Saturday Night Live recap: Emma Stone fully commits to the bit
The actress gamely joins the famous "Five Timers Club" in a heavily musical episode
TV Reviews Saturday Night Live
If you need proof that Emma Stone is one of the most fearlessly funny actors working today, you only need to look at her most recent projects: she’s brilliant as the bawdy Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-bound Frankensteinian fable Poor Things and alongside Nathan Fielder as a married couple–slash–hosts of an HGTV show in Showtime’s satirical series The Curse.
So, consider her Saturday Night Live hosting gig on the December 2 episode—with singer-songwriter Noah Kahan as a musical guest—simply a cherry on top of a very funny year for the performer, who, at 35 years old, becomes the youngest member of the Five Timers Club. The exclusive designation is for hosts that have—you guessed it—hosted SNL at least five times, including the likes of Tom Hanks (the inaugural member), Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin, and Melissa McCarthy, among others.
And Stone more than earns her membership card, regularly elevating a celebratory episode pocked by underwhelming writing.
Cold open: Sashay away, George Santos
After “God, finally,” my first thought at hearing the news that the House of Representatives voted to expel everyone’s favorite flamboyantly fraudulent Congressman George Santos was “What about Bowen?!” Indeed, Yang’s take on the disgraced politician has been a standout this season and this swan song–literally–was no exception.
“This whole country has been bullying me just because I’m a proud, gay, thief. What else is new? America hates to see a Latina queen winning,” Santos proclaims at a press conference that, despite protestations saying otherwise, he requested. Bowen’s George continues his signature parade of bald-faced lies, including his age (“17 years old”), official titles (“astronaut, protector of the realm, princess of Genovia”), and career moves, announcing that he has a new movie hitting theaters this very weekend. (That would be Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, of course.)
Then, beneath glittering chandeliers and with a cape dramatically blowing behind him, Santos takes to a grand piano to sing a tribute to himself. “It seemed to me I lived my life like a scandal in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the law closed in,” he croons, doing his best Elton. Goodbye Congress queen. We hardly knew ye!
Opening monologue: Emma gets emotional
Given the “herstory”-making nature of the night’s episode, you knew that the powers that be would pull out some Five Timer favorites to usher Stone into the coveted club. Doing the honors are Candace Bergen (the first woman to ever host Saturday Night Live back in 1975) and Tina Fey.
And it clearly means a lot to the inductee, who speaks about SNL being her favorite show and that she even met her husband on-set. “I know he’s pretty camera shy, he’s not a performer, but I’d love the cameras to cut to him,” she says before the cameras throw to Lorne Michaels. (IRL, she’s married to Dave McCary, who served as a segment director for the show and was a member of the sketch comedy group Good Neighbor.)
Stone tears up as the distinguished duo enrobed her in the club’s signature lounge jacket, that is until she finds a joint in the pocket. “This must be Woody Harrelson’s jacket,” Bergan quips. But wait, there’s more: a vaccine card. “So definitely not Woody’s,” adds Fey.
Most nightmare-inducing sketch of the night:
For many creatives (including this writer), AI is a futuristic nightmare that is creeping ever more prevalently into our every day. The Please Don’t Destroy trio—consisting of Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy—tapped into that very creepiness in this digital sketch, where they claimed they had to resort to using advanced AI technology to replace some footage of host Emma Stone that had become corrupted.
Their sit-down with Stone gets frequently intercut with hilariously horrifying scenes of Stone’s face poorly layered over “body double” Punkie Johnson, who unfortunately “knows very little about Academy Award-winning actress Emma Stone.” (“Oh! Am I that b*tch from Harry Potter?”) It’s made even freakier when Johnson’s “Emma” and Martin begin to make out. (“You look like a lot of women in my DMs. It’s about to be like that one time in college!”)
“This will get Emma Stone an Emmy” sketch of the night:
Stone’s turn as an afro-wearing, Phil Spector-like record producer named Mitch Lester is as brilliant as it is bonkers. The ’60s-era sketch is set during the recording session of Mama Cass’s solo single “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” which Mitch says will start showing up in a bunch of movies in 50 years because “it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.” (Indeed, the soaring track has popped up in IRL movies like Free Guy and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, as well as a Barbie trailer.)
