Saturday Night Live recap: Kristen Wiig gets a starry induction into the Five-Timers Club
The SNL alum returns to Studio 8H for a predictably great episode
TV Reviews Kristen Wiig
Just a few months after our most recent inductee into the Five-Timers Club—that would be Emma Stone, who hit her fifth hosting gig this past December—we saw another 30 Rock regular receive one of those coveted smoking jackets on this week’s edition of Saturday Night Live: that would be SNL legend Kristen Wiig, who joins fellow former cast members like Chevy Chase, Tina Fey, and Will Ferrell in the elite group
Wiig, who was a daffy and dominant force during her seven-year tenure on the sketch comedy series from 2005 to 2012, is making the promo rounds for her new Apple TV+ series Palm Royale. And while diehard fans might be disappointed not to see the return of the comedienne’s most famous original characters—spoiler alert: there’s no Gilly, Dooneese or Target Lady to be found—Wiig leveraged both her own comic genius and plenty of her famous pals to put on one of the best installments of the season.
Opening monologue: Five time’s a charm
After a very skippable March Madness cold open—it felt like such a missed opportunity to not have Sarah Sherman pop in for a Caitlin Clark cameo—Wiig’s opening monologue livened things up with Hollywood cameos galore. Fellow SNL greats like Will Forte, Fred Armisen and Martin Short returned to Studio 8H to honor this week’s host, as did actual Five Timer Paul Rudd.
But then some decidedly non-Five Timers Club members like Girls5Eva’s Paul Pell, Matt Damon, Jon Hamm and Ryan Gosling showed up to jokingly downplay the jacket’s significant (“They pretty much hand those out to everybody like free maxi pads!”) before sweetly serenading Kristen.
Lorne & Co. clearly have a soft spot for Wiig—her “She’s a Rainbow”-soundtracked farewell episode was one of the most moving editions of the decades-spanning franchise—and her Five Timers Club induction was no exception. (Speaking of Lorne’s favorites, loved seeing that Martin Short can still break him.)
The best drinking game of the night:
If you took a drink every time the word “Jumanji” was uttered last night, you’d very much be unalive right now. In this silly sketch, Wiig plays a woman meeting her boyfriend’s buddies (Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Chloe Fineman, Andrew Dismukes) during a casual house hang.
However, things take a turn when one of them suggests breaking out a boardgame, which Wiig’s character refuses to play because she’s afraid of getting “Jumanji’d.” Why? Because “Jumanji is a series of jungle emergencies,” of course. The comedy continues to crank up the more furiously Wiig and Dismukes debate the details of the 1995 Robin Williams-led children’s movie. (“The kids don’t go into Jumanji, the Jumanji comes out of Jumaji!”) Good stuff.
The best satire of the night:
“From the creator of Saw X and the marketing director of Alo comes a chilling new look at girl horror,” begins this sharply written movie trailer for the horror film Pilates, which features Chloe Fineman and Molly Kearney attending a Pilates class for the first time.
Anyone who has been menacingly called “Mama!” while entering a yoga-studio torture chamber of foot straps, hand straps and “one pound” dumbbells knows exactly what chills and thrills lie ahead. Namely, “eight gorgeous women, one gay man not wearing underwear and, sometimes, Kaia Gerber.”
The best character break of the night:
Hooray for Heidi Gardner! She officially has a recurring character in Trudy, the uber-dedicated secretary the performer debuted back in the Pete Davidson-hosted season 49 premiere. This time around, Trudy has company in Tootie (Wiig), the second secretary of a Don Draper-esque boss (played, naturally, by Jon Hamm) who is equally eager but ineffectual. (Yes, she picked up her boss’s baby daughter, but may be housing said infant in a fine-cabinet drawer.)
Garner and Wiig ham it up with the physical comedy here, jostling around a cocktail shaker between their chests and flailing about in their undergarments, but the skit gets good when it goes wrong: when Wiig as Trudy struggles to fling herself through the office desk, requiring the comic to hysterically attempt a take two. And any remaining composure the actors had is entirely tossed aside when Gardner fail-flops through a breakaway wall.
