Saturday Night Live season 49 premiere: Pete Davidson returns with the same old jokes
From Staten Island to BDE, the comedian hits all of his familiar beats. (Oh, and the world's biggest pop star also drops by.)
TV Reviews Saturday Night Live
The prodigal son has returned: Pete Davidson, erstwhile “Weekend Update” wunderkind/prolific seducer of Hollywood’s most famous women, is back. The Bupkis star—who, as the first cast member born in the 1990s, was relegated to being the show’s “resident young person” during his tenure—departed Saturday Night Live in May 2022 after eight seasons. Originally set to host a May 2023 episode late into season 48 (more on that later), he instead made his return for the season 49 premiere in a decidedly Gen Z episode that also featured TikTok favorite Ice Spice as the musical guest. But despite the youthful airs—including a surprise cameo from the world’s biggest pop star—the opening episode felt sadly stale.
Cold open: Acknowledging the unavoidable
“This week, we saw the horrible images and stories from Israel, and Gaza and I know what you’re thinking: Who better to comment on it than Pete Davidson?” the comedian somberly opened the show. But Davidson made a strong case for his input: He tragically lost his own father, an FDNY firefighter, to an act of terrorism in the 9/11 attacks and related his own childhood grief to the suffering that countless innocent children are currently experiencing in the Middle East. Pointing to the way the 1983 stand-up special Eddie Murphy: Delirious helped him navigate his sorrow, he promised to do what he always does in the face of tragedy: “Try to be funny…remember, I said try.” Sometimes, comedy is the only way forward through tragedy, he explained. And forward we go.
Monologue: Is this 2023 or 2013?
The tough thing about kicking off a new season of SNL is the wealth of joke-worthy material that occurred during the show’s down season, an especially lengthy one this time around as season 48 was shortened due to the writers’ strike. (Speaking of strikes, SNL was granted permission to resume during the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike because the show is not covered under the same contract that the actors’ union is striking over.) And yet, instead of trying to weave in topical beats, Davidson’s stand-up monologue tackled such of-the-moment news as…the amount of incest in Game of Thrones, a series that has been off the air for [checks calendar] four years.
Best sketch of the night
No, it wasn’t a shock seeing a Barbie-related bit given how much of a phenomenon the fuschia-hued flick was this past summer. Nor was it a surprise to see Davidson take on Ryan Gosling’s instantly iconic “I’m Just Ken” power ballad and retool it with his usual self-deprecating snark. (“I’m Just Pete, looking like a meth head on the street.”) However, that expectation didn’t make it any less enjoyable to see the comedy star gamely croon about his “butthole eyes” and bipolar disorder. Though, like the original movie musical number, the segment could’ve been trimmed a solid minute, it was worth it for the thrusting “Kenergy” dance breakdown dedicated to Davidson’s most infamous appendage.
Worst waste of a celebrity cameo
If you needed any proof that Saturday Night Live was attempting to cater to a younger demo, just count how many Taylor Swift references the writers’ room shoehorned into the premiere. (If it was a drinking game, you’d be well on your way to rigor mortis.) A Fox NFL Sunday sketch saw Mikey Day’s Howie Long, Devon Walker’s Michael Strahan, Molly Kearney’s Terry Bradshaw, and James Austin Johnson’s Jimmy Johnson’s football analysis swiftly devolve into sheer Swift Mania, with Davidson as Kenny Ditullio videoing in for a spirited rendition of “Love Story.” (He’s no Richie Jerimovich, but who is?) It all culminated in a rather lackluster appearance by the pop star’s rumored beau, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, but that wasn’t the most confounding celebrity cameo of the night: that belonged to Swift herself, who later blandly popped up to surprise-introduce Ice Spice’s performance of “Pretty Girl.”
MVP of the night: Heidi Gardner
On the whole, most of the sketches Gardner was featured in this week didn’t work: The “Glamgina” bit (“makeup for your other face”) would have fared far better as a fake commercial, and that USS Asperon space number was an absolute yawn but Gardner made good use of every minute of screentime, flinging her Secretary Trudy through a wooden office desk with a full-bodied slapstick glee that would make Chris Farley proud. Honorable mention goes to Bowen Yang and his campy Christopher Columbus, all trilled Rs and self-delusion. (According to Chris, he also “discovered” electricity, Tex-Mex, and the “sad gay songs” of boygenius.)
Stray observations
- Mentions of Staten Island (a.k.a. “the only island in the world with a worse reputation than Epstein”) in the monologue alone: five.
- Between Chris Columbus’ Hot Ones mention and that “Sean McEvans” character in the Wired Autocomplete Interview spoof, this episode seemingly comes to you by way of First We Feast.
