Don’t let holiday spirit blind you to the monster next door, advises Kate McKinnon and SNL
The parody ad about inviting your elderly neighbor to Christmas dinner comes with a side of horrors
TV News Kate McKinnon
With the holiday season in full, carefully manufactured swing, we’ve all been inundated by those Christmas commercials about showing goodwill to our fellow humans. Last night’s Billie Eilish-hosted (and musical guested) Saturday Night Live, however, provided a darkly funny counterpoint to the idea that throwing your doors open to strangers in the spirit of giving guarantees a movie-worthy feel-good biopic. Sometimes, the short film “Lonely Christmas” posits, that sweet but bereft-looking old lady across the alley is actually a creepy weirdo with a whole lot of genuinely horrifying secrets in her closet.
Parodying those carefully focus-grouped commercials where the holiday spirit prompts young people to, say, help that nice old lady with her groceries (sometimes, you get mittens!), the short sees teen Eilish spotting Kate McKinnon’s solitary widow through her lit window, sighing and staring wistfully at her husband’s photo. Breaking out the markers and notebook paper, the two strangers quickly strike up a friendship, as Eilish’s well-intentioned teenager informs her unseen mother that they’re having one extra for Christmas dinner.
So far, so heartwarming, right? And, sure, the senior citizen does hold up a card asking if there are going to be any Black people or Jews in attendance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, right? (“Could you check?,” the smiling woman urges Eilish’s teen to make sure about the whole “Jews” situation.) With hilarious escalation, things go very much downhill from there, as Eilish finds, to her increasing unease, that she’s invited a stranger to her home who also loves Donald Trump, hates her family (who voted for that “disgraceful” woman instead), is deliberately sickening her own adult son with hypodermics full of green liquid to keep him under her thumb, and, yeah, probably murdered that husband whose picture she was staring at.
With McKinnon (back on the show after missing the season’s first seven episodes filming the Tiger King miniseries) portraying the outwardly harmless old woman, the sketch is powered by pure, glassy-eyed madness, revealed in escalating, Love, Actually-style cue cards. If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that dangerous weirdos are still dangerous and weird, even at holiday time. She sees you when you’re sleeping.
21 Comments
the eating of the paper by Rutger had me lolzing. Eilish is like a chameleon when her hair changes!
“Can you check?”
That’s right, folks — leave that elderly neighbor alone for Christmas!
Hell, I’ll go even further than that. I even leave elderly family alone at Christmas.
The humor is rooted in people in a situation opposite to reality! Incredible!
As humor is, by definition, something that is unexpectedly or subversively true… what?
Eilish was fantastic in this sketch and even though I found the premise predictable (maybe I’m a jaded misanthrope) the actor’s performances really made the whole thing hilarious.
Yeah, I saw it coming too, until Rutger showed up.It went up a level after that.They turned a kinda tired premise into the best sketch in a while
Rutger was the cherry on top.
That was good. I thought it was going to be “LOL OLD PEOPLE ARE RACIST”
which is kind of tired but it got so much weirder and darker.
I don’t think that I were not as goddamned high as I am, that would have been funny. But I am and it was, so there you go.
I did like the twerking nurse Billie played in the Tick Toc scroll.
Now now, let’s be fair. We don’t know she loves Trump, just that she never would have voted for Hillary.
Its true I got the impression that she was opposed to any woman as president.
She did seem like a Kanye fan…
LOL there aren’t many things I like more than sparring with some obvious Cult 45er who indignantly says “oh I didn’t vote for him, how dare you infer that!” (based solely on my reflexive vicious bashing of Biden and/or a pining for the days when “we had a strong leader” as president)
No one’s even mentioned that it was a Smiths song!
Are There Any Black People There is a Smiths song?!
Lovely handwriting. Don’t see a nice flowing hand like that very often these days. I blame those new-fangled computers….
I don’t care for creepy old racists, but it seems to be the only place you can get good calligraphy these days.
Absolutely insane how the country is going to Hell in a handbasket under Biden, to the point where even Democratic leaders (especially in border areas down south) are starting to say “Seriously?! WTF???”…. yet these people intentionally ignore all of that and still trot out Trump jokes and paint his supporters as evil incarnate (I’m sure they’re also not gonna touch Jussie Smollet with a 10 foot pole. They’ll cancel the show before doing that, despite the whole situation being ripe for some depricating humor). I’m no Trump worshipper, but FFS, how brainwashed and delusional do you have to be? Yep, all Trump supporters are evil, and all Democrats walk on water and are above reproach and criticism. Sure.