The best (and only) return of a Wiig classic:
As mentioned, Wiig didn’t utilize her Rolodex of recurring characters much during her fifth hosting gig, but we did see get a characteristically eyeroll-heavy “Weekend Update” cameo from Aunt Linda, that perpetually cranky Karen of a film critic. A lot has changed in the 14 years since Linda last paid us a visit: she’s divorced, for one, and the “Update” seats are occupied by entirely new people, not that she’s noticed. (To Colin Jost: “Well, hello Seth! Someone’s gotten some work done.”)
Aunt Linda has finally caught up on the biggest movies of last year and she has thoughts. She wasn’t the biggest fan of Oppenheimer (“directed by Christopher No-Thanks!”) and she didn’t take to America Ferrara’s feminist-101 monologue in Barbie (“I love wearing a bra!”). But even grumpy Linda couldn’t deny the infectious charm of Ryan Gosling (“He’s very hard to make fun of”), nor the power of the Paw Patrol movie. (“Dogs saving the world in uniforms? Here’s my alley and this movie went straight up it!)
Stray observations
- Though delightful, the Gosling cameo last night wasn’t entirely a shock: Ryan is imbuing Studio 8H with his Kenergy as SNL host next week, April 13, to promote his new action-comedy The Fall Guy. He’ll be joined by country crooner Chris Stapleton as musical guest.
- What do you think of the Five Timers Club? Does it still host the same panache as in the past or is the frequency dulling the prestige?
44 Comments
Can’t believe Short isn’t a 5-timer.
Same with Hamm.
It’s Paula, not Paul. It’s file cabinet, not fine cabinet. Other than that, great review.
Whaaa?
Two typos, one review, b/c AV Club.
What’s wrong with the cabinet that it isn’t fine? You an expert on the current condition of that cabinet?
My Masters in Current Cabinetry Events is what makes me an expert. 200k in student loans, but all worth it to flex here.
And significance, not significant. I wasn’t going to mention it, but since we’re doing this I’m gonna. And I still don’t love the fact that the reviews don’t review all the sketches.
Bonus points for catching that one. Yeah, seems like reviewing all the sketches would be part of the gig, but oh well.
And the musical guest, who seldom gets so much as a name-drop.
For real, especially since I thought Raye slayed.
I’d heard her name but not her music, and was duly impressed.
Gotta say it was a great call NOT to bring back those characters that I think many of us long-timers are still pretty sick of (though it was a smart call of Target to throw an ad in last night) as I was genuinely dreading the return of most of them. The movie-reviewing Aunt was just enough. I found the opening funnier than most of the cold opens (granted, not saying a lot)—making up the Men’s college names was funny and accurate, as the women’s tournament has had a lot more drama the past couple of weeks.Jumanji shouldn’t have worked and didn’t seem like it was going to, but the cast delivery over the semantics of what being “Jumanji’d” really means had me laughing pretty hard.Honestly the whole show was pretty great and a better ‘solid 90′ than most episodes have been, and the French variety show towards the end was one of the better 12:55 sketches in a long while. The individual characters were on just long enough to be funny without getting into ‘okay, we get it’ territory. “Oui” and “NO!” and the ‘mime standing too close to the camera’ are ideas that SNL will wear out in one sketch, so that was some nice restraint on the writers part.Also, nice visual gag for the ‘sign off’ with everyone on stage wearing a “5-timer” club—SNL isn’t usually that subtle.
“Don’t make me sing.”
Did anyone else think they were going to do a Californians sketch when Fred Armisen appeared during the Monologue? Seemed like a gimme with Hamm, Gosling, Rudd and Short already there.
When is the last time they did The Californians? I feel like there’s always people, myself included, thinking the same thing you did whenever Armisen pops up
I was hoping for a Lawrence Welk show sketch. They had all the right cast members.
It wouldn’t work without Bill Hader on their side.
Useless fact! YouTube served me up Wiig guesting on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, and she says that Aunt Linda was based on someone she saw on an airplane who watched The Matrix and kept making “Whaaaa?” sounds.
I hope this is true as that is a great story–every family has one, don’t they?
My Mom isn’t that way with most movies but it been two decades and she still thinks she doesn’t understand the Matrix. The irony is the first time she watched it she turned to me and said “I don’t get it, is he suppose to be cyber Jesus or something”. Which of course meant she got it better then most people I know who saw it.