- One of the current iteration’s most reliably funny bits is Michael Che bamboozling Colin Jost into saying racist things from the “Weekend Update” desk. This week’s “Ebony Alerts” bit was no exception.
- The season 49 cast has one fresh face: Welcome new featured player Chloe Troast!
86 Comments
Largely forgettable episode but the Kenan as Deion bit was fun, esp when he called back the “dad” joke from the Ebony Alerts. Che embarrassing Colin will always be funny.Also agree on MVP Gardner. Funny to see Yang as Columbus channeling his Santos.
They’ve run the “Colin pretends to be embarrassed” bit into the ground.
Wrong. See above: “Che embarrassing Colin will always be funny.”
Yea if you loved forced comedy
When Bowen Yang said ‘I used to work here’ in the Star Trek sketch I knew exactly where it was going, but the sketch was even more lazy and joke-free than I imagined it would be. Bowen seemed to be going through the numbers with such a terrible script, and poor Heidi Gardner was still committing to her android character like the trooper she is. The whole episode was mediocre from start to finish.(Also, I hadn’t seen Pete Davidson’s stand-up before: is it always as generic as it was in the opening monologue?)
Heidi’s costume looked so shiny and metallic. I couldn’t tell if it was a camera trick or if it just worked out like that.
noooooo please god no!!!!! no!!!
Kieran Culkin was scheduled to be the host right before the writer’s strike happened. And for some reason, I held that against Pete Davidson all last night as I sludged through the episode. Kieran would have been such a better choice.
Pete Davidson was scheduled to be the host just before the strike shut SNL down. Kieran was scheduled for the week after, so it seems fair that Pete got this spot
Wait a minute, didn’t Kiernan already host last year? He joked about his 6 yo self mugging for attention when he was on stage for the credits back in 1993.
He had hosted the season before.
Kieran has hosted before and he will probably host again. I don’t know what “better” choice matters when there are multiple weeks and years ahead available for Culkin to host. It’s not like it was a once in a lifetime event.
You’re correct – Kieran was only scheduled to host the finale before the strike. Succession had just wrapped up and he had just been submitted to the Best Actor category for the Emmys. I guess the Roman Roy fan in me was pouting and would have preferred to see him instead. Pete’s cold open was great. I give him credit for that. Separately, I also think Sarah Snook would be an excellent host. 😉
Sean Evans episode when?!This was a pretty solid first episode, I think each skit got a chuckle. I don’t need to be non-stop laughing the entire 90 mins to enjoy it.
SNL has ALWAYS been like this. I don’t know why reviewers expect anything else. Somtimes it has a good hit-to-miss ratio, sometimes less so, but that’s the name of the game.
Agree ever since the original cast left it’s been called Saturday Night Dead, etc. I loved the Hartman, Carvey, Lovitz, Hooks era, but plenty of unfunny stuff then too. Couldn’t all be Cave Man Lawyer.
If they ever ran those old episodes, they’d find out that the original cast had a lot of unfunny moments, too.
They use to run old episodes at 10pm a couple of years ago. You’d see a few episodes from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, but then they just started showing stuff from like 2016, totally defeating the purpose of the “classic SNL” hour.
Ahem…my good man. “Unfrozen” Cave Man Lawyer.Didn’t he try another Unfrozen thing? Can’t remember now, been watching since its inception, and now my brain works rather poorly.
Yes, of course!! You get a free video! Unfrozen Caveman President.
AWESOME!
49 YEARS OF LIVE TELEVISION – ABOUT 83 MINUTES OF ACTUAL COMEDY!
yeah one could make the argument there has never been a ‘good episode’ of snl in the entire history.
Seriously though, does Staten Island have like a national reputation that makes it worth endless jokes about? I am not from New York so I do not understand.
I’m from north jersey, and have tons of friends from the city. I cash count the number of times Staten Island has come up in conversation as a joke in the post 25 years on one hand, with one finger. It’s not a funny punchline, or really a place anyone ever really thinks about.
It can be funny in certain contexts, I think, maybe like where it’s just lurking in the background like it does in WWDITS. But yeah, constant overt jokes are a bit much.And I vaguely recall a Law & Order… uh… TV movie, maybe? Where Chris Noth’s character came back and he’d been exiled to Staten Island. That wasn’t supposed to be funny as such, but it did make me go oof.
lol I just mentioned the same thing about Chris Noth. Yes he was exiled to Staten Island, and the movie they made about it was literally called Exiled: A Law and Order Movie. The impression being given was that Staten Island was a giant step down.
As a former Manhattanite, I find that stuff pretty funny.
No, but probably if you’re from the place you’re the most likely to hear whatever jokes there are about it, so maybe it seems like more to the people who live there. Idk. But yeah, no.I do remember when Chris Noth’s Law and Order character got in big trouble he was banished to Staten Island, with the impression being that was a huge blow.
