SNL Bets on Ariana Grande’s Versatility—And Wins Big

And Your Host…

In another life, Ariana Grande proved tonight that she could have been an SNL cast member. Maybe even a star. Sure, she would be immeasurably less wealthy, but still, the Wicked star was uniformly strong in pretty much everything she did in her second hosting gig. Brassy film noir dames, absurdly competitive suburban moms, teens who sing, herself singing, a boy castrato singing, Celine Dion singing—okay, there was a lot of singing. But, hey, you don’t complain when someone plays to their strengths on Saturday Night Live, and Grande revealed more strengths than viewers were perhaps expecting*.

*(Here I’m including my old-ass self, as I was not a Nickelodeon viewer during Grande’s tenure there, nor am I all that hip to the pop stars of today.)

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In her monologue, Grande sang, naturally. But the expected wheeze that these throwaway modern singalong monologues so often are turned into a rather dazzling little showcase for all that Grande brought to the table. Singing about how she wasn’t going to sing (“Oh, what’s this?,” she asked innocently as an unseen stagehand pressed a microphone into her hand), Grande ably whipped out the impressions she was not going to do (Britney, Miley, Gwen Stefani) with offhand aplomb, fended off a Glinda-gowned Bowen Yang, and unsuccessfully called musical guest Stevie Nicks to accompany her for her big finish. (“Worth a shot,” Grande shrugged at previous decades’ diva Nicks’ no-show.)

In the show proper, Grande sang, of course—if you’ve got a popular singer bearing a facility with impressions, you use it. But her most impressive outing saw her playing the sort of tightly wound family matriarch that Kristen Wiig would have played. And—I’m just going to say it—Grande was about as good. I know, I’m as disappointed in myself as you are. Taking on her son’s new boyfriend Bowen Yang in charades, Grande’s mom, as her family warns, has a bit of a competitive streak. When it emerges almost immediately in response to Yang’s good-natured trash talk, Grande (kitted out in mom wig and bulky sweater) goes hard, relentlessly one-upping Yang’s innocuous ribbing with deeply personal, creatively crude, mainly penis-based put-downs. (“Toad-choad” being the most elaborate.)

This was like a long-mothballed Wiig sketch and, one more time, Grande filled those orthopedic, boyfriend-kicking shoes as well as anybody could. Watching the light leave the previously pleasantry-spouting mom’s eyes was to watch a genuine actress take over a sketch. I was genuinely impressed, not the least by the ending, where—after Yang manfully puts a quickly-swapped Grande dummy into an airplane spin—the two combatants heatedly make out, much to son Michael Longfellow’s distress.

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Confidence. That’s what Ariana Grande had tonight, and it served as a tonic to pep up sketch after sketch.(Even the one-two punch of back-to-back Grande-themed commercials in the first ad break were forgiven as the night went on.) Having someone versatile, game, and this gung-ho to get down with whatever is a gift that Saturday Night Live too often squanders. But tonight Ariana Grande just wasn’t going to be denied. Yeah, she was that good.

The Best and the Rest

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The Best: Well, since I’m saving my actual best sketch for a rag-tag little 10-to-one castoff below (with the aforementioned charades sketch an able second), I’ll slot in Grande’s Celine Dion as she croons a song about her unlikely love of combat sports. Taking off from the Canadian chanteuse’s unexpected appearance hyping up (American) football last week, the filmed piece sees Dion (Grande, killing it in a Quebecois accent) crooning about everything ultimate fighting, from nut-punches, to spitting teeth, to how all the commentators are bald and wear shiny shirts. It’s a silly little perfect storm I imagine came about when Grande told the writers she had a Celine in her back pocket, the incongruity of singer and subject reaching its height when Grande’s Dion extols the spectacle of a woman fighter taking one in the chest my grabbing her boob while singing of the pleasures of being “elbowed in the tit.”

