Bill Burr Hosts a Shaky, Noncommittal Post-Election SNL

And Your Host…

Bill Burr’s booking as Saturday Night Live‘s post-election host caused a few ripples. The fact that Dave Chappelle was apparently passed over for what had become a customary week-after comic reckoning received the expected backlash, counter-backlash, and whatever you call it when the internet sinks its venomous teeth into a subject until the next shiny thing passes by.

Not to spend time discussing someone who wasn’t in the room, but Chappelle has been a bracing, challenging presence in the aftermath of elections, whether the results turned out well or whether white America reelected the single worst human being possible. But the fact that late-career Chappelle has stuck to his guns after being called out for truly disappointing and disqualifying attacks on trans people (don’t worry, he’s still up for a Grammy this year) might have had something to do with Bill Burr subbing in this time around. That even though Lorne Michaels, like Chappelle, continues to show his age and creeping conservatism by railing against those darn “woke” people who think that an otherwise brilliant comedian’s whole act can be completely ruined just because he—like Donald Trump—has made beating up on a marginalized and vulnerable community part of his brand.

Bill Burr, a pal of Chappelle’s, notably, is hardly an un-controversial comedian. Burr walks the line—not unsuccessfully—between being one of those beyond-tiresome “I’m just sayin’ what we’re all thinkin'” bro comics and a comedian who mines that mindset for more interesting laughs. For example, his monologue tonight was greeted with gaps of excruciating silence that kicked off at his Covid joke about having “walked by an Asian or something.”

Say this for Burr—he doesn’t switch his act to suit a room. For the brain-bombed post-election SNL audience, that joke landed with a thud, even if—and here’s the Bill Burr brand—the follow-up defanged it when he put on a “dumb guy” voice to say, “They say on the internet, that’s where all the disease comes from.” And while that can come off as having it both ways, the failure of the joke in this setting had more to do with a mushy lack of confidence—and maybe an audience that wasn’t in the mood for boorishly complex deconstructions of American racism at this particular place and time.

Burr’s transitions were leaden, though. After promising to “keep it light,” Burr eventually swiveled to the fact that America just signed on for four more years of dangerous, unhinged racist chaos by half-berating, “Okay, let’s get to what you all want to talk about.” Burr’s takes weren’t shocking to anyone familiar with Bill Burr. Burr plays—and to some extent is—the loutish Masshole who’ll boom his opinions at you from the end of the bar, only to end most bits with an unexpected twist for those loutish Massholes who thought he was 100 percent on their side.

So Burr can joke about “ugly women, feminists, I mean” not accepting his strategy of women candidates “whoring it up” to “make that farmer think he’s got a shot” [Massholes cheer], and then segue into mocking voters’ choosing “that orange bigot” [Massholes look confused at the funny guy they thought was their guy.] Burr’s brand is both-sides mockery with a chaotic good twist, and when it’s good, it’s illuminating. Tonight’s monologue wasn’t his strongest, though.

The balance was out of whack, and if some are feeling like SNL booked a MAGA comic as a sop to the new reality, they’re not just being touchy. Burr isn’t MAGA. But his sensibilities hew so close to the line‚especially tonally—that it’s not inconceivable to see him that way. (Note to Burr—do not follow your friend Dave into curmudgeonly bigotry in the guise of maintaining your “telling it like it is” cred.) .

Generally, it felt like the moment outweighed him and, for an act like Burr’s, complete confidence is essential. Putting it in Boston-speak (Burr and I grew up near there around the same time), in a big spot he didn’t pull a Bill Buckner, but he wasn’t Big Papi either.

As a host, Burr is an invigorating choice—at least in theory. His brash bullshit detector persona feels ill-suited to playing characters, even if he’s actually turned into a decent character actor in recent years. In sketches, he’s always game—conspicuous cue card-reading isn’t a sin on SNL—and the show has generally suited sketches to fit him. The first commercial bumper after the so-so monologue showed the Boston Fire Department logo, promising Burr a comfy place to land. Later the show reprised a commercial conceit where Burr got to truly inhabit the Boston guy stereotype, and if Burr was never as comfortable in his other roles as he was drunkenly fist-fighting adult son Mikey Day, well, that’s to be expected. 

The Best and the Rest

The Best: On a thin show, you can sense when SNL is front-loading its best ideas. The fireman sketch has a fun premise and it fits Burr well as the lone member of a Boston firehouse who keeps seeing Pixar-related erotic imagery in the squad’s department-mandated ink blot tests. (Yes, it’s an old joke, but sometimes the telling is all.)

Specificity is an often underused comic tool, and here it’s Burr’s straight-faced elaboration on just what he sees that makes this one zip along. Monsters Inc‘s Mike Wazowski in sexy lingerie is fine, but Burr describing the shapely cartoon blob as “presenting himself” because “he got things tight for the wedding and he’s about to get got” is much better. As each scenario gets more and more outrageously elaborate (the dead wife from Up consoling Master Chief over poor sexual performance is telling enough for an entire psychological conference) , Burr sells the bit with earnest surprise that his buddies are only seeing trees and butterflies, while the comeback that the dog dad from Bluey‘s bondage scenario is from his wedding night to Mike Wazowski puts a nice button on things.

The Worst: I really wanted to like the bald guy musical sketch. I’m always complaining that Saturday Night Live resists going wide and weird with things, so a first date sketch that veers into a completely bananas musical ode to the 30 bald men who are coincidentally the only patrons beside Sarah Sherman and Mikey Day’s lovers gives me just what I asked for. Like with Burr’s monologue, the issue is confidence—there are a few funny ideas filigreed throughout, like Burr’s soloist revealing that his bullying gym teacher got caught with an underage girl, and the kicker with the men chorusing about being generous in bed because they have to be.

But this feels like a “Diner Lobster” that didn’t have everybody’s full attention. Distractingly offhand direction (that guy under the silver cloche should have gotten a bigger laugh), and a general lack of immediacy (the extra’s desultory dance solo) kept an oddity from being a memorable or hilarious oddity. Plant your freak flag deep if you’re going to get weird with it, is all I’m saying.

The Rest: Speaking of Bill Burr’s comfort zone, the Good Will Hunting filmed piece brought us back to Boston (or, sure, Cambridge), with Michael Longfellow’s unassuming janitor solving the impossible math problem on an M.I.T. chalkboard. Any such sketch is going to subvert the Oscar-winning screenplay’s take on undiscovered genius and here it comes in the way that Longfellow’s brilliance doesn’t translate to knowing how to properly clean up the barf that’s been stinking up the lecture hall.

Or “baff,” as Burr and fellow janitor Andrew Dismukes roundly berate Longfellow’s incompetence. (A Roomba? For wet spills? Ew.) As usual, this is crafted with care so that the straight-faced element can run up against the ensuing silliness (and gross-out factor) for heightened hilarity. Kenan steals things as the straight-laced dean, whose heartwarming embrace of this undiscovered, lowly genius is derailed when he steps in the uncleaned barf. “And what is this I’m standing in,” is peerless Kenan Thompson underplaying.

And then there’s the final note, as James Austin Johnson emerges (from the M.I.T. coat closet where he’s been living, it’s revealed) to do a riff on the movie’s cathartic “It’s not your fault” scene. Johnson’s been my pick as one of SNL‘s best-ever character guys from essentially his third episode or so, and here he’s channeling Robin Williams not so much by doing an impression (although it is a great, un-showy impression) as in his contained and committed demeanor. A lesser sketch would go big and count on audience recognition for the laughs. Throughout, this one lets its jokes land as jokes themselves, with Johnson’s riff on Williams (the barf was his naturally) a loopy little bow on top.

There’s a particular tone in father-son relationships—especially on the phone—that landed so hard with me in this sketch that I’m not sure I can be trusted to evaluate it fairly. The joke—that adult sons Andrew Dismukes and Devon Walker’s attempts to talk to their dads about anything real are deflected by telling digressions—isn’t revolutionary, but not all sketches have to be. That Kenan’s elderly pop can only couch his fears about aging through a Philadelphia Eagles lens and Bill Burr’s can only inquire as to his son’s well-being through queries about his car are old hat, but delivered exquisitely. Kenan and Burr let enough telling emotion sneak into their voices to land the joke nicely.

But it’s Burr’s almost immediate “Well, I’ll let you go,” that really hit home. Maybe it’s a Massachusetts thing of a certain age, but I heard myself and my dad so clearly in that that I instinctively reached for my phone before reminding myself that it’s after midnight, my dad’s been asleep for five hours, and his own “Well, I’ll let you go” would be tinged with worry that I called him at such an ungodly hour.

Regardless, this was refreshingly sweet and earnest. No undercutting, no dad-like deflection—just observational comedy about fathers and sons’ unwillingness or inability to open up and connect on a real level. And if you’ll excuse me… (checks watch) nope, dad won’t be awake for quite a while yet.

The commercial for 80’s hair metal band Snake Skin sees dad Burr and son Emil Wakim unsuccessfully bonding over the father’s remembered love for a trio of particularly suspect rockers (James Austin Johnson, Andrew Dismukes, and Sarah Sherman.) Any time you’re going to do a musical parody of truly terrible metalheads, you’re going to have to contend with the Spinal Tap in the room. And if Snake Skin’s sex rock anthems “Nah Nah Train” and the Aerosmith-esque “Havin’ Sex on an Escalator (Sex-Scalator)” aren’t a patch on “Sex Farm” or “Big Bottoms,” everybody involved goes delightfully hard. (There’s nothing more infectious than watching people belt out bombastic metal nonsense with all their hearts and souls.)

It’s the little details, once again, that give this one a lift. The band’s lyrical hints about a fetish for women’s shoes, the Scorpions-like intro to the supposedly political Berlin Wall anthem “Tear It Down” (meaning Gorbachev’s pants, natch’), and Burr’s defensive dad finally admitting that all his “back in my day” bluster hides a conflicted view of parental laxness and repeated molestation—all serve to elevate things. Or escalate them, anyway.

Burr dons a ponytail and adopts a worrying lisp at the start of the group therapy sketch. And while the gay joke never comes, thankfully, Burr channels a certain kind of sensitive male stereotype anyone familiar with his stand-up will recognize. Whenever a man says “your experience is valid,” Bill Burr’s comedy antennae stand at attention.

Anyway, the real crux of the sketch is that Bowen Yang’s leather-jacketed group member is a self-absorbed jerk, a conceit that’s aided by Yang’s performance as much as by the oddball details that accumulate around his disruptive behavior. Sure, he responds to one participant’s heartfelt confession about struggling with her sobriety by complaining about his phone’s battery life, and puts his cigarette out on another but then he also offscreen devours that entire heaping table full of donuts.

Burr’s therapist is all touchy-feely stereotype—at least until he tells his own story about how his wife, um, exploded? While they were playing tag in the snow on Christmas Eve? He speculates that it was all the Mentos and Coke she was downing, but who can say? As an assemblage of mismatched parts, this at least wasn’t predictable, even if its lack of an ending sort of was.

Weekend Update Update

After his appearance mugging along in the cold open, Colin Jost and Michael Che did almost literally nothing with the election in the first post-election Update. The jokes were unhurried and ordinary despite the truly extraordinary circumstances. (Not to belabor things, but a legally determined rapist, felon, fraudster, racist, and open admirer of fascism who stole classified documents and fomented a literal violent insurrection against democracy was just handed the keys to the country like a dangerous drunk with too-trusting friends.)

Shrug. It’s Jost and Che. Being cool is paramount, and whatever edge they can muster comes swaddled in smirks and self-regard. He’s done it before, but Che whipping out a scotch and sipping away in “who the hell cares any more” swagger was the most potent part. Jost responding to Trump proclaiming “a golden age” with “things turn golden when the sun is setting on them” at least glances off the very real prospect of the end of the American experiment. And Che, ice cubes clinking, managed to assert some genuine personality to his complaint that being around white liberals so long allowed him to get sucker punched by the results.

So, so much more to say on the topic below (you’ve been warned), but if there were ever a moment for Saturday Night Live to shake off the calcified, self-congratulatory ironic remove and actually engage with the moment with creativity and courage, this was it. But like those lonely voices calling for Democrats to step up and do something, that’s just setting yourself up for another soul-crushing disappointment.

But that’s not really what Saturday Night Live does, no matter how windily Lorne Michaels holds forth about comedy, or how many morning-after YouTube views each say-nothing cold open gets. I’d say it’ll be illuminating to see how the show approaches America under Donald Trump this time around, but we know already what it’s going to look like.

Ego did another of her good-not-great would-be breakout Update characters. The woman who can’t fully listen because she’s looking for stuff in her purse is a nice little showcase for Nwodim’s lived-in quick characterizations, with a few funny surprises pulled out of her oversized bag. (A maraca, her un-mailed Pennsylvania ballot, her untaken birth control, a gun.) As a rule, these “concept spelled out in the title as the character’s name” pieces are just excuses to get on the air with a funny bit of business, and for what it is, this is fine.

I like Kenan’s Willie a lot. As Michael Che’s endlessly, unjustifiably optimistic neighbor, Kenan makes beaming, oblivious “look on the bright side” banter weirdly charming. Willie’s had it rough. Sure, largely because he’s an unscrupulous weirdo who occasionally engages in human dog fighting and may or may not be a sex criminal, but Kenan still manages to make the old guy’s resilience amusingly admirable. Amidst all the hints (he has to move because Che lives within 99 feet of a school), Willie asks if Che’s ever played “Hide” while relating why he was trapped in that fridge for so long. Upon Che telling him the game is called “Hide and Seek,” Kenan’s uncomplaining, “Well, that would have been nice,” sums up Willie perfectly.

Recurring Sketch Report

The setting changed from a supermarket to a sports bar, Bill Burr and Mikey Day were back as the dysfunctional father-son duo from a particular Massachusetts city (or its surrounding area.) Again, if you’ve got Bill Burr in the house, this is what you live for, as his a-hole husband and father joins the crowd at a particular hot wings establishment on Sunday to berate his beloved-now-hated losing Brady-less Patriots.

As when fellow Bostonian at soul Casey Affleck hosted, the Masshole comic energy is strong and specific. Burr’s dad screams at the TV, complaining that he’s been exiled there since his wife says “I bring tension to the house” (he’s sporting a wrist cast, tellingly), and blurts out the sort of white resentment that’s helped foist Donald Trump on us one more. (“I’d be watching this game in my mansion but I was born white in this country 50 years too late,” is a statement I swear I’ve heard verbatim for the last 50 years.)

Day, irritatedly running late to his ex’s with his baby daughter in tow, is once more cowed and powerless against his drunk dad’s offhand cruelty (“It’s not my fault you don’t pull out”), their inevitable fisticuffs seeing him storm off, momentarily forgetting his daughter in a bewildered server’s arms. (“Father of the year!,” Burr’s father of the year sneers.) Mocking Massholes is a time-honored comic tradition, but only those of us with a little Masshole in us can truly do it right. Bill Burr has the music in him.

Political Comedy Report

Well, at least it wasn’t a musical number.

When Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson, and Heidi Gardner opened tonight’s show by somberly addressing the camera as themselves in the wake of Donald-f**king-Trump being reelected to the presidency, images of mawkish, self-serious such cold opens past flashed before by already-rolling eyes. When Ego noted how most SNL viewers view that outcome as “shocking and even horrifying,” I got even more worried.

