Saturday Night Live put Ryan Gosling and his tendency to break during sketches to the test this weekend, with a classroom scenario explicitly conceived to make the host laugh.
Gosling famously broke during one of his very first SNL sketches, the December 2015 debut of “Close Encounter” featuring Kate McKinnon’s E.T.-fondled Miss Rafferty. With that and other instances of tittering in mind, the March 7 SNL deposited the four-time host in “Passing Notes,” a classroom sketch in which he played a school principal, and Ashley Padilla a teacher.
When the students (including Kam Patterson, Jane Wickline, Mikey Day, and Marcello Hernández) are seen passing notes during a lecture about bullying, Gosling and Padilla’s characters intercept the missives and read them aloud to the rest of the class.
The wrinkle? Neither Gosling nor Padilla knew ahead of time what the notes would say. (They were changed up from Saturday evening’s dress rehearsal, where they were similarly blindsided.)
What’s more, said notes were of such an outlandish nature that they’d surely test the principal’s and teacher’s ability to keep a straight face. At dress, one note involved a J.D. Vance MAGA vibrator that’d been brought to a Wuthering Heights screening; in the live show, the topics included the teacher stumping ChatGPT with a request for makeover tips, and a thirsty nod to Gosling’s role as Barbie‘s Ken.
Watch a snippet of the sketch below:
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) March 8, 2026
Don’t want to dismiss the efforts of writers and cast, but the sketch didn’t seem that funny to me. Not funny enough for the cast to break character anyway. It felt as though the laughter was phony.
I thought it was really lame to tell us ahead of time that the actors hadn’t seen what was in the notes. It would have been obvious, like Bill Hader’s Stephan character and last year’s Beavis and Butthead skit. It’s like someone holding an audiences hand and telling them what’s funny.