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The Worst: I’m not just trying to make a point by putting the castrato sketch in this spot. Sure, I am routinely annoyed that Lorne lets his chosen ringers stomp all over the show, trampling the hopes of an overpopulated cast that they—rather than here Andy Samberg and Maya Rudolph—might get to play a Renaissance-era couple who twisted off their son’s nuts so he’d be able to sing all pretty. And it has to be said, for a “worst” sketch in a strong episode, this wasn’t bad at all. Yes, the over-the-top, Mario-level Italian accents bordered on anti-Italian violence, but hey, whatchoogonnado?

It helps that everyone involved seems to be enjoying themselves, even if I could practically see the polite smiles of the actual cast when informed how two alums who’d already done their cold open duties would take two more plum roles as well. I’m never going to complain overmuch at having more Maya and Andy on my TV screen, as much as the purist in me likes to have his say. (Honestly, how freaking stacked were those early 2000’s casts? Damn.)

The sketch itself saw Andrew Dismukes’ royal longing for some musical variety, with Kenan’s three-necked “shredding” lute not getting the job done. Ushered in by doting parents Rudolph and Samberg, however, it’s Grande’s high-pitched boy singer that gets the prince’s blood flowing, even after they reveal just how they got the unfortunate lad’s voice to remain in the required angelic register. Both the ringers make a meal out the revelation that they didn’t actually chop off the poor boy’s “gonads,” but rather employed an even more terrible sounding alternative method while he was in a, comi se dice?, “opium-induced coma.” (If you relish the thought of Andy and Maya repeating the word “twist” in exaggerated Italian voices with horrifying glee, then this is your sketch.)

There’s nothing special about the sketch, but nothing truly bad about it either. Somebody thought, “Hey that was totally weird how they used to castrate boy singers, huh?” and everybody ran with that. Grande has the pipes, two big guest stars will get the nostalgic crowd pop, and everybody speaks like Chico Marx and we’re out. For me though, that the biggest laugh came when Andy called old pal Kenan’s troubadour “Kenan” speaks to how little true investment anybody had in this sketch as a sketch.

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The Rest: For the first post-monologue sketch, the bridesmaids song suffered from the seemingly incurable Saturday Night Live malady, premise over-explain. The joke—bridesmaids’ wedding toast musical number gradually reveals the bride’s pre-wedding dalliance with a hunk named Domingo—isn’t a bad set-up. And here’s to Grande and her three backup singers (all of whom have demonstrated some at least comic singing chops in the past) for bravely committing to the bit’s assertion that none of them can carry a tune. But poor Andrew Dismukes—an unexpectedly potent devotee of the weirder side of things—for being saddled with the thankless groom character.

And by “character” I mean “nonentity whose only role is to repeat the damning details of the song and ask his now wife, “Are those damning details in that song correct?” (Mikey Day must have gotten special dispensation, or maybe he’s just aged out of convincingly playing young, cheated-upon grooms.) SNL has become a guardian of the comic status quo. Sketches hinge on disruption of the normal, and too often sketches see a character tasked with pointing at the disruption and telling everyone, “Hey, that is a disruption,” just so nobody gets too confused or disturbed.

There are infinite approaches to a comic sketch, and so many times Saturday Night Live operates from the place of reassurance and restoration rather than chaos. A sketch will admit the chaos, only to have some poor sap (Dismukes here) stuck telling viewers that that weird thing is weird but it’s okay because we know it’s weird, so don’t worry. Let us get there. Let us enjoy being surprised, challenged even. When Bob Odenkirk left his unhappy tenure as an SNL writer it was out of frustration that all the rough edges of his material were chipped away and sanded down to the house’s preferred beige tones. So he and David Cross went on to create Mr. Show, and these days Odenkirk (when not getting robbed of dramatic Emmys or almost killing himself becoming an action star) lends his talents aiding people like Tim Robinson, another prickly comic genius whose time in the SNL mines ended in disappointment.

Anyway, the sketch was okay. The details pile up, as the best friends reveal the details of Chloe Fineman’s bride’s night out in specific enough colors to get some laughs. “Think of your fiancé,” Sarah Sherman’s bridesmaid sings concerning the bride’s obvious attraction to Domingo, followed by the bride’s lyric, “Good reminder.” When Marcello Hernandez pops in as the aforementioned Domingo, he brings some gusto along with him, but then there’s Andrew, stuck blurting out stuff like, “Is the point of this song that Chelsea cheated on me this week?” Yes. Yes it is.

