Quinta Brunson and Kenan Thompson Rule a Very Funny SNL

And Your Host…

It makes sense that Quinta Brunson’s been hanging with Amy Poehler lately. Apart from being diminutive comedy powerhouses (or “fun-seized,” as Quinta termed herself in the musical monologue), both Poehler and Brunson became adored on sitcoms whose “nice” reputation disguised surprising depths, and came from much edgier sketch backgrounds. Improv pioneer Poehler, before SNL and Parks and Recreation was a complete sketch animal in the Upright Citizens Brigade TV series, while Brunson was similarly all go-for-it mischief on A Black Lady Sketch Show. (That both of these series have been sort of memory-holed is a damn shame, even if it lets comedy nerds hoard them, smugly, all for ourselves.)

In her second hosting gig after what she termed “the best night of her life” last time, SNL superfan Brunson brought the confidence of somebody both obviously delighted to be there and completely at home. If the young Quinta always wanted to be on Saturday Night Live, tonight proves once again that, should she have foregone her current role as award-winning showrunner, she could have been a star on SNL, no problem.

Some hosts just fit so seamlessly and inspire such clear affection and camaraderie from the cast that you assume they’ve got a free pass to return. The fun becomes contagious, for the cast and us at home. Tonight, Kenan, paired delightfully with Brunson in sketch after sketch, seemed to be having more fun than he has all season. And if Brunson’s monologue (where she sports the coolest little flapper hair-curl along with her slinky dress) went the tired musical route, her anthem of short-queen power—complete with similarly wee backup dancers and pop-ins from fellow shorty Sabrina Carpenter and Dwayne Wade (he was kind of undersized for the NBA at 6’4″)—made the cheesiness part of the fun.

The Best and the Rest

The Best: I’m going to go ahead and group together the sketches making up the Quinta and Kenan show for the top spot. Those two were just a great team and their obvious delight in working together lifted up sketch after sketch. The first sketch of the night was the best, with a Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure riff seeing Andrew Dismukes and Marcello Hernandez’s time-traveling dudes try and fail to get dragooned past heroes Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to take that phone booth back to their own time.

It’s a big, broad joke sold with confident silliness by Brunson and Thompson, their anti-slavery icons’ reluctance to resume their important work after they’ve seen the still problematic but immeasurably preferable racial attitudes of the late 1980’s very much pale in comparison from their perilous work of a century earlier. The cheekiness of deflating the stalwart images of two dedicated American heroes instead of playing up their burnished image is, in Quinta and Kenan’s hands, a mischievous goof that works extremely well.

Sure, battling tirelessly against the evils of slavery (which 2025 GOP America is hell-bent on erasing, but whatever) is noble work, but have you ever been on a roller coaster/”the train tracks that went in the sky?” And Kenan’s Douglass interrupting Devon Walker on his big-ass 80’s cellphone to ask simply if he 1.) has a job and 2.) gets paid is the capper on that argument. A premise is only as good as its performers can sell it, and Brunson’s Tubman telling Chloe Fineman’s QE1, “Bitch, you are going back to be the Queen of England,” vies with Kenan telling the guys how anti-slavery activists in his time “have a deep bench” is sold beautifully. Silliness, a bit of timely bite, and two killer central performances.

Part of an ensemble they were, but Kenan and Quinta shone individually in the corporate retreat. The whole sketch benefitted from an overall commitment to weirdness, with poor moderators Emil Wakim and Chloe Fineman (doing fine straight-person work) quickly realizing that they’re trying to herd a roomful of nutcases through the HR paces. Back to Kenan for a minute—in this, his 22nd season, the all-time all-star is still a treat to watch. But his scene-stealing has come more and more at judicious intervals. Nobody’s saying he’s easing his way out the door, or that he should, but it’s rare Kenan’s the centerpiece of so many sketches in a given episode these days.

And while this is another of those pop-in roles he’s excelled at in recent seasons, there’s such a twinkle in his eye as his grinning strange-o, all pursed lips and heavy lids, subtly mispronounces words in his questions, which are the questions of a deeply, perhaps alarmingly off-kilter dude. Incongruously pitching a dessert burrito containing “ice-a cream” and “pieces of Reese” alongside also-game sidekick Marcello Hernandez, Kenan’s swiping this sketch with a joy I’m going to speculate has something to do with Brunson being in the house.

As another attendee not grasping the corporate kung-fu of the “compliment sandwich” by telling one female coworker how she slept with her husband between nice stuff, Brunson pitches her own vibe at just the right frequency to match her colleagues. James Austin Johnson is there too, answering Wakim’s innocent question about office motivation with a beady-eyed but smiling, “Uh, this could be wrong but, sexual threats?” When Bowen Yang pops in to ask about the sexual harassment policies in his work-from-home situation and then suddenly beams out of the picture, Enterprise-style, it’s barely an escalation, so consistently weird and funny everybody is here.

The first filmed piece saw Kenan and Quinta team up again, this time as an elderly couple happily touting their new health insurance plan to their adult kids (Ego and Devon). That the tellingly named OnlySeniors turns out to be just OnlyFans for old people is the gag, with the aged marrieds unconcernedly making their commercial pitch while shots of them delighting their “filthy little chat-babies” with pixilated sexcapades evoking the kids’ horror.

While the joke is one-level, the stars bring some others as old, borderline abusive dynamics recur (Devon notes that that’s not a belt his dad is threatening him with), and Brunson makes Nwodim flinch with her high dudgeon at being questioned. And then there’s the performances again, where Brunson and Thompson deliver lines about being “bull-ball nekkid” with the glee of seasoned vets who know a huge laugh line when they get their teeth into one. Are there buried satirical points about the desperate straits older Americans face under predatory capitalism and ageist neglect? Sure, why not. But it’s mainly about Kenan calming his irate wife down with a suspiciously effective remote control that’s the true soul of things.

I’ll put the support group meeting in the bottom of the top, since it was more Kenan than Kenan-and-Quinta. (She played the thankless moderator role fine, but didn’t get much chance to shine.) Again here Kenan is anchoring an entire sketch, something he’s done less and less lately, as the newly arrived group member, whose confessional about temptations in a new city is immediately revealed to us as a series of pointers on how to score some coke. (Or nice-nice, booger sugar, sniff—lots of cocaine euphemisms tossed out for the laugh.)

Once more, I’ll say how infectious it is to watch the now venerable veteran take complete control of a sketch. Kenan’s twinkle is back and ticklish as ever, his smoothly obvious research on the whos and wheres of getting some of that good stuff emerging with the impossible ease of a guy who’s been doing this literally his entire life. There’s a moment where Kenan leaps into frame to demand that fellow addict Mikey Day let him become his roommate in his drug-haven neighborhood that was pure, joyful energy. And his offhand faux-shocked interruptions to Brunson’s own confession are as nimble and hilarious as anything he’s done all season. (His “Prove it, liar!” response to Quinta’s moderator claiming how easy it was to have coke delivered passes by with the giggle-fit airiness of vintage Astronaut Jones.)

The Worst: Nah. Good episode pretty much all over.

The Rest: Quinta teamed with Ego Nwodim for SNL‘s inevitable take on the whole tiresome “100 men vs. a gorilla” internet meme-ery with their sketch, “Two Bitches vs. a Gorilla.” Props to the cameraperson, first off, who performed a “The Continental,” only with gorilla hands instead of evening gloves framing the POV shot. And Ego and Brunson are amusing, their drink-swilling birthday bashers throwing attitude to counter the unseen and no doubt confused ape’s hurled poop.

If the show was going to do something with the latest thought problem fascinating the internet hive mind like dangled car keys, at least it gave two funny women a chance to cut loose. There’s enough amusing specificity to go along with the ‘tude and the poo. I liked Brunson’s boozy lady telling the ape “We goin’ to Coinstar after this” while threateningly waving her heavy purse, and taunting the beast by noting how its furious 400 pounds doesn’t frighten her because she used to work at Lane Bryant. There’s a reliable vein of humor stemming from overconfident inebriates, here the ladies repeated claims of “We didn’t do nothing!” the refrain of momentarily courageous drunk talk. Not my favorite of the night, but Ego booming, “Square up, Donkey Kong!,” made me laugh.

The other ad parody of the night was a crisply produced commercial for Forever 31, the go-to fashion retailer for women unsure how to dress after their “Coachella Whore” phase. (I’m allowing that one with the expectation that this piece was written by women.) With a color palette solely in the “bummer rainbow” and enough baggy, shapeless slacks that one customer claims she could give birth without ever changing sizes, it’s a bit of observational humor enlivened by archly funny posing performances and SNL‘s ever-meticulous production values. It’s no “Mom Jeans,” but jokes about always having hummus in your purse and figuring out that you’re probably bisexual “but it’s, like, a little too late” fill out the writers’ take on a niche woman’s dilemma amusingly.