Mitch demonstrates the point by acting out several cinematic scenarios, such as the Final Girl in a zombie movie (“killing” the rest of the record-label reps with a saxophone shotgun) and a powerless prostitute out for revenge (using a flute “sword” to take down the powerful men she services). The sketch goes on too long, but Stone sells it with everything she’s got.
MVP of the night: Michael Longfellow
Fellow featured player Chloe Troast was a standout singing in two sketches this week, serving up Cecily Strong vibes as Mama Cass and in that “Fully Naked in New York” music video. But it was Michael Longfellow’s delightfully petty “Old Fashioned Cigarette” that nabbed him MVP status this week.
Joining Colin Jost at the “Weekend Update” desk to discuss Australia’s move to ban nicotine vapes, Longfellow’s cig extolls the virtues of a classic smoke. “NBC probably doesn’t want me saying this directly to kids, but smoking makes you skinny and popular. And for guys, it adds a couple of inches!” The comedian’s wry delivery is pitch-perfect for the throwback vice, especially when taking the mick out of Jost. (“You know what they call a cigarette in London?…Say it!”)
Stray observations
- As a person who may or may not have chugged two cans of Diet Coke while writing this, that “Diet Coke by Olay” fauxmercial–for a facial cleanser that “seeps into your pores and into the river of Diet Coke already running through your veins”–hit a little too close to home.
- Chloe Fineman and Marcello Hernandez’s secret handshake during the closing credits was mucho adorable.
- Next week, we have the Tumblr-breaking combination of Adam Driver as host and Olivia Rodrigo as musical guest. And that’s not the only good news: Weird Barbie and SNL great Kate McKinnon will return for the last episode of the year on December 16, with musical guest Billie Eilish no doubt set to make us all weep with a live version of “What Was I Made For?”
75 Comments
I was kinda hoping there would be a Henry Kissenger sketch. I mean come on, there’s no way anyone at SNL was friends with him? He’s not OJ Simpson. Oh who am I kidding I’m sure someone was.
It’s funny and a bit sad that you think anyone is working on this show anymore, let alone watching it. They replaced both the audience and Lorne Michaels with ChatGPT long ago.
Did you mistaken SNL with this site?
I only watched because I really like Emma Stone. Yeah its on autopilot.
Posters Part 3 was funny, the naked song wasn’t bad, pawning off a tortoise was ok, then the rest was bad.
I have no doubt that that starfucker Lorne Michaels has yukked it up with Kissinger at a cocktail party or two.
Lorne Michaels is the only one there who knows who he is.
Well, Candice Bergen did date him so it was a missed opportunity.
Kissinger isn’t universally hated and some would consider it in poor taste.
He’s just hated in East Timor, Chile, Cambodia, Vietnam…..
…England, Bangladesh, America…
Kissinger isn’t universally hated Yeah, right wing dictators loved him, and his CIA death squads.
And you know, pretty much all of China, which attribute China’s current economic success to Kissinger’s and Nixon’s opening of China’s relations to the West (Nixon also has a better reputation there than in the US). But that was kind of the one time Kissinger actually helped rather than hurt things.
I’m sure a couple writers called their dads who used to be SNL writers to ask who Henry Kissinger was.
I think Kissinger was in Michaels’ wedding.
I think there’s a few reasons no Kissinger sketch and I don’t think any of them are due to friendship/liking the guy – 1) Santos was more topical with key demographics and 2) Kissinger died relatively late in the writing cycle for the week with many outlets fully admitted he was a war criminal in their headlines. Was there real anything to say in a sketch whose key demo is pretty young?
You are almost certainly correct that its a demographic thing, although it does feel like the most vocal can’t wait for him to die were Zoomers on social media. Knowing SNL also it wouldn’t have been funny or inciteful. But damn part of me still wanted to see even milktoast SNL rub it in one more time on German War Crime grandpa not the obvious one.
I have a feeling you already know this but the word is milquetoast. It doesn’t fucking matter, I don’t really know why I’m posting except that there’s an asshole pedant in me who likes the word.
I will completely level with you. I’m terrible at spelling so I use my autocorrect constantly and that was the best suggestion it gave me. I could have Googled it but my phone for some fucking reason only allows one tab open and I didn’t feel like closing this and checking and retyping. Also its fine, I’m terribly pedantic too. I’m the first girl to always go well actually when anything historical comes up.
Tsk. I don’t deserve this kind reply. I deserve a “Shut up, you jagoff.” (I’ve spent just enough of my life in Pittsburgh to have a fondness for that word, too.)