Weekend Update Update

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Colin Jost and Michael Che each had one great joke tonight. Jost, reporting on Donald Trump’s contortions as he attempts to pretend he’s moderate on abortion without pissing off his evangelical base, stated, “In fact, this is the best he’s come up with.” [Cue picture of one of those decorate padded coat hangers.] Che, for his, noted Trump’s upcoming Fox News, all-woman town hall, musing, “Well good luck trying to talk over all those rape whistles.”

No jokey explanations, no waiting for the audience to catch up. Stick and move and leave a bruise.

The rest of Update was not that good, but solid as usual. Sometimes the topical jokes have to act more as public service announcements under the Jost-Che regime. the real joke is about them, or about how cleverly they can amuse each other. A joke about J.D. Vance’s recent unwillingness to give a straight answer about whether or not Donald Trump lost the 2020 election turns into a Jost aside about not answering questions with questions, morphing into a Billy Goats Gruff riff. Not terrible, but more about itself as joke than the subject. Che relishes speaking as himself rather than anchor Che, so his run on pundits complaining that only 78 percent of Black Americans apparently support Democrats is like a chunk of his stand-up. Which is fine, but hints at Che chafing under the role he’s played for so long.

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When Jost starts a joke about Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoing her party’s all-out assault on women’s rights and roles in implying stepmom Kamala Harris needs “real” kids to keep her “humble,” he veers into an irrelevant joke about stepmother stereotype rather than grapple with the issues he raised. A politics-free Update would be an interesting proposition (which I would certainly bitch about), but that’s not what Che and Jost are doing. They want the attention of joking about hot button issues, but not the smoke. Being clever is great and all, but use your considerable powers for a greater good than making yourselves look good, is what I’m suggesting.

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When is product placement not product placement? When Ego Nwodim shows up as an Amazon worker so overworked and exhausted that she falls asleep at the Update desk with her eyes open and admits that she sometimes sends herself a package so she can drive by her house and wave to her kids. The capitalist horrors of Jeff Bezos’ online retailer and its history of everything from union-busting to forcing workers to piss in jars so as not to run afoul of draconian quotas are well documented. So Nwodim’s glazed-eyed loyalist vibe when describing her employers in the wake of its worker-crushing discount event smacks nicely of Stockholm Syndrome, even as she explains how she had to make up an eighth workday to account for everything she has to do. “What, it is Fluesday already?,” she asks in a panic after Che awakens her from her eyes-open micro-nap. So it’s a double-edged punchline when Ego asks a sheepish Che if he’s going to stop ordering from Amazon now that he knows the misery its caused. At least her benefits include—and are limited to—that snazzy branded vest.

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With Oasis’ impending reunion already beset with rumors that the perennially feuding and bitchy Gallagher brothers are at each others’ throats, James Austin Johnson and Sarah Sherman’s appearance only stoked suspicions that Jost is never going to get to use those tickets he pre-purchased. Johnson’s impression of Noel is the more technically lived-in, but Sherman’s a gamer as Liam, and the duo are clearly having a ton of fun giving each other wet willies while begrudgingly finding snatches common ground at Jost’s urging. (Mostly about their favorite cartoon characters, in keeping with their arrested brotherly “I’m not touching you” energy.) As somebody who never got what the basically two-hit wonders’ ( I said it) big freaking deal is, the Gallaghers’ infighting has long eclipsed whatever enjoyment I got from “Wonderwall,” so elbowing them in the ribs on Update is amusing enough.

Recurring Sketch Report

Jennifer Coolidge is in on the joke. Chloe Fineman’s immaculate and amusing impression of Jennifer Coolidge insists that she is not. Therein lies my issue with Fineman’s recurring run as the White Lotus star, here facing off in the mirror against host Grande’s also-outstanding Coolidge impression as they get ready for a big date. As funny as both actors are (and, man, Grande’s impression of her offscreen pal is just as good as the professional’s), it’s irritating when an otherwise amusing turn is built on a dumb premise, here that the onscreen Jennifer Coolidge is just the offscreen Jennifer Coolidge with better writers.

