Paul Mescal’s Charm Buoys an Agreeable Saturday Night Live

And Your Host…

Paul Mescal has a scruffy charisma that offsets his monologue admission, “I’m not really known for comedy.” The montage of his wrenching emotional breakdowns in the likes of All of Us Strangers bears that out, although as SNL host the Irish Gladiator acquitted himself just fine.

In most sketches, Mescal wasn’t the epicenter of the jokes, but he was an able straight man enough that the show didn’t simply write endless variations on the “hot guy is hot” theme, which testifies to his considerable comic charm. His monologue was a big nothing, though (even Marcello Hernandez in very short shorts couldn’t save it).

This being part of Mescal’s Gladiator II PR rounds, there was plenty of talk about the dubiously necessary belated sequel tonight, but Mescal himself seemed genuinely happy to be hosting, and the mandatory Gladiator filmed piece benefitted from the actor’s gameness. That someone would have the idea to pump up the good but not great-earning film by adding Wicked-esque musical numbers is topicality done right, and the actual songs are just good enough to be queasily plausible. Mescal himself is a hoot, offering up a series of nimble little hip-shimmies and Broadway flourishes to his mid-combat show-stoppers.

As an aside, the joke construction where a narrator reads off bewildered critical reviews without breaking pitchman’s stride is almost always funny. Here, the testimonial from director Ridley Scott (“I was not told about this”) gets a good-sized laugh. SNL‘s had some great stabs at this kind of joke (the Goulet brothers musical still cracks me up), but I recall there being a Mad TV sketch that perfected it, weirdly enough. (It’s about dueling Truman Capote movies and if it’s on the internet anywhere, I can’t find it.)

The Best and the Rest

The Best: Andrew Dismukes plugs away at being the cast weirdo original. Idolizing as he does previous defiantly strange star Will Forte, Dismukes stakes out his claim for writerly, strange little premises he can anchor with unblinking commitment. I feel like I want to send him a little present every time he manages to get one of his staunchly offbeat pieces into another bland rundown.

The courtroom sketch does announce its premise with what seems like predictable SNL prosaicness, as Dismukes’ lawyer advises understandably worried client Mescal to wear an outrageous getup (including plastic Devo helmet) to the last day of a trial where Dismukes has done nothing to defend him. But it’s all about Andrew Dismukes’ ability to stare down silliness with unerring commitment that makes this one sing its weird little song. His lawyer’s unshakeable confidence never wavers as he unveils one masterstroke after another. Like having 20 (or so) identically kitted-out guys sit behind the baffled Mescal to trip up the witness. (Plan A.)

Plan B sees him just as smugly call out “Gentlemen, shuffle!,” even as the ensuing scrum of fluorescent-suited fakes fail to impress Bowen Yang’s judge. Okay, then on to Plan C—escalation. The lawyer’s threat, “I’ve gotta say, if you don’t dismiss this case, I’m going to kill myself,” emerges, in Dismukes’ exquisitely timed deadpan, as a comic masterstroke, if not a legal one. (The little pulsing synth sting underscoring his every legal maneuver is a great touch.) And his follow-up bribe attempt plays out the same way, with Dismukes’ lawyer never blinking in the face of defeat, Dismukes’ beaming confidence the product of a single-minded inner life we can only marvel at. Dismukes possesses an all-American baby face that sets us up perfectly as another of his characters strides purposefully into unexpectedly silly waters.

The Worst: The cold open saw Dana Carvey playing the Church Lady… in 2024. The fact that an undeniable SNL legend has chosen to kick around 8H past his topically mandated cameo stint might be a function of SNL ramping up the nostalgia for February’s big 50th anniversary celebration. It may also be an effort by Lorne Michaels to pump air into another wheezy season with an old cast favorite. I’d like to think that Carvey just won’t leave, his tireless, schtick-y backstage presence forcing writers to shoehorn him into the show week after week mainly to be polite.

