlet, where Glaser as herself first apes one of those “I’m too depressed to smile at my kid’s drawing” TV pitch-people before the reveal. There’s nothing wrong with it—Glaser’s mortified practice dancing is amusing and the joke that the drug simply makes celebs too horrifyingly ill to appear is just absurd enough to land. But it’s a long way to go for such a marginal cultural thingy.

Speaking of people going to Saudi Arabia in search of regime-legitimizing buckets of money, the Beauty and Mr. Beast sketch, everybody. The sketch includes a disclaimer about nobody over 25 knowing who Mr. Beast is (he’s a rich guy who makes poor people debase themselves for cash on the internet), so this old fart got zinged there. But as with the previous sketch, pegging an entire sketch (Mr. Beast is the Beast… from Beauty and the Beast… you get it) on this sort of webby ephemera smacks a little of [meme of Steve Buscemi asking, “How do you do, fellow kids?”] about it. (And yes, I am using webby ephemera to make my point.)

A lot of effort (Bowen Yang and Kenan in clock and candelabra suits respectively, Ben Marshall’s Beast horns) went into an idea (“What about Beauty and Mr. Beast?”) someone scribbled on an index card, basically. The song wasn’t sold with much conviction, and the repeated jokes about the Fear Factor stunts the viral sadist/benefactor puts people through are basically just on-the-nose as far as I can tell, making this an exercise in, “What? Why?” for me.

The American Girl doll (but adult-sized) commercial went exactly where you thought it would. (Dudes make their dolls do sex stuff.) Glaser’s pitch-person gets gradually more and more freaked out (see sketch template rant from before), but not before the guys involved (especially JAJ, natch’) do some nice underplaying as their doll-woman enthusiasts smilingly contend that there’s nothing weird going on. It’s such a straight-line predictable bit that I wonder who thought it was worth all the effort, but damned if JAJ and Dismukes don’t give it the old creepy try.

Weekend Update Update

The Update ethos of joking like nothing’s changed suggests that Jost and Che simply don’t have another gear at this point. They’re funny guys and they like to zing, but they’re not going to rise to the bait of actually giving much of a crap about, say, a literal white supremacist takeover of the government in all three branches.

It’s not that Jost and Che don’t engage with the news of the week—they’re just not going to get too worked up about it. It would muss up their whole smart-alecky vibe too much.

Example: Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race over Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, part of a country-wide repudiation of GOP complicity with Trump’s anti-democracy and division. Lt. Gov Earl-Sears campaigned almost entirely on anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, with the right-winger’s utter trouncing just one of a raft of blue wave wins. Che’s joke: “She will now have to change her name to Losesome Earl-Sears.” Zing? Next.

Not that the tactic can’t be funny in a “look at this asshole” sort of way. Che’s joke about Trump-endorsed sex creep Andrew Cuomo’s NYC mayoral stomping centered on Cuomo’s use of a white Bronco for his campaign vehicle, noting, “At least O.J. was ahead in the race for a while.” Great, clever joke. Nothing about Cuomo’s Earl-Sears-esque “all bigotry, all the time” strategy targeting eventual winner and [gasp!] Muslim Democrat Zohran Mamdani? Too real. Next.

The show couldn’t resist this week’s Oval Office spectacle of Donald Trump standing in irritated immobility as a visiting big pharma exec collapsed in front of him, which, fair enough. (It’s almost like a third of America willingly chose a soulless goblin in a human skin-suit for president. Or something.) And Jost had a funny, clever joke about RFK Jr’s similarly baffling response to the medical emergency (the HHS head literally sprinted out of the room), noting how Kennedy traditionally eats anything he finds immobile on the ground. But when it came to having to address Trump’s cutting of SNAP benefits (you know, the ones that allow millions of people not to starve), cut to a clip of Trump happily dancing on the set of Maury? (Cancelled in 2022 for extra satirical bite.)

Am I asking too much? I’m told I am, even as the late-night comedy realm Jost and Che have toiled in for a very successful living for so long is literally (not hyperbolically) under assault from Trump and those network-owning conservative oligarchs eager to at least curry Trump’s censor-happy favor. Trump routinely calls for late-night shows to be pulled off the air and their all-too-compliant networks to curb their comic criticism (or face fines or worse from Trump’s FCC attack dog Brendan Carr). So, yeah, the onus is on people like Jost and Che to exhibit more than their signature brand of above-it-all wiseass schtick from time to time. Not to do so is to invite viewers’ scrutiny. So there’s mine.

Recurring Sketch Report

Pete Davidson introduced a “Classic Pete” graphic to accompany a one-liner, so I’m putting his pop-in on Update as a recurring bit. Pete sported a natty mustache while offering up a single joke to explain/excuse his controversial choice to appear at the culture-washed Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Was it good to see Pete back at the Update desk? Sure. Addressing recent stories about the current status of his and Jost’s perhaps unwise purchase of the Staten Island Ferry (the phrase “money-losing fiasco” has been used), Davidson’s joke about that being the reason he took what some are calling blood money (or, you know, reporter-dismemberment money) to appear at the sellout-studded event at least saw him obliquely reference his dad’s 9/11 death with a sharp bit of joke-work. (Referencing RFK Jr, Davidson noted he wouldn’t “be famous without my dad dying either.”)