I’m watching this episode (just up to the Mama Cass bit), and this is the first crap bit of the night.
The only reason I didn’t mind this one going too long was that Chloe Troast sang each new go-round. She has a hell of a voice.
I thought George Carlin was the first 5 timer?
No it was Buck Henry, back in 77. But Hanks was the first one to make reference to a “club”.
Exactly. We see Steve Martin, Paul Simon, and Elliot Gould in that initial Five Timers Club skit with Hanks, and they were all “in the club” before that skit was even written. 🙂
It’s so weird to me that the “Five-timer’s Club” went from being the premise for a sketch to an actual thing they make a big deal about. The whole joke was that marking a host’s fifth appearance is kind of ridiculous!
Seriously. The joke was that there was some sort of behind the scenes Stonecutters society that only a select few were aware of, and fully silly on its face. I have to think the only people who actually care about a fifth appearance are the producers and the hosts themselves.
No, Carlin hosted the first episode and never came back.
He hosted in ‘84.
Carlin hosted twice: the first show and once in the Dick Ebersole era.
Oops. I guess wherever I thought I read that they never had him back actually said that Michaels never had him back.
noooooo god, please no!!! nooooooooooooo
Michael Longbottom is the opposite of funny for my money
His comic timing is woeful.
His timing is woeful and he telegraphs every punchline he reads. And they seem to put him in a cooky costume every time, but it just underlines his lack of humor. People try to ascribe him with a dry wit like Norm Macdonald’s or Bill Hader. He’s tall, and that’s all he shares in common with those two. If anything he’s more like Dennis Miller. Apologies if this is a double comment, but I do wish Longfellow the best, because many people seem to see something in him. I just don’t see it.
What a waste of an Oscar-winning actress. A real missed opportunity not to have done the Billie Jean King sketch during Stone’s hosting gig.The best use of “Make Your Own Kind of Music” shall always remain the Lost season 2 premiere when Jack enters the Hatch.The commercial for a particular soda brand can go fuck itself. Worst product placement in a while.
Instead of the kind of the ending they used that just totally fizzled the sketch out, when Mama Cass interrupted them to say how she wanted to see her song used decades in the future, it should have been something like “I want my song to show up on this weird show, that becomes surprisingly popular in spite of all its genre elements, that’s kind of a mystery, kind of science-fictiony, kind of like an adventure serial reimagined for the 21st century, where a weird guy in an underground bunker is playing my record, and he’s all unstuck in time like the guy in that new book by Kurt Vonnegut…” (cutting it close as the song & book came out the same year, but maybe they could lampshade that)
I had to go back and rewatch the hatch scene on Sunday morning, specifically for that reason!
What an amazing show that far, far too many people shit-talk because they failed to understand what was actually good about it and instead obsessed over the idiotic mysteries.
A B?!?!?!?
A C at best for me. After we got to the first commercial break imo the show went down big time.
“The sketch goes on too long” is a safe criticism of pretty much all SNL sketches for the last 20 years or so. “Hey, I came up with a decent joke!” “Cool, can you drag it out for 10 minutes?”
I think the joke in the case of the pine lodge bit (and I had the same sense about this sketch) was the tree lighting at the end, which was the only time I laughed. Enough with the quirky lounge-lizard sketches already.
Candice Bergen flubs a ventriloquist joke; history marches on.Look it up, kids.
Bergen is responsible for one of the best flubs in all SNL history.
And the sketch was even funnier because of the flub.
It would be completely unmemorable if Bergen hadn’t lost it. But the combination of her inability to maintain her composure and Radner’s absolutely commitment is perfect.
It is why The Carol Burnett Show was funny because they were always losing it.
I like to think she still tortures Charlie McCarthy to this day
“He always loved you more!”
Old Edgar was such a terrible ventriloquist.
A solid B? Nah. No way. I can’t go any higher than a C- and that might be kind. Complete waste of Emma Stone. Most of the writing was tepid. Overly reliant on musicals that weren’t that good or catchy. Plus the sound was off on that Naked one where I could barely hear it, not that it mattered because it was a one note joke that wasn’t funny to begin with. And wtf was that pine lodge sketch? Who wrote that garbage and how did it even make it to the stage? I’m use to random nonsense, I’m use to random nonsense involving Kenan, but usually that random nonsense is at least mildly amusing. That was just crap. It was like a bootleg AI bot malfunctioned and just started throwing out collections of words.