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Coolidge isn’t the dumb bunny space cadet she plays so often and so well. And so having a “real life” Coolidge revealed as a dumb bunny space cadet is the impression wagging the dog, if you follow. That aside, watching both performers (and a third, which… we’ll get to) affectionately play Coolidge as a loopy weirdo is pretty damn fun, with one Jennifer’s query about great date conversation starters seeing other Jennifer respond confidently, “Lemons!” The product placement of a it is irritating as well, even if the Jennifers’ happily incoherent mangling of their lip gloss’ over-elaborate name is consistently worth a chuckle.

Aaand then it was Dana Carvey’s turn. Look, I love Dana Carvey. He was an impossibly versatile and absurdly prolific SNL star who’s adjusted more or less well to his movie career never happening, and I can even find his often labored impressions kind of funny, if I’m in the mood. But having Fineman unfold her triptych mirror to reveal a late-sketch Carvey in wig and ruffles bugged me, for a couple of reasons.

One, on a show seemingly dedicated to disappointing as many actual cast members as possible, this was just another unnecessary cameo that could have gone to literally of the other 15 performers in house. And for anther, what does Dana Carvey truly bring here? Fineman and Grande were wowing us with their dueling impressions and the sketch—as fundamentally flawed at its core as I maintain it was—was humming along nicely. “Crab walk!,” being one Jennifer’s exuberant answer to the other Jennifer’s practice question about your dream superpower comes from a perfect weirdo place. Carvey doesn’t have a Coolidge impression, so the sketch becomes, “Hey look, it’s Dana Carvey in a dress!” until the ending. Frankly, it deserved better.

Political Comedy Report

It’s pretty much a perfect encapsulation of this Saturday Night Live‘s satirical sophistication and courage that the show’s political cold open gets crammed into a game show sketch. Family Feud: Presidential Campaign Edition lets Kenan do his Steve Harvey, which is mildly amusing as ever (Harvey confesses his hosting gig represents his alibi for all those Diddy parties). But for the love of all that is topically pressing, this is the big idea to emerge from the writers room in the last weeks of a beyond-pivotal, beyond-parody election season?

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Maybe that’s the point, if not the excuse—the fact that an election is this close between Kamala Harris and a guy who tried to overthrow democracy, is obviously sundowning more each day, routinely edges ever closer to straight-up Nazi rhetoric in his rallies, and has been legally judged a felonious fraud and a rapist in recent memory is a tough situation to wrap your comedy head around. Oh wait, it’s not—not if you don’t flee to your most lazy, exhausted, and hacky recurring sketch template rather than exploring any number of the myriad possible comedic possibilities this farcical sh*tshow presents on a daily basis.

I guess this would be marginally redeemed if the wearying premise were executed with a little verve, but, man, is this dull and uninspired stuff. Having your ringers (Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Jim Gaffigan, Dana Carvey) all in a row and a brilliant technical Donald Trump from James Austin Johnson in-house and coming out with a Family Feud sketch where the freshest idea is “Joe Biden sure is old” is bordering on unforgivable at this point. It’s a shrug of a sketch, which would be par for the unambitious course if not for the fact that the nightly news is essentially serving up better sketch premises on a silver platter every day of every week in the days leading up to, again, the most important and perilous election of viewers’ lifetimes.

Maya is fine as Harris, with each appearance reaching for the latest soundbite for some enterprising sing maker to turn into a meme. (Tonight’s message to young women: “You need to go to the ballot box if you want the government out of your ballot box.”) Andy Samberg is fine as Doug Emhoff, the show’s take on the potential first First Gentleman portraying his “Doug the shrug” energy as the epitome of supportive irrelevance. Gaffigan’s garrulously folksy Walz is fine, even if booking a relatively big star for a few lines per episode doesn’t give him a lot to do. (Harvey sums up Walz’s comprehensive catalog of glove box preparedness tools as “white nonsense.”)

