Not one minute into “Passing Notes,” this weekend’s Saturday Night Live sketch seemingly engineered to test host Ryan Gosling‘s tendency to break, a veteran TV comedy producer texted me with a lament: Was this officially the end of one of Lorne Michaels‘ most famous rules?
The rule, of course, is simple: Don’t break. However funny the material may be, the performers are meant to keep a straight face. “This isn’t Carol Burnett,” is how Michaels historically explained it, referring to the legendary comedian’s eponymous sketch comedy show, where part of the sport of performing appeared to be making your co-stars laugh.
“Passing Notes” appeared designed to test that rule, when in fact it was leaning into the big no-no in an inventive way that produced its own kind of comedy.
The set-up was simple enough. Gosling played a school principal observing a class taught by Ashley Padilla, whose teacher character confiscates passed notes and reads them aloud to shame the students who wrote them.
Only these notes were being read cold, with onscreen text informing viewers, “The Contents Of These Notes Have Been Changed Since Rehearsal.” (For the record, Padilla, Gosling—and later, Mikey Day—were in on the sketch’s conceit; it was only the content of the notes that was unknown to them.)
Padilla went first, reading aloud a note about Ms. Perry being seen stumping ChatGPT while asking it for makeover advice. The Season 51 breakout went up almost immediately.
That in itself was notable. Padilla has been game for some of the season’s most absurd scenarios—think her appearance in the viral “Haircut” sketch—but seeing her struggle to maintain composure offered its own kind of delight. It could have been described as “a rare break,” had she not lost it earlier that same night while playing a guardian of treasure dealing with some particularly dense cyclopses.
Then came the second note, read by Gosling’s Principal Whitt. Here, oddly enough, the trap seemed not to spring. Gosling—the very person the sketch seemed designed to break—escaped with little more than a half-giggled line reading and a grin or two.
For a moment, it felt like the sketch might fall flat.
Instead, it delivered exactly what it promised. As Padilla tried to soldier through increasingly embarrassing revelations—including Ms. Perry psyching herself up for a gynecological exam (“You can’t have the worst one in the world”)—both performers cracked. Gosling eventually broke more overtly during a note about Principal Whitt gawking at (Gosling’s own) Ken during a screening of Barbie.
The biggest laugh, though, came when Padilla opened Ms. P’s desk drawer to discover “Lunch #2”: a giant Ziploc bag stuffed with spaghetti. The mere sight of it stopped her cold.
Padilla’s unrepressed chortle was a joy in itself. Gosling, clearly reveling in the trained comedian’s loss of composure—as he had earlier in “Cyclops”—helped turn the moment into something memorable.
Was “Passing Notes” on the level of the best Stefon appearances on “Weekend Update,” where Bill Hader was famously ambushed with last-minute joke changes by John Mulaney? No. Those segments offered the extra layer of Stefon himself being a comedic persona. Padilla’s Ms. Perry and Gosling’s Principal Whitt were playing comparatively straight roles.
Still, this weekend’s sketch illustrated an important truth about comedy. At the end of the day, a show like SNL aims to deliver funny material and to make people laugh—and sometimes those two things are not the same. The notes in “Passing Notes” were not particularly hilarious on their own. But watching them derail two performers was.
Such is also the case for the recurring “Weekend Update” joke swap, where neither Colin Jost nor Michael Che is prepared for whatever caustic quips the other penned for them to read on live TV. The jokes sting, while the real-time reactions sing.
That brings us back to Lorne Michaels’ rule, and the question: Need we mourn its apparent demise after nearly 51 seasons? After all, it’s not as if this sketch aired without him knowing exactly what he was getting.
As SNL alum Heidi Gardner recalled on Watch What Happens Live! after she broke during Gosling and Mikey Day’s April 2024 live-action “Beavis and Butt-Head” debut, she worried about Michaels’ reaction. “I was really scared,” she admitted. But when the show ended, the two locked eyes across the studio floor. Michaels simply smiled and chuckled.
“Passing Notes” didn’t fly in the face of Michaels’ long-held wishes, but instead turned the taboo into a winningly interactive form of sketch comedy. And SNL’s creator has always understood that funny is the ultimate standard.
Personally, I love it when they break, as it’s just plain fun to watch. And a fifty-years-ago diss of Carol Burnett’s show should no longer apply, anyway. One of the funniest things about the Carol Burnett Show WAS when they would break, especially Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. Hopefully Lorne is over worrying about being ‘hip’ and can just let his cast be.
Conway riffing about the Siamese elephants attached by their trunks!
😆🤣😂
I came here looking for, possibly – somewhere off in a distant although seemingly recent at times – past, actual reporting. Reporting on an event that was very cool and timely. And if a human had actually done some reporting, perhaps a few interesting anecdotes could have been discovered.
Instead it’s Aislop