He also alluded to the upcoming birth of his first child as another reason he took the money, the audience cheers SNL‘s PR assist to its pal Pete. Davidson’s unassuming, self-deprecating persona is expert at deflecting potential criticism—manufactured as it may be, it’s tough to hate on a guy whose whole shtick hinges on his tenuous grasp on fame/sobriety/stability, even if he’s doing just fine, seemingly. And the recent NYC election did give him plenty of ammo to lob at home borough Staten Island, the only place in the city that went for Cuomo over Mamdani. Long a comic punching bag for Davidson, Jost, and, well, everybody, that New York outlier island was in for it, with Pete joking that the newly rechristened Titanic II ferry might not work out since conservative holdout Staten is the only place that would be happy “if they ran into ICE.”

Political Comedy Report

Good ol’ James Austin Johnson. Plugging away as he’s plugged into these Trump cold opens, the guy is at least trying to channel some more darkness into the requisite buffoonery, as he’s noted. The spectacle of Trump ignoring a possibly dying visitor to the Oval Office was impetus for JAJ’s Trump to riff amusingly enough, as he airily wondered at someone collapsing in the White House that was “not me” before stepping over the prostrate man and his rescuers to launch into this week’s rambling rant.

The rants themselves are of a piece with Saturday Night Live‘s traditionally glancing swipes at this… person. With a sundowning “complete sociopath” deploying masked white supremacist shock troopers to whisk every brown person they can find off to unsupervised torture prisons and a government-wide rampage of similar whitewashing in every corner of American life and culture, SNL‘s tack of dropping passing references to the week’s most unavoidable atrocities in these pieces is increasingly irrelevant. (Even if Johnson’s impression remains solid.)

This week, Trump illegally cut off food assistance program SNAP, and JAJ’s Trump did his usual thing, noting, “this Christmas, we’re doing Grinch.” Johnson’s impression has the rhythms down, Trump’s self-satisfied digressions pitched at the frequency between insufferable and addled, but the show has never truly moved off its conception of Trump as clown, even as the actual…. person has revealed abyssal depths of corruption and cynical cruelty. So it’s funny when JAJ’s Trump, noting RFK’s speedy exit from the medical emergency, says Kennedy’s infamous brain-worm “Ratatouilled him right out of here” “like someone was trying to give him a vaccine.” It’s just harder to find the comedy in these sketches when the show runs away from the darkness in favor of the same old shtick.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Ashley Padilla’s justified rise from the featured player ranks continued tonight, even if her roles were less exciting than they have been. She and Dismukes teamed up again, too, a pairing clearly advantageous to them both.

Of Padilla’s comrades on the junior varsity (for now), Tommy Brennan got a sizable role right up front, even if I didn’t think the karaoke sketch deserved its prominent slot. Much better was Jeremy Culhane’s turn in the final sketch, even if he had to play the almost-dead guy in the cold open. (Pay those dead guy dues, new kid.) Ben Marshall got the big makeup job as the Beast (sorry, Mr. Beast), although his performance was nothing special. Tough night for the ladies, and Kam Patterson is still pretty raw.

JAJ and Kenan got theirs, and Sarah Sherman was everywhere, although I maintain that she’s going to have to incorporate some subtlety into her toolkit at some stage.

Another uncharacteristically light night for Marcello Hernandez, while Bowen only really got to shine getting irate in the ten-to-one, despite playing an actual candle at one point. Again, I don’t mind this season’s ensemble concept, but if nobody breaks out soon, this is shaping up to be another campaign that’s going to claim some heads in the off season.

10-To-Oneland Report

This is my sort of ten-to-one sketch. Set up as the bittersweet farewell for now-grown former children’s book heroine Glaser to give a series of gifts to her fairy tale playmates, the sketch hinges on a bit of extended nonsense from identically costumed weirdos Mikey Day and Jeremy Culhane. Presented with pinwheels, the pair coo and goggle in such incessantly childlike wonder that it provokes even Glaser and her other fuzzy pals into fits of mounting irritation. And, again, I am all about this sort of indulgently silly performance joke, with Day and Culhane’s committed simpering and background pinwheel shenanigans gradually infecting things like an especially contagious giggle-virus.

Here’s to Culhane especially, who, after promising Glaser that in no way will his next statement have anything to do with pinwheels, stammers “if you, when you, if you…” for so long that I imagined the control booth planning how much of the goodnights to cut. (It was about pinwheels as it turns out.) Culhane hasn’t fared as well as his other new kids so far, but I got some Bobby Moynihan vibes here, which is most definitely a compliment.

Stray Observations

That Mikey Day mask was genuinely creepy. Like, Possessor movie poster creepy.

Nikki Glaser wore a series of brown wigs tonight and all I kept thinking was, “Did SNL finally give Michaela Watkins another shot?”

If you’re a young singer of self-serious ballads and you call yourself sombr (all lower case, no less), you have to know some a-hole on the internet is going to make note of it. (I did think, “Is this one of the Stranger Things kids at one point.)

“New Mexico has become the first state in the country to offer its residents free child care. Which will be provided by nannies from old Mexico.”—Che

“He can’t be far-left and a jihadist. I mean what’s he going to do, turn ISIS into THEYSIS?”—Che, on conservative attacks on Mamdani

Episode Grade: Another Season 51 B-Minus.

Next week: Suddenly everywhere leading man Glen Powell runs into 8H alongside musical guest Olivia Dean.