Weekend Update Update

If the rumors are true that these will be the final three episodes of Colin Jost and Michael Che’s record tenure at the Update desk, it seems the guys are going out punching. Not that they lack targets these days, as the Trump administration presents nothing but exposed, pasty midsections and incessant, stumbling self-owns. Throughout their snappy zingers tonight, Che and Jost snapped off asides, Che noting, “Let’s keep this groan-train going” after one more joke about former Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz’s being a seriously accused sex trafficking pedophile, and noting, “Okay, we’re finding the line” after another about Kanye West’s latest excuse for his increasingly unhinged behavior. (This time it’s his dentist’s fault, although Che was skeptical that any dentist’s laughing gas tank has a “go full Nazi” setting.)

I’ve been critical of this Update for putting self-congratulatory smirkiness over substance, especially when having a guaranteed live satirical fake news showcase to needle the worthless lump of a president who is most definitely hate-watching offers so much. And, you know, I’ve been correct. But this was Jost and Che using their snark to great effect, each jab landing with a satisfying, often clever snap right in the breadbasket.

Donald Trump posts an A.I. picture of himself as the Pope days after attending the Pope’s funeral? Jost (addressing Pope Trump’s raised finger posture): “…apparently ordering a one-way ticket to hell.” The Trump administration ordering up a manual on recognizing gang tattoos after Trump defended an obviously photoshopped picture of unjustly kidnapped Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Che: “The way it works is, they check to see if the tattoo is on brown skin.”

We’re in a national tailspin into fascism. Trump is yanking out the pillars of democracy with the maniacal abandon of a Nazi toddler, all while the mainstream press holds fast to outdated concepts of even-handed, both-sides, hands-off norms. There’s never been a better time for Weekend Update to function as the biting, brash, and brutally funny news parody its better imitators (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper) have been. Instead, while those shows might not have come to pass without Update as a template, they and others like them have moved beyond the “look at me” personality comedy of the Chevy Chase-seeded original to craft fake news into real satire.

Che and Jost are funny as hell when they’re on, as tonight. And there were more teeth to an Update packed with jokes about the United States kidnapping and shipping off kids with cancer, the GOP plotting to steal workers’ Social Security in broad daylight, and a conspiracy kook undermining centuries of responsible public health policy in deference to the worm in his brain. (Jost: “President Trump boasted that he is bringing back Columbus Day. And as a tribute to Columbus, RFK is bringing back smallpox.”) This is the sort of “f*ck it, let’s piss the right people off” energy Weekend Update should always be fueled by.

The desk pieces were different shades of amusing. Michael Longfellow joked partway through another of his signature bits as himself that he isn’t on the show much this season (doing an “Uh oh!” take when Jost reminded him he still has to come to work every day), and he’s not wrong. The show has yet to utilize the young comedian’s vibe of mischievous charisma on any regular basis. He’s only allowed to shine as himself on Update as a rule, and he does so here, his stated refusal to get one of those deeply problematic Real IDs allowing Longfellow to stare down the camera as only he can.

“Prove it,” Longfellow smirks after Jost rebuts his claim that his appearance garnered a standing O, which is Longfellow’s vibe in a nutshell. Taunting the government for wanting him to wait at the DMV to obtain a new ID, he says of his current one, “If it’s fake, you fix it,” and brazenly states he’ll “do a terrorism” is his demands aren’t met. As a vehicle for Michael Longfellow to make his case for more airtime, this is another strong outing. A great SNL ensemble has a variety of strong, contrasting flavors, and Longfellow’s brand is something this often bland concoction sorely needs.

Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman addressed the looming fast casual dining crisis in America. Or at least they showed up as a couple of trashy Applebees barflies, sucking unidentifiable, bowl-sized cocktails through their straws and decrying the death knell of restaurants reliably found “between Game Stop and a Lidz” and featuring cuisine “microwaved by a local drug addict.” It’s all an excuse for two inveterate hams to do their thing, with Sherman and Yang’s hook-up drunk buddies (the Applebee’s bathroom being their preferred rendezvous spot) stopping to sloppily make out and make boorish jokes about Fuddruckers. (“Oh, I can say it!,” Yang greets the unease at his character’s reference to “Fuddraggits.”)

Recurring Sketch Report

You knew the road rage pantomime sketch was coming back. It feels a little rude that SNL did one of these without Quinta this season, since it was her work alongside Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman that made that first one so great. Still, as far as repeaters go, this still hasn’t lost its capacity to find new hand gestures for reliable chuckles.

The joke takes to the seas here, as the motorists’ dispute stems from parking etiquette on what turns out to be the Staten Island Ferry. (Colin Jost turns up to mime his own desperate plea to unload the barnacled money-suck he and Pete Davidson bought a few years back.) I’ll go ahead and call a bit of a foul in that, with their cars idled for the boat ride, there’s no reason the two can’t just scream at each other instead of all the noise-necessitated gestures, but there wouldn’t be a sketch otherwise.

Mikey Day has become something of a punching bag for me, I admit. He’s a solid writer, but an often uninspiring screen presence, not helped at all by his penchant for casting himself as the guy who objects to all the silliness going on while explaining just what that silliness entails for the benefit of the kids in the cheap seats. He’s sort of doing that here, too, although he and Brunson once more make a fun pairing as two anger-prone drivers whose interpretive approach to abuse sees them reliably coming up with original arm signals instead of the good old middle finger.

Brunson calls Day a drama queen while miming holding an Oscar, Day comes back by doing the “Single Ladies” dance while deriding what he insists is his unhappily single nemesis. Kenan pops out of the backseat as Brunson’s equally hand-happy father. And Chloe Fineman‘s teen daughter keeps demonstrating far too much sexual experience in her own contributions. (That prying-apart motion in “kiss my ass” really got her dad understandably alarmed.) I’m trying to come up with my own clever ASL for “never as good as the first time,” but Brunson, Fineman, and Day still made this comebacker worth it.

Political Comedy Report

As cold opens go, this was one of them. I’m being a jerk—James Austin Johnson’s Trump, here doing a thankfully tight five over his latest spate of executive orders, remains the saving grace of these things. And there’s a consistent escalation of absurdity to his Trump’s scribbled orders (pardoning J.K. Rowling and Bill Belichick, forcing Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio to take credit for banning Hispanic babies from getting their ears pierced) that at least nods toward the fact that a sundowning white supremacist TV addict is Sharpie-defacing the Bill of Rights every other day.

The major flaw in JAJ’s impression (or at least Saturday Night Live‘s mandated take on Trump) is that it plays up the incompetent idiocy without acknowledging the malice. The joke about Trump “bringing back Columbus Day” with JAJ rambling against interracial couples in Hello Fresh commercials (“He’s wearing loafers, she’s got tight braids, you’re like ‘Where did they meet?'”) is genuinely funny while eluding the reality that Trump and his Project 2025 cronies laid out very clearly their plan to literally whitewash American history to conform to their white supremacist propagandizing and not make bigots feel uncomfortable.

It isn’t helped that Mikey Day does a wan and colorless turn as in-White House Goebbels Stephen Miller. Handing Trump his succession of folders with a monotone creepiness just doesn’t capture the loathsome Miller’s way with an inevitable, repellent on-camera meltdown, or his beady-eyed dedication to the sort of sneering racism he’s been vomiting forth since high school. Especially alongside JAJ’s world class Trump, Day just disappears along with the can’t-miss potency of what an actual Miller performance could bring to the Resolute Desk.

Johnson gets his laughs, as ever, mainly from mining Trump’s TV-and-age-and-Adderall (allegedly)-addled digressions. While pardoning J.K. Rowling, presumably for anti-trans backlash, JAJ’s Trump babbling about Rowling’s work providing a place for “overweight millennials to stake their entire identity well past the point of it being cute” likewise goes for the pop culture over the political. (“I’m a Hufflepuff! No, bitch, you work at Staples,” gets its laugh while tacitly sort of endorsing this Trump’s nerd-bashing misogyny.)

Basically, this was a series of quick-hit zingers at the expense of concepts of dignity and human decency. Which, fair enough—this is now officially the trolling presidency. But putting Johnson’s Trump into a sketch that paired actual insight and satirical meanness with the spot-on impression’s facile laugh lines would be too difficult it seems.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

With just two episodes left after tonight, the chance for featured players to make the cut is evaporating. Jane Wickline is likely all but out the door, as the show put her in a men’s suit and gave her one line as a reporter in the last sketch of the night. She was a youth hire the show never found anything to do with, which isn’t her fault. Ashley Padilla wasn’t much in evidence (although more than Jane), which worries me. Padilla has a JAJ-esque ability to inhabit a character and Wiig-style talent for going big that could make her a star on SNL if they don’t do another inexplicable squander. (RIP, Chloe Troast. You deserved better.) Emil Wakim, too, feels like someone unjustly on the bubble. Longfellow’s “see if I care” schtick is well-honed, but I imagine he cares quite a bit. The show should keep him—and integrate him better into sketches.

Of the main cast, Devon Walker seems iffy, too. A funny guy, Walker is too often shunted into “third male character” thankfulness, and airtime isn’t as much currency as memorableness. For everybody else, I imagine it’s more a question of who’s ready to move on in the off season. (Heidi Gardner didn’t factor much tonight, tellingly.) Kenan should stay exactly as long as he wants to.

Historically I’m not great at end-of-season predictions, so I’ll just say that while this SNL needs a shake-up, I’m not confident that the powers that be will shake off the right elements.

10-To-Onleland Report

After an endless stream of end-of-show commercials had me worried that the live show’s occasional timing issues would cut right to the goodnights, we finally got a pretty funny 10-to-one sketch. Quinta donned a mustache as Jerry “Jackrabbit” Tulane, a 60’s era boxer whose diminutive size and oversized mouth sees him doing some Ali-esque trash talk without the remotest ability to back it up against her much, much larger heavyweight opponent.

Brunson isn’t as comfortable in this role as her others tonight, although she excels at the increasingly incoherent insults in each pre-fight press conference. (“I’m gonna beat that chump or my name ain’t Elizabeth Taylor,” Jackrabbit boasts in his final go-’round.) And Kenan as the Don King-looking promoter gradually starts to counsel his disaster-courting fighter to cool it, once more demonstrating his mastery of the judicious comedy lean-in.

But the real star is James Austin Johnson who, as the straight-laced present-day boxing historian, deadpans his way through the unfortunate Jackrabbit’s inevitable decline. Johnson is invaluable, and has been essentially from his first episode, his unassailable gift for donning sketch characters in an instant and filling out their necessarily sketchy (in both senses) outlines with fillips of engaging detail elevating pretty much everything he does, no matter how small. If the joke here that Devon Walker’s reluctantly dominant opponent sent Jackrabbit sailing into the crowd with his very first punch is inevitable, Johnson’s nonjudgemental delivery (along with a funny photoshop) truly sells it.

Each time we cut back to the professional, even-tempered JAJ’s narrator, his timing and underplaying are low-key lethal. When Jackrabbit claims the second time around that “God will pick me up,” a lesser comic actor would punch what Johnson sneaks by in deadpan, noting, “The paramedics picked him up.” Same goes for his third-fight revelation that Walker’s opponent simply picked up the unwell Jackrabbit and carefully transported him to a home, where the brain-addled boxer lived out his days until “he sneezed and his brain flew out of his nose.” Truly the only outcome for a sport Johnson’s narrator nimbly describes as, “a delicate dance of agility where one man punches another man in the head until he loses consciousness.”

Stray Observations

Benson Boone is basically the impossible offspring of Pedro Pascal and Timotheé Chalamet. Discuss.

Boone started his first number by crooning right to an eyelash-batting Quinta Brunson after she introduced him, which was neat.

As pleasantly louche as was Boone’s showmanship, you could basically hear the audience holding back from, “Do the flips!” the whole time. (SPOILER: He did the flips.)

After navigating the halls of Abbott Elementary with a teacher’s decorum, you can feel how liberated Brunson was to contemptuously just say, “Bitch…” to a couple of people. And a gorilla.

When you’re in a pantomime insult war with someone, you don’t bring up your thumb and finger a half-inch apart if you’re a dude. Rookie mistake there.

Strong week for New York-based Brunsons.

Episode Grade for the Quinta and Kenan Show: B-Plus. Oh, other people were good, too.

Next Week: Walton Goggins hosts, Arcade Fire guests. I will watch. Join me, won’t you?