Not that she’s wrong—this second Trump administration is going to be even worse than most people could possibly imagine—but Saturday Night Live in the Trump era has whiffed so hard on these sorts of “we’re about to get real with you” premises that the sight of four cast members lined up to speak to a hushed audience suggested all manner of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip-esque tonal disasters.

In the end, the joke was a simple one. With Kenan reminding everyone how Trump has “openly called for vengeance against his political enemies” (not mentioning Trump’s explicit attacks on SNL itself), the premise was revealed as everybody then pledged complete fealty and subservience to Donald Trump. It’s not a bad joke, although it has nowhere much to go after the initial swerve. (And you know, maybe it’d have more impact if SNL hadn’t so servilely bowed to him the first time around.)

Not that Dana Carvey doesn’t try, bless his schtick-y SNL legend’s heart. Coming out as Elon Musk to hop around and repeatedly point out his “Dark MAGA” baseball cap in an approximation of Musk’s Apartheid-bot accent, Carvey’s Musk elicits similarly slavish “just kidding” apologies from the gathered performers. James Austin Johnson, sadly assured of another term as Trump, came out, too, here sporting impressively vascular prosthetic arms as “Hot, jacked Trump,” the show’s new take on the now-elected president, with Johnson promising that he’s always thought of his signature impersonation as his hero “and eventually king.”

It all could have been worse—and so much better. Having Colin Jost come out with his customary smirk to join in on the faux-groveling was a telling touch. There is nobody who epitomizes Saturday Night Live‘s current lack of skin in the game than Weekend Update anchor Jost, and so him turning his part into a continuation of his joshing one-upmanship with co-anchor Michael Che yanked whatever wee fangs the sketch dared bare.

But the main problem is this—and it’s hardly one Saturday Night Live will have to face alone in the dark days ahead: Irony isn’t something conservatives respect, or even register. There’s no chance Donald Trump saw tonight’s bit of deadpan mockery of “Trump 2.0” as anything but capitulation, no matter how many references the cast dropped in about, say, the right-wing Supreme Court essentially removing all guardrails for their chosen despot to enact any insanely awful thing that flits through his addled brain.

All this is being said from the perspective of someone who’s watched (and exhaustively written about) a decade of the best (mostly non-SNL) political satire that resulted in Donald Trump winning a second term. Late-night hosts, stand-ups, oblique movie and TV allegories, amusingly wry essays, outright mockery, spot-on impression parody, scathing exposés of the worst and most disqualifying excesses punctuated by cathartic British-accented outbursts—comedians have applied themselves exhaustively and creatively, all to no avail.

And so if this Saturday Night Live—not being a mostly worshipful scripted big screen paean to the self-perpetuated myth of a renegade Canadian political satirist producer as it is—isn’t cut out for an America facing the very real possibility of choosing whether or not to make attic hiding spaces for neighbors running from a Trump-branded racist deportation force, the cynic in me suspects it won’t be alone. (The joke that the main cast is ready to toss new kids Emil Wakim, Jane Wickline, and Ashley Padilla to the wolves to save their own skin was the one chillingly bitter edge to the whole affair.)

There’s an urgency that’s missing here as we watch cast members including a gay man, two women (one of them Black), a Hispanic man, a Black man, and others directly in Trump and his coterie of squirmy Nazis and genuine GOP sycophants’ sights. They might be rich and more or less famous, but Heidi and Ego face an America where their bodies have been proclaimed state property and where smirking MAGA chuds issue online rape threats and call for the repeal of the 19th Amendment for funsies. Marcello Hernandez has to be mindful of being lumped in as “an illegal” by those Trump adherents delighted their blanket bigotry against people who look like him now have presidential approval. Kenan and Ego probably have some thoughts about Trump’s promise to rebut all that Black Lives Matter stuff with complete police immunity from prosecution.