Regardless, this was deeply tiresome. Church Chat became one of the most over-deployed and exhausting recurring sketches about halfway through a tenure that took place 30 years ago. Even the primed and prompted studio audience wasn’t all that into the throwback sketch, with lukewarm initial recognition applause fading away into almost eerie silence as the thing plodded along. Carvey’s creation has long rubbed away any prickly satirical edges she once had, and SNL choosing to wheel out another former star in David Spade’s wanly indifferent Hunter Biden only underscored that all the desperately hyped SNL 50 hoopla really needs more behind it than mere nostalgia.

As political comedy, the cold open was a flabby nothing. Flogging disgraced Republican sex creep Matt Gaetz weeks after his candidacy to be Donald Trump’s henchman in the Attorney General’s office is as telling as it gets for this Saturday Night Live. Take on a safely fading target so nobody can get too mad, say literally nothing about him, and let the makeup department go nuts. (Sarah Sherman’s botox-ed Gaetz seems to be auditioning for Smile 3.)

As for Spade’s Biden, even the hint of swatting Church Lady’s judgement back into her smug little face (“Last time I checked, Jesus wasn’t walking around in a robe with no underwear hanging out with prostitutes.” “Uh, I think he was”) is clearly secondary to Spade making dick jokes and Carvey’s rote mugging. Even the “Satan had a good year” musical closer is half-written and sheepishly performed. What’s most surprising is how neither Carvey nor Spade truly seemed into this, a fatal quality for a needless retread that could only conceivably been saved in performance.

The Rest: Trailing just behind Dismukes’ trial sketch was the Italian restaurant commercial, gliding along as it does on Ashley Padilla’s similarly off-kilter lead. Alongside Mescal, she’s a neophyte actress whose ad-libbed flub about the “pastabilities” of the eatery’s menu so tickles the director that Mescal’s pro can only get more and more irritated and desperate.

Padilla is one of those new performers who could grow into a big star on SNL—or sink under this iteration of the show’s deadening instinct for ordinariness. (Chloe Troast, we hardly knew ye.) Like James Austin Johnson, Padilla is a character comic, her ability to imbue a wisp of a sketch character with inner spark livening up pretty much anything she’s in.

Here, it’s never clear just how conscious is her actress’ scene-stealing (“What is that called, improv?,” she asks, waving away the director’s praise), Padilla’s continuing string of pasta puns forcing Mescal to effortfully up his own game. His own would-be catchphrase (“Spaghetti or not, I’m gonna kill you”) lands with a plop, even with some hastily produced sunglasses, leading to Mescal abandoning all deference to his co-star. Their exchange (“I am learning so much from you.” “Shut up.”) is an edgy little delight, with Padilla’s slippery solicitousness only enraging him more.

And then Kenan shows up as the Italian-accented owner, the incongruousness of his Brando-esque authority (“It’s a-me, Mario Caponelli”) bumping the sketch up one more silly level. (Turns out that Mescal’s grasping attempt at reclaiming the spotlight channeled Mr. Caponelli’s grandma exactly, right down to the Terminator 2 reference.) Comedy is a matter of taste, naturally, but I’m confident in my assertion that I’d take a sketch built around performance and originality (and silliness) over another watery topical bit or naked appeal to limping nostalgia any day.

Heidi Gardner’s another of those SNL performers whose ability to jolt a sketch character to life has been only intermittently well used in her time on the show. When in the right role, she’s comically riveting, her way of glazing over her eyes with sudden, implacable mania an indispensable asset. In the family dinner where son Mescal reveals his new earring, she (matched by a game Emil Wakim) turns suburban vapidity to scornful insanity with such quicksilver devotion that it’s as funny as it is sort of unnerving.

The sketch keeps flirting with true manic brilliance (that Ashley Padilla’s unperturbed granny gets hurled needlessly out of not one but two windows should be a bigger laugh), with the parents’ placid veneer stripping further down layers and layers of anti-intellectual and sexual prejudice with escalating absurdity. Their otherwise ideal son’s earring flips the switch on the couple’s knee-jerk fears and insecurities, their ensuing ironic mockery of Mescal’s now-assumed libertinism a perceived rejection of the beige normality they clearly hold onto for dear life. “Your father’s been gay for 15 years!,” Gardner blurts in response to Mescal’s tiny act of rebellion, a line brimming with unexpressed comic complexity.

It’s hardly a groundbreaker, but I find myself humming along with the sketch’s deconstructionist chaos. (Gardner shows up with a spatula bloodily dangling from her ear in wild-eyed mockery of the offending jewelry.) Mining blandly cheerful acceptance to unearth the comically squirmy unspoken terrors and prejudices within is rich ground, and Gardner and Wakim’s loony engagement with the enterprise makes for layered laughs.

Returning to my assertion that Paul Mescal’s charm overtook his hotness in the writers’ estimation this week, the male stripper sketch allowed him to keep his shirt mostly on. The sketch sends up a warning flare early, as a table of ready-to-ogle bachelorettes (Ego Nowdim, Heidi Gardner, Sarah Sherman, Chloe Fineman) spend the first bit setting up the scene and then intermittently explain how the ensuing historically accurate, pirate-themed all-male revue isn’t what they were expecting. (As ever, Saturday Night Live performs this public service for its slowest and most easily confused viewers.)

But the performance by Mescal and most of the male cast is a great joke, the assiduous attention to period detail from the distinction between pirates and privateers and the intricacies of trade routes played out with gusto from a cadre of dancers completely oblivious to the irritated women who just came to see some peen. Even the ordinarily annoying griping about the premise has a fun wrinkle, as Ego keeps defending the dancers’ accuracy. (“He still had life in him but it wasn’t worth giving him five days rations of salted pork,” she explains after Marcello Hernandez’s stripping seaman is hurled overboard after revealing his scurvy symptoms.)

And the guys are all into the performing aspect, which is infectious and buoying of the whole enterprise. Mescal especially looks like he’s having a ball in his puffy shirt and wig, and James Austin Johnson, as ever, plays his detail-oriented sailor as if he’s in a straight production of Mutiny on the Bounty.

As a topper, having Emil Wakim finally give the women the strip-off they want—by revealing two puppet-y peg-legs—escalates things to a giddy pitch, until bride Gardner finally gets her wish of being tied up by the pirate crew—and tossed overboard because women at sea are bad luck. An ensemble sketch that’s full of energy is the sort of thing this cast truly needs more of.

The Please Don’t Destroy guys finally get back into their cramped office, this time pitching ideas to a receptive Paul Mescal—whose chummy agreeability eventually turns into a shared fantasy of surprisingly touching and elaborate four-way cohabitation. The set-up for the joke isn’t promising—the hunky actor making the nerdy writers retreat in gay panic is played all the way out. But things get sillier with welcome speed, as Mescal’s designs on the guys seem less sexual (“What???… In time, maybe,” Mescal responds to the guys asking if it’s a sex thing) than indefinably cozy, with the four settling into a dream life of blanket forts, fireside cuddling, and an unnervingly paternalistic Mescal relishing in being called, “Daddy.”

When the film jumps up an absurdity notch, it’s to see angry townspeople coming to kill patriarch Mescal for the family’s unconventional life, only the bowhunting skills Mescal had shown the guys earlier preventing tragedy. “Why do people hate?,” wide-eyed Ben asks while cowering under the bed. “Because they don’t know love like we do,” Mescal assures his son-lovers earnestly before heading out to fight. I’m never excited by the “I’m not gay… but what if I were” joshing of straight dudes—even when, as here, it’s marginally supportive of actual gay dudes, the device feels hacky. But as Mescal, returned from reverie to see his new pals cuddled on their office couch asleep, kisses John on the cheek and wishes a warm parting, Good night, my sweet boys,” it’s, well, sweet.

It’s not a rule or anything, but often the second-to-last sketch of the night comes off like a 10-to-one sketch with a busted timing chain. Sort of weird but not weird enough is the sketch based on that app’s year-end musical playlist trend that shows you which of your friends has even worse taste than you thought.

That Mescal’s partygoer should reveal his number one artist as an “anti-instrumentalist sound guru” from Maryland named Satoshi Gutman sounds like the set-up for a 10-to-one sketch, certainly. But, dammit, the piece never quite finds its groove, as Bowen Yang’s Gutman turns out to be something of a dud. A wan New Age, asexual poser with flowing blond locks and a song called “Y’all Made Me Celibate” should be right up my alley, but in practice, the sketch fizzles. Nobody’s at fault really (even though there’s a celebrity cameo that doesn’t help things). The sketch just never achieves liftoff.

Weekend Update Update

Taking place as it did mere blocks from Saturday Night Live‘s home base, the apparently targeted killing of a health insurance CEO this week should have been irresistible for a pair of comics whose brand is “edgy.” (Or at least, “We’re going for momentary audience gasps before our smirk lets everyone know we’re just being naughty.”)

While the online discourse has been its usual predictable stew of un-clever jokes and sententious scolding in the wake of the murder of an exec whose job it was to embody the heartlessness of the American healthcare system, I’ve honestly seen more so-so internet zingers that grappled with the thorny issue than Jost or Che could muster tonight.

To be fair, the various layers of Standards and Practices influence likely had something to do with that. Jost’s jokes dodged the potential controversy of, say, addressing that the shooter appears to have explicitly targeted a CEO whose company routinely condemns people to unnecessary pain, death, and/or financial ruin in the name of greed in favor of picking at the innocuous edges of the story.

The ineffectiveness of the NYPD in hunting for the still at-large shooter, the consensus that the killer is hot, and a jab at everyone at the Port Authority looking like a murderer are nothing jokes that nonetheless crackle with the tension of proximity to a very big and revealing crime.

A bolder comic (or show) would address the roots of why this story is on everyone’s mind. Jost and SNL smirk at their cheek in sidling up to the issue and then scurrying away in mission-accomplished self-satisfaction. This murder, bringing together as it does themes of class warfare, predatory capitalism, the rising boldness of Trump-era oligarchy, gun violence, the inherent inhumanity of for-profit healthcare, social media callousness, the inherent hypocrisy about tut-tutting one dead rich guy in a world of suffering (in which he was complicit)—all touchy, dangerous, endlessly compelling comic targets. And all ones that Saturday Night Live took one look at and said, “Naw, we’re good.”

On a perhaps less immediately touchy note, Che did basically the same dance when he used a bit about Trump’s nominee to head the IRS for a fat joke. It’s a rhetorically clever fat joke, sure—over a pic of nominee Billy Long’s impressively bulky head and seeming absence of neck, Che trailed off expertly, “Trump considered a lot of candidates, but Long was just head and shoulders…” Your position on ad hominem appearance jokes aside (Psst: they’re cheap and easy and cause collateral damage), the choice to make that joke over, say, anything about a Trump loyalist being installed specifically to allow Trump and his oligarch pals to continue to evade taxes by reversing the current administration’s effective and lucrative investigation of wealthy tax cheats is… well, you get me.

I’m out of criticism for Jost and Che on Update. I’m as tired of making them as you are of reading them. Two funny comedians more interested in seeming clever than using their positions—as satirical news anchors, just to reiterate—to turn their considerable talents toward the tougher task of giving a shit about what they’re saying. Glib cleverness was punk rock refreshing in a fake news format when Chevy Chase did it in 1975. In 2024, it’s apparently too much to expect that Saturday Night Live would have evolved this part of its game.

Only one correspondent piece tonight, and it gave Heidi Gardner another shot at reclaiming her throne as queen of the desk piece. As the delightedly outspoken mom of Marcello Hernandez’s newly crowned NFL superstar, Gardner channels every sponging stage mom, even as she makes the role her own with a down home exuberance for her newfound wealth and semi-celebrity (she’s really gunning to make musical guest Shaboozey her next celebrity conquest).

Offhandedly noting how her son’s singleminded pursuit of excellence has left him without any discernible personality, Gardner makes her character’s happy grasping grotesquely entertaining. And Hernandez is chillingly on-target as an athlete so numbed by repetition and obedience that his every utterance is a dead-eyed interview cliché. (“Trust the process,” is one of those meaningless catchphrases that absolves athletes of all mental activity, and Hernandez incongruously repeating it after his mom cheerfully announces that she’s dating that grown Modern Family kid is as funny as it is creepy.)

Recurring Sketch Report

I was all ready to complain about the show reaching back three decades for this one. But then research reminded me that Dana Carvey’s come back to do Church Lady as recently as eight years ago. Say what you want—Dana Carvey is tenacious when it comes to schtick.

Political Comedy Report

I mean, does the Church Lady count? On a technicality?

Oh well, it’s not like there’s anything else going on in the world.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Amidst all the snowballing alumni and celebrity cameos, there are glimpses of what this cast could do. Dismukes, Padilla, and Gardner’s individual and collective idiosyncratic talents got to peep out here, and it was bracing. Emil Wakim, too, feels like a good comic actor who comes alive when the show allows.

Michael Longfellow in two sketches tonight appears to have cornered the fey, androgynous cameo slot. Congrats!

Jane Wickline got a couple of musical numbers (part of Church Lady’s chorus and as Mescal’s doomed Gladiator wife). Hang in there.

Dispatches From 10-To-Oneland

While it seemed like the coveted (by me anyway) final slot of the night would be nothing but a vehicle for Chloe Fineman’s preening, faux-bashful Timothée Chalamet (as ever, amusingly uninspired), the sketch gradually turned into something more fitting for this land of weird little ideas the show could use more of.

James Austin Johnson clearly spent the back half of the show in the makeup chair as the red carpet interviews about Chalamet’s turn as the legendary singer saw Johnson emerge in uncanny Dylan drag. Now making sport of Bob Dylan (for mumbling, for having it both ways on profitable self-promotion) is easy enough. But having this Dylan be merely obsessed with being kept from the backstage appetizers by Heidi Gardner’s vapid interviewer (nobody, in fact, had a brat summer), makes this into an entertainingly odd little doodle of a sketch.

JAJ’s verbose if barely intelligible Dylan’s lust for barely out of reach arancini is very funny. “Relinquish me, Buzzfeed!,” is a battle cry more celebrities should adopt going forward. And if Andrew Dismukes’ Bruce Springsteen and Mescal’s Bono aren’t as accomplished, the conceit that these aging superstars really just want to get to the grub embroiders the goofy premise with delicate chuckles. “A tiny tiramisu?,” JAJ’s Dylan blurts in staccato outrage upon seeing Mescal’s Bono toting one app, “Oh, you’re testing me, Bono. Like Job, a Christ in the wilderness.”

And in the capper, the idea that these aged, self-serious musical icons would have the same enthusiastically definitive ranking of Rory Gilmore’s love interests in response to the reporter’s mandatory final question cements this oddball piece’s place in this, the home of oddball little pieces.

Stray Observations

With his countrified soul-styled hits, Shaboozey gave country fans everything they claimed to love (bar being white) and was repaid by some shit-kicker’s spiteful joke about his stage name at the country industry’s biggest night. Just sayin’.

After some cursory old guy Googling, it appears that the Trisha Paytas a segment of the audience went nuts for in the Spotify sketch is a YouTuber who has a long history of being irritating feuding with other internet figures I have no interest in. That is all.

In the earring sketch, Mescal doing American sounds like Mescal doing Aaron Paul.

The running joke of Martin Herlihy breaking down in tears after each joke about his girlfriend wanting to sleep with Mescal got me each time.

“It was reported that the mother of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, sent her son an email saying that she was embarrassed by the way he repeatedly belittles, lies, cheats, and uses women for his own power and ego. To which Hegseth reponded, ‘Bitch, shut up!'”

colin jost

[After preemptively warning the audience that the following joke might not be funny, but not laughing at it will mean they’re dumb] “National Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day was tomorrow.”

michael che

Episode Grade: B-Minus

Next Week: Another former cast member in Chris Rock hosts, for his fourth time. (Just going to pencil in those cameos now.) Musical guest is Gracie Abrams, who will miss out on her boyfriend Paul Mescal by a week.