Jumanji’d started slow, but then it turned into how talking about boardgame rules always go. And I laughed a lot.
Yup. They pulled off a good idea with a solid landing this time.
I like how Gizmodo still has “You Might Like” links to AVC articles.
They broke up, but they’re still good friends
Sites with benefits
So does that mean the merger with Paste wasn’t an April Fool’s gag? I mean, I always go there to read Dennis’s reviews of SNL bef0re coming here, but I looked at the date and thought “riiiight.”
The escalation of the Jumanji sketch was hilarious. It started out really tame like your typical SNL groaner but I got some good laughs in by the time Dismukes and Wiig were really going at it.
Dismukes was especially spectacular here. I got a real I Think You Should Leave vibe from this escalating nonsense.
Agreed. SNL has a tendency to take a decent concept and then run it into the ground with no actual ending. This time, they did it right with a build-up and proper payoff.
I did get distracted, however, by Wiig’s obvious reading of the cue cards during the sketch rather than looking at the other actors.
It’s been a long time since anything truly memorable for me came from SNL, but I imagine “Jumanji is a series of jungle emergencies” to be one of those things that sticks around
“there’s no Gilly”Ohhhh nooooo. Whatever will we doooo? 😐(Gilly is the most unfunny character in like the last 20 years and I’m glad she’s gone. I don’t know if this is a hot take but welp that’s my opinion)
Sorry . . .
Never noticed how alike some of Wiig’s and Gartners characters are. And shouldn’t that be WHAAATS?
Yes, it definitely should be, but that’s kind of a losing battle. It seems to have become convention to simply repeat the last letter of a word, whether it’s a consonant or a vowel or the letter which is being elongated or not.
‘# Timer’ sketches are always a snooze to me but this one was better than most. My favourite part was of course Jumanji, which wasn’t executed perfectly but it was clear that everyone was having fun with a concept that somehow crosses all generational lines to an absurd degree. Altogether a very strong episode!
Two of the most odious tendencies for SNL:Musical number…checkRidiculous over-reliance on cameos…check
I am surprised at the high rating. I mean, if we are grading on a curve for this season, sure, but I thought the sketches were a shade below B (I chuckled at the Jumnajii and secretary sketches, and was bemused by the rest). The writing is just awful this season – get someone new in there to spice things up.
First I’ve been impressed by a musical guest in a while; why take time to mention the dullnessfest of last week’s, and say nothing about Raye (who I expected not to be impressed by at all, expecting just another single-named “mere” singer, not to be blown away like I was).
Great episode, by SNL standards. No mention of the brilliant musical performances by Raye? She was awesome.
I think the show itself was acknowledging that the five-timer thing isn’t really much of a big deal anymore. When you have actors in their 30s who are already on for the fifth time it kind of loses its impact as a milestone.
Thoughts from an internet rando who saw this a week late:1. The Jumanji sketch ended up being pretty good. Dismukes in particular getting intense about whether things go in or out of Jumanji was good.2. The Five Timers club thing started as a funny joke, got beat to death, but as come around as fine now that it’s clear everyone is in on the corniness of it. So I am fine with the bit.3. Saved the HOTTEST TAEK for last: I do not, for the life of me, understand the absolute adulation Wiig gets from SNL. I think her time on SNL was marked by largely unfunny characters in an especially tough period for the show. She never elevated a sketch, nor are any of hers especially memorable. Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Kate McKinnon and Vanessa Bayer were all funnier than Wiig and on the show at the same time. I thought Wiig was great in Bridesmaids and I am one of the few people who thought Ghostbusters 2016 was perfectly okay and thought she did well in that. So I don’t dislike Wiig. And IIRC she was the only female main cast member for a spell. But the amount of love she gets from SNL, you would think she was on the same level as Gilda Radner or Jan Hooks or Tina Faye. And I just don’t understand it.
She reminds Lorne of Gilda, and I think he still feels some guilt about how poorly Gilda’s post-SNL career went, as well as sadness over her untimely death. She’s his favorite, and gets treated as such.
Honestly, this is the best explanation I have seen.