And then there’s Saturday Night Live legend Dana Carvey. Carvey can’t be blamed for the show’s “Biden = old” material—it’s essentially all SNL has had to offer for years now. But turning Carvey loose with another of his self-impressed catchphrase impressions (“And guess what? And by the way. I’m being serious right now.”) is as crowd-pleasing as it is played the hell out. Carvey can portray Joe Biden as old and out of touch if he likes, but his signature approach to the impression invites some telling comparisons.

James Austin Johnson got the SNL gig largely on the back of his viral Trump, and his disjointed but defensive Trump remains an enlivening spark at the dusty heart of the lame sketches he’s plugged into as the current Republican cult leader. Apart from the voice (now smothered under even more prosthetics), Johnson barely gets to say anything potent, or especially funny. “I could have sworn she was standing right beside me just two years ago,” in response to the absent Melania’s contest podium is as close as it gets to a laugh, with all of Trump’s dangerously ramped-up campaign trail incitement against immigrants getting merely a passing mention. (“They’re eating Moo Deng!,” is SNL plugging in some buzz-worthy pop culture and calling it a day.) Bowen Yang’s unctuous J.D. Vance and Mikey Day’s smilingly resentful Don Jr. round out the GOP team, the duo’s identically smarmy anti-charms seeing Don Jr. wondering once more why his daddy doesn’t love him as much as the bearded simulacrum sycophant he picked to stand by his side.

The audience did recoil audibly when Johnson’s Trump repeated his “immigrants have bad genes” eugenics bullsh*t as part of his “weave” of brain-rotted digressions, which is a reaction these sketches could provoke consistently with a little more boldness. Honestly, since cold open Trump sketches have long relied on verbatim transcriptions of Trump’s most outrageous/appalling statements to write these jokes for them, the choice not to do that more often when Trump is actively whipping up his white supremacist base to racism and election-denying violence in the waning days of the campaign is pretty telling. Cowardice or laziness, it’s all the same when it comes to how Saturday Night Live‘s “edgy” political comedy reputation is remembered.

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On the other hand, there’s 76-year-old musical guest and icon Stevie Nicks, who belted out her new women’s right’s anthem “The Lighthouse” with unabashed screw-you authority. Sure, the lyrics might be a little prosaic (“Or is it a nightmare?” is a lyrical question best left unasked), but Nicks, with her half century of moon-powered female empowerment and witchy badassery, just doesn’t give a f*ck. Even the titular declaration, “I wanna be the lighthouse/Bring all of you together” overcomes any sense of self-importance—if anybody’s earned the right to speak for pissed off women, it’s Stevie Nicks.

Also, and I know this isn’t the point, it’s a real overnight pick-me-up to watch right-wingers lose their minds that Stevie Nicks of all people would dare to express a pro-choice, pro-women’s rights anthem on their TVs. It’s always a hoot when conservatives try to chime in on pop culture. The people who write and perform the stuff you love almost universally believe that your bigotry, misogyny, and general pinched and blinkered worldview are ridiculous and contemptible. When you try to lecture Stevie Nicks about, say, the place of women in society, you look very, very stupid.

Also as an aside, it’s indictable that Saturday Night Live got upstaged in political courage by an old lady in their own house. A kickass old lady, but still.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

And coming from out of nowhere, it’s Dan Bulla! ‘Who’s Dan Bulla?,’ asked everyone not hip to the terminally overlooked SNL writers room. Well Bulla’s written for Saturday Night Live since 2019, was promoted to co-writing supervisor with Auguste White for Season 50, and has produced most of those Adam Sandler Netflix movies, which—let’s move on. On tonight’s episode, the Ariana Grande filmed piece “My Best Friend’s House” was branded on both ends, with the musical sketch being credited as presumably the first volume of a series of “Saturday Night Live Midnight Matinee” sketches, and the end tag labeling it as “a Dan Bulla Short.”