Nobody in the cast (and nobody in general) needs me to speak for them, but watching this mediocre conceit play out on a show that itself will undoubtedly be watching its back as Trump takes office is to hope that Saturday Night Live will let some of that very personal anxiety and anger loose in the show’s content. As with literally everyone and everything in America faced with a sundowning would-be dictator with full judicial backing and a literal army of drooling bigots and democracy-hating billionaires propping him up, Saturday Night Live is facing a test, both of its satirical abilities and its own carefully manicured outlaw comedy cred.

And to those readers rolling their eyes at my liberal alarmism and paranoia, I’l just quote Principal Skinner—”Prove me wrong, kids! Prove me wrong…”

I’d be f**king delighted.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Emil Wakim, step on up. The featured player was all over the place tonight. And even if his roles in support weren’t of the belly laugh variety, that sort of versatility bodes well.

Same goes for Ashley Padilla, who anchored one sketch and had a big part in another.

Hang in there, Jane.

Kenan has Willie, the dean, himself in the cold open. Kenan gets (and deserves) his.

Good spotlight for Ego on Update and as herself.

Michael Longfellow was solid in the janitor piece, even if the real praise goes to the SNL wig department for that Matt Damon number.

James Austin Johnson should stay on SNL for as long as it doesn’t bore him.

Honestly, this was one of the best episodes in terms of passing the ball. Huge cast, but this time almost everybody got a turn. Well, except Chloe Fineman.

Dispatches From 10-To-Oneland

Ashley Padilla continues to make her pitch to be James Austin Johnson’s counterpart in the SNL character actor sweepstakes. This sketch saw Padilla’s wife embarrass her husband and his work colleagues at a restaurant by trying to match their easy banter with an elaborate, go-nowhere joke about dogs with a truly excruciating punchline. (“It shouldn’t smell like daaaaaaatt!”)

It takes a special kind of courage to commit to a premise designed to be offputting, and Padilla is right in there. Long a champion of this final slot of the SNL night as a repository for writers’ unheralded, out-there ideas (and not—I repeat not—a “dumping ground”), this is right up my alley—at least in theory. But sometimes weird little ideas need a little nudge into shape, and this one, despite Padilla’s performer’s moxie (when the audience realized she was telling the exact same joke for a second time, you could feel the air leave the studio) never fully asserted itself or its reason to exist. Still, I’ll never complain too much about the final sketch being a strange little outlier.

Stray Observations

While I liked it just fine, Mk.gee’s first song opened with a “Jesse’s Girl” riff and then sounded like The Police. I may not be young.

Also, for a song featuring multiple hawk noises I have to ask, but was that fuzz distortion part of the song or another indictment of SNL‘s long history of not being very good at mic-ing rock acts.

My Studio 60 flashback musical number terror was mostly thwarted, thankfully. The fact that Donald Trump has appropriated one of the most explicit anthems to 1970’s gay culture as an unironic theme tune is objectively funny.

For those looking to examine the complexities of Bill Burr’s persona, the fictionalized, Burr-esque patriarch of the departed and underrated animated series F Is for Family is worth a watch.

Given his history, I was relived that Che’s story about a coming all-woman pro baseball league was a joke about Donald Trump and the GOP’s plan to destroy women’s rights and not another anti-women’s sports dig.

Not a judgement, just an observation: Man, that’s a lot of offhand molestation jokes tonight.

I’m interested to learn why Burr singled out SNL band drummer Shawn Pelton in his goodnights.

Tonight’s bummer of a title card went to one time SNL host and music legend Quincy Jones, who died on November 3 at the age of 91.

[On Musk and other Trump-loving oligarchs seeing their net worth skyrocket after Trump’s win] “Yup, the richest people immediately got richer. But don’t worry, I’m sure yours is coming soon, Earl.”

michael che

Next week: Charlie XCX pulls double-duty.

Episode Grade: B-Minus.