I remember the first show after 9/11, Lorne Michael asked Rudy Guliani in the cold open, “Is it okay to be funny?”Rudy: “Why start now?”
Remember when Giuliani was…well, he was always an asshole, but remember when he wasn’t literally a wizened, ichor-dripping hobgoblin?
Jon Oliver did a very prescient segment on his show about yes, he’s always been like this.
He was always a Nazi but now he’s Naziferatu.
Kelce’s was one of the better episodes of the last season.
It really was. I had absolutely no idea who he was (I don’t watch a lot of sports) so when I found out he was a football player I wasn’t sure what to expect (I remembered Peyton Manning did pretty well!). His was really funny and I thought he was perfectly game and charming.
The American Girl sketch had me rolling.
“The truth, honey.”“Boy alert.”“Isabelle just had her period and she thinks she’s a woman now.”
This show seemed like it was put together at the last minute and it showed. I will agree that Heidi was the MVP of the night.
The NFL segment was a bust. The Wired segment was a bust. The bar segment was a waste.
A solid D rating from me.
I didn’t get the Wired segment. Are those all real people they were pretending to be? I had never heard of any of them. Did that guy really have a poop episode on a Delta flight? I couldn’t tell what the joke was.
There was a news item a last month where a Delta flight en route to Barcelona with 336 passengers on an Airbus A350 had to turn around and go back to Atlanta because a passenger had explosive diarrhea.
I remember that. What I’m asking is who is this guy they are saying did it? Does he look like the passenger? Does he share the passenger’s name? What’s the joke? Is this a real person?
It is not certain whether the passenger who had explosive diarrhea on the Delta Airlines flight was a man or a woman. The identity of the passenger was not known.
Then yeah, I did not get the joke of this sketch at all.
“This show seemed like it was put together at the last minute”
Yes, much like EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE. EVER.
No mention of the secretary sketch? Heidi was hilarious in that one, as was James Austin Johnson in his brief bit. Far and away the funniest, weirdest, giddiest skit of the night.
It got a mention for Heidi fully committing to the physical comedy.
She was great, but the sketch itself was even more outdated than the GoT references in the monologue. Mad Men? Really?
It was mentioned. I also enjoyed Johnson’s brief part. It was perfect delivery.
The Princes of Comedy was pretty damn funny.
It was a fine episode, nothing special. C to C+ feels right. The Barbie filmed piece was the best of the night. Funnily enough, I thought Davidson was better here in sketches as a host than he ever was as an actual cast member.
One minor note but a nice little detail, the “Please Don’t Destroy” crew got a spot in the opening credits similar to how they use to do “A cartoon by Robert Smigel”. The bit itself, with the trio as children being Def Jam comedians at the Apollo, was solid. It was up there with “I’m Just Pete” for best of the night.
I was trying to figure out if they really did that as kids, or did they hired three kids that looked like them. I’m pretty sure it was the latter after Johm Mulaney showed up.
This is the first time I’ve liked a Please Don’t Destroy sketch. It had an actual premise other than bigger and bigger escalation. I almost feel like this was Pete’s idea, but I can’t believe he would come up with something so funny.
“Originally set to host a May 2022 episode late into season 48…”I think you meant May 2023.
My problem with sending up the “I’m Just Ken” thing is that it seeks to tweak a performance that was essentially satire in its original form. I hate when a sketch parodies something that is a goof to begin with…it’s like doing a “spoof” of a Weird Al Yankovich song – very pointless and a little lazy.
Somewhere out there is a parody of a Weird Al song that’s brilliant. We’re just waiting for it. It is the grail to me.
SNL has a history of doing this…
Anyone else feel Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker are not long for this show? These guys always fail to impress.
Michael needs to do a Johnny Depp sketch its the role he was born to play, then he will get his heat back.
Longfellow has been pretty solid in his Update appearances, but sketches, not so much. And yeah, Walker has been… there.
I like both of them. When Devon gets in the right character he’s really funny.
I thought Pete did a solid job. The monolog was, I’m guessing, part of his standup that he was able to polish off to get the ball rolling while minimizing the chance that he’d be emotional after what he said in the open.
Agreed – that was a tough opening to manage on his own.
Everything in the monologue is from his current routine that I saw last month as part of the Jon, John, & Pete tour.
So is he joking about incest or not because that seems to have gone pretty dark.
No, you got it. It was a dark joke.Like most dark jokes, there’s an interesting question there at the root: how did American society as a whole go crazy for this TV show full of sibling- and cousin-fucking?The vast majority of comics aren’t just going dark for the hell of it.