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Very few writers ever get that sort of on-air recognition, so for Bulla this is kind of a big deal. Not being privy to the behind the scenes decision-making to highlight Bulla, I can only assume that this is the test case for a regular thing, with Bulla joining the likes of your Jack Handey or Robert Smigel in the auteur boutique mid-show carve-out. And it’s not a bad opening salvo, with Grande, as she did all night, hitting a fine note in balancing her musical and comedy talents as a teenage girl whose infatuation with her best friend’s seemingly perfect home life (and its attendant smells) comes crashing down when it’s revealed that her pal’s dorky dad (Mikey Day) is a serial killer. (All the wafting odors are there to cover up a house stuffed with dismembered bodies.)

The bit takes its time, too, which is a quality I enjoy. Indeed, the opening with Grande’s teen dreamily singing about the perfect little details of her friend’s life—complete with sing-a-long household furniture puppetry— is so well-realized that it made me wonder, just momentarily, if there wouldn’t be a big, jokey rug-pull at all. (The line about Grande imagining that she’ll still smell the spray deodorant her friend’s older brother wears years in the future is evocative enough to string us along.) When the hard cut to a news report about Day’s crimes does land, the joke’s patience pays off well enough, but it’s the ranting, handcuffed Day’s assertion, “The furniture made me do it!,” and his prediction that Grande “has the darkness in her” since she can see them too is a whole other level of twist. I dug it, and if this is the beginning of the Dan Bulla Presents short film era, then I’m intrigued to see where it goes.

Bulla apart, James Austin Johnson had a big show, playing two egomaniacs (Trump, Liam), a comical Italian courtier, and best of all, a snappy hotel detective. Johnson’s everyman versatility is slowly but surely taking its place as one of the show’s stars and I’m here for it.

The ringers gobbled up a lot of time, so only Ego, Chloe, Bowen, Andrew, and to a lesser extent Michael Longfellow got time to do their thing. No sign at all of Devon Walker or Ashley Padilla, while Emil Wakim and Emily Wickline had a line.

Dispatches From 10-To-One Land

Things went seriously awry in the timing of tonight’s show—and honestly we’re the better for it when it comes to the final sketch. For those not versed in how SNL quick changes work (or, you know, how changing clothes works), Ariana Grande’s sudden swap from Jennifer Coolidge finery to black-and-white period garb in an instant between seemingly live sketches was a clue that some major control booth re-jiggering was going on. When you’re a professional, you pick up on these things.

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Emergency fill-in or not, I loved the piece we ended up with, as the House Detective sketch kept pulling out one deliriously loopy twist after another to go with its already snappy and meticulously recreated 1940’s finery. Nobody’s more at home playing a hard boiled period dick (I know what I said) than James Austin Johnson, so I was initially left to wonder who was going to play the sketch’s promised Sam Stanley, Hotel Detective, since Johnson initially seemed to be playing the aw-shucks rube about to get hustled by Grande’s hotel bar floozie.

Have no fear, since, as the sketch played out with nimble tongued hilarity, Johnson was indeed Stanley, swapping patter mid-stream to seize the on-the-make dame with a quick flip of his badge. Only she wasn’t a prostitute at all, but a badge-flipping overseer from the hotel dicks’ union, there to bust Stanley for hotel dick-ing without a license. And Andrew Dismukes isn’t the obliging bartender, but—cue badge flip—an undercover internal affairs dick from the hotel dicks bureau, there to bust Grande for padding her expense account with hooch. Bad luck then that Johnson turns out to be an actual hotel detective (expertly flipping a second badge), deployed to bust both of them after Grande attempts to get the receptive Dismukes to drop the charges with a roll in the hay.

The final sketch of the night is where sketches periodically offer a glimpse of the smarter, funnier, less predictable and hidebound show Saturday Night Live could be. That’s why repeaters, game shows, celebrity impressions (I was annoyed when I thought the Jennifer Coolidge sketch was going to take the slot), and the like are so unwelcome. All the product placement has been dutifully deployed, the big guest stars have swiped airtime, and the show very occasionally admits that there are a literal infinite other types of sketches out there. This is a silly idea, pulled off with impeccable performances, loving attention to technical detail (I’m sure that visible cue card person would have been properly blocked for the live show), and the freedom to get laughs from original, eccentric places.