It seems all the songs they have done this year have had weirdly quiet audio.
I enjoyed the tortoise sketch, because they actually managed to do something original with the game show premise. Can’t believe it wasn’t mentioned in the review.
Yeah, I liked that one too. Probably the best of the night and it kicked off the night. But it was all downhill after that one
It’s gonna go downhill at some point. And fast. This show is like skiing.
I don’t think I so much as chuckled at a single joke this episode, which hardly ever happens to me.
At this point, I come to the AVC review to see how far off their grade is from my living room’s consensus view. Surpisingly great show… tepid review. Unwatchable show (as with Emma Stone tonight)… strong review.Unsuprisingly, a lot of it falls along political lines. Bad Bunny was abysmal, but he spoke Spanish in several sketches, so a D+ becomes a solid B on the basis of DE&I.The monologue portion of Weekend Update is usually pretty reliable, but you can see the moment when Che can’t quite make out a word on the cue card. He didn’t quite recover from that.Loved the Michael Longfellow bit. When he first appeared last season, I instantly thought that he had great early Chevy energy. Unfortunately, we’re living in a different era, and he may not get enough screen time to shine.
The Mama Cass sketch was great.
Seriously. I loved it.
Remember, we learned on Update last year (I guess) that Punkie truly doesn’t know the names of any movie stars, so not knowing Emma Stone from Emma Watson is on point.
There’s a weird point in the monologue (about 3:50 in the video) where Stone just stops and says “Oh no” and stops for a bit before she recovers and goes on.It’s like she forgot she was live and wanted to cut and start over.
she’s choking up lol it’s even mentioned in the article!
Kate McKinnon will return for the last ep of the year on December 16,
with musical guest Billie Eilish no doubt set to make us all weep with a
live version of “What Was I Made For?” And maybe an update of Lonely Racist Lady In The Next Building.
I’d like to see a Psycho riff where the son is now wearing a wig and dressing as his mother.
Good God that was an amazing sketch, welcome back Kate
I really need a Colleen Rafferty Alien Abduction story…
Imagine SNL being somebody’s favorite show. Even famous actresses can be boring as shit it seems.
Boy, we’re going hard with alliteration in that first paragraph, aren’t we?
People still watch this? SNL is written by coked up college kids who snicker amongst themselves over how clever they think their writing is but their blase skits only draw straight faces.
“There’s only one Jesus and he’s white!” was a funny line.As was the “Elon Musk should buy Hamas” or whatever line.The Pine Lodge band was awful. Almost painfully awful.Like three or four good sketches. I’d give it a D.
Hard disagree on that B. I felt like most of the skits fell flat. The LiveFromNewYork subreddit also seemed to agree there. Lots of very weak sketches, and Emma Stone deserved a better episode than what she got.
I am an SNL apologist for the most part, but this episode did not do it for me. Stone seemed disengaged/on autopilot for most of it and none of the humor really landed. Che in particular seemed really off during weekend update. Longfellow’s cigarette bit was kind of funny, even if he seems like a Brooks Whelan in the making (goes back to standup, occasionally pops up for talking about SNL). The posters thing seems like an odd sketch to make a recurring bit. The Mama Cass sketch seemed more like a half-baked result of throwing ideas out at 4 am the night before a script is due than anything else.I do not expect earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting comedy from SNL. Usually I am content if the episode seems like fun and the host/cast are having a good time and there are a few laughs. This episode was not that.
This was my first time hearing him, and I think Noah Kahan might be the worst lyricist in music history. His second song in particular was gobsmackingly, jaw-droppingly bad. I legitimately couldn’t believe what was coming out of his mouth. “I am terrified of weather ‘cause I see you when it rains / Doc told me to travel, but there’s COVID on the planes” should be the centerpiece of a hypothetical Bad Songwriting Hall of Fame. Truly transcendently awful.
The Emma Stone episodes are usually good ones, but I found this one hugely disappointing for the most part. Once again, Emma was game and did everything she could possibly do to help elevate the material, but I thought the writing let her down big time. The “naked on the garbage truck” pre-taped sketch and the Mama Cass one totally fell flat for me.
I was absolutely convinced for more than a few moments that Mitch Lester was being played by Sarah Sherman. That is one heck of a compliment.