I’m not remotely surprised that this country lost its sh*t over that garbage. Patiently waiting for the asteroid.
Counterpoint: life is good, and you’ve got people you care for (and vice versa!) who would be severely inconvenienced by an asteroid.
Years ago, I took a class in college that followed history through the lens of music (i.e. interpreting movements and genres in terms of the context of their surroundings) from the 50s up through Bieber. It was really fascinating, and a lot of music I’d previously spurned (“rap is crap,” rings the eternal cry of the awkward midwestern boy) turned out to be rich, beautiful, existing in conversation with so many more influences and events than I could ever have previously understood.At the end, the guy teaching the class asked us to never stop listening to the new music coming out (even though studies show that music preferences crystallize in a fairly permanent way in the teen years) because when you stop listening to and valuing people’s music as music, it’s a short step to no longer listening to them and valuing those people as people.I think there’s a similar argument to be made for pop culture more broadly. I don’t think it makes sense to condemn an audience due to disapproving of a show’s content. Ultimately, GoT was about a family, separated, in a fantasy world that didn’t shoehorn in happy endings and often shoehorned in bad ones instead. I think what drew people in was the hope against all evidence that things would turn out well for these characters (even though, painfully, their happiness was often mutually exclusive.) When something did, it meant more, because it was happening in a setting like ours where that was never guaranteed. It felt earned. (This is before the last few seasons got bad…)
The incest was never anything more than exotic window dressing. I mean, he just took it from Ptolemys. It’s weird in the history books, too.
Yep, he was. Honestly, only someone like Louis CK could have pulled that off in a monologue, but it truly fell flat for Pete.
i know i’m an old but…the fuck with that “singer?” her main talent seemed to be posing & shaking her ass. now, don’t get me wrong, those are fine talents…but she’s no singer.
“Davidson’s most infamous appendage.” makes it sound as if he has a number of infamous appendages.
They really need to work his vestigial tail into more skits.
Well he does upload a few hundred foot pics an hour…and now he makes, six-, seven-figures a month.
‘If you needed any proof that Saturday Night Live was attempting to cater to a younger demo, just count how many Taylor Swift references the writers’ room shoehorned in’oh so that’s why there are 2 swift articles every day on this site.
lol Burn.
“with a full-bodied slapstick glee that would make Chris Farley* proud”*Molly Shannon.Also, yes, I love the racist Colin Jost bits. Hearing Che gleefully giggling in the background always cracks me up.I have a question about the SAG strike. That’s still ongoing, so I’m curious as to how he was able to promote Bupkis on this show? Does it not count as promotion if it’s a comedy sketch?
More SNL sniffing their own farts as they try to be “important” on actual real-life issues. Nobody gives a shit, just do some funny shit already.
Dude was never funny.
I’m more convinced than ever that Davidson has some dirt on Lorne Michales. It’s the only reason why he’d ever be on the show. Painfully unfunny, and I’m sick of the Staton Island/my dad died on 9/11 crap.
“I’m sick of the Staton Island/my dad died on 9/11 crap.”
Ohhhh, poor baby!
Sorry about your dad…
I’m confused — I know the writers are back at work, but is the SNL cast not SAG/AFTRA? Or is Lorne Michaels’ production company not AMPTP?
SAG-AFTRA members appearing on Saturday Night Live either as hosts, guests, or cast members are working under the Network Code agreement, which is not a contract SAG-AFTRA is striking. They are not in violation of SAG-AFTRA strike rules, and SAG-AFTRA supports them in fulfilling their contractual obligations.The program is a SAG-AFTRA non-dramatic production under a separate agreement that is not subject to the union’s strike order.The majority of SAG-AFTRA members who are regular cast on Saturday Night Live had contractual obligations to the show prior to the strike. Many are under option agreements that require them to return to the show if the producers exercise their option which the producers have done.SAG-AFTRA members are also subject to a “No Strike Clause” in the Network Code Collective Bargaining Agreement. This means SAG-AFTRA performers agree not to strike during the term of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and to show up to work during this term (the Network Code runs through June 30, 2024).
Got it, so SNL doesn’t fall under AMPTP.
SAG-AFTRA is a merger of two separate unions: Screen Actors Guild for film and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for television and radio. The National Code of Fair Practice for Network Television Broadcasting, also known as the Network Television Code is essentially an old AFTRA collective bargaining agreement that covers many shows that have live studio audiences (like game shows, award shows, variety shows, sports, etc.), as well as promos, talk shows, morning news shows, reality, and soap operas. Saturday Night Live as a variety show with a live studio audience is under the Network Television Code collective bargaining agreement. SAG-AFTRA members ratified this collective bargaining agreement on July 8, 2022.
It wasn’t always this way, but the news segment is the most reliably funny part of the show.