Nobody can do rat-a-tat film noir banter like James Austin Johnson, and his ability to imbue a sketch character with improbable inner life made his hard switch from tourist john to snappy detective all the more hilarious. But Grande gave Johnson a run for his money—as was the case all night, the singer/actress was a confident and funny delight, matching the peerless Johnson beat for Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy beat. Dismukes, too, his inexplicable slip into mid-sentence Mexican accent while expertly running through his elaborate undercover title just another layer of comic weirdness to jolt the already humming sketch along. And the tag with Michael Longfellow’s apologetic Rod Serling telling us that this is purgatory and everyone’s dead (“Did we sell that? It doesn’t feel like it.”) is just frosting on the cake.

Saturday Night Live may have ossified according to some very tired molds, but sketches like this one serve to crack the professionally smoothed plaster a bit. It’s a good look.

Stray Observations

Still waiting to hear why, but SNL went up an unexpected five minutes late tonight at 11:35. (Not even a football overtime to blame.) Now does this hitch in SNL‘s giddyup account for the full minute of dead air near the end of the show? Saturday Night Live (operative word being “live”) is an impossibly precision stopwatch of a production, so maybe, but then there’s the fact that the last sketch of the night was clearly a dress rehearsal sketch plugged in at the last minute. (see immediately above.) I’m sure there will be some story, but the live nature of things made staring at that Stevie Nicks title card in dead silence for so long feel genuinely unsettling. Update: Our crack LateNighter team has cracked the case even before this review went up. A bad mixing board seems to have been the culprit, with another Cinema Classics featuring Grande as Judy Garland) (another impression I imagine she would have knocked out of the park) being canned in favor of the hotel detectives.

Apart from that big time hiccup, there were a few more minor technical issues. Somebody turn on Ego’s mic in the bridesmaids sketch, please?

The last time Stevie Nicks was the musical guest, it was 41 years ago and Flip Wilson was the host. Just to make you YouTube watchers run to Wikipedia.

Once more, no Please Don’t Destroy short, which makes Dan Bulla’s ascension that much more telling. maybe the guys are just too busy with pest control?

Bulla’s title card features a meatball person, tiny horse, and Pongo, so here’s to Bulla for slyly busting through SNL’s longtime policy of never crediting writers for individual sketches.

[On Trump interrupting a rant about California to call for an offscreen rally attendee apparently dressed as Abraham Lincoln to stand] “Given your recent history at rallies, do you really want both you and Abraham Lincoln to stand up?”

colin jost

“If it wasn’t for Black voters, y’all wouldn’t even be a party right now. You’d be the democratic small get together.”

michael che

Episode Grade: B

Next week it’s Michael Keaton, back for his fourth time alongside musical guest Billie Eilish.

6 Comments

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  1. Linda says:

    The show started late because the Ohio State vs Oregon football game didn’t end until 11:06 p.m. The local news still ran its full 30 minutes.

  2. Not brainwashed says:

    you were doing great until you regurgitated propaganda and lies about trump.

    1. Tman says:

      Or we all can see exactly what Trump is ourselves, without having to “regurgitate propaganda and lies”.

  3. Blood Meridian says:

    Great review as usual, Dennis. I especially loved your take on that excellent 10-to-1 with JAJ. He’s so good playing such roles and I’m glad his versatility and utility are being utilized more and more as his tenure progresses.

  4. Drn211 says:

    I knew when that political cold open started with Kenan/Harvey welcoming us to the Feud that somewhere Dennis Perkin’s head was exploding.

  5. Tom Roche says:

    Thanks for clearing up the mystery of The Hotel Detective sketch immediately following the Jennifer Coolidge spoof. I backed up the DVD and clocked 11 seconds between Grande ending her Jennifer Coolidge costume and make up… almost immediately walking into the B&W 1940s bar. I know the SNL costume changes are legendary but an 11 second elaborate changeover seemed impossible. And so it was, not. And the fact the full dress taping had a flash of cue cards in it shows… well I’m tired of this post already so I will stop now.