Saturday Night Live struggles to find a punchline or point this week
Pedro Pascal is a willing and winning host, but dull sketches fail to meet him halfway
TV Reviews Saturday Night Live
After Aubrey Plaza, the booking agent of Saturday Night Live might be building an HBO-to-SNL pipeline with this week’s first-time host Pedro Pascal. A timely selection, Pascal has become an increasingly known household name after decades of somewhat anonymously guest starring on serial television. A star on the rise, Pascal has an impressive resume of big-budget prestige television work like Game of Thrones, Narcos, The Mandalorian, and most recently, The Last of Us. The show made great use of his versatility with him portraying a hot teacher, recovering coma patient, critical mother, and flirtatious waiter among others. An eager and enthusiastic host, his talent and charisma were squandered on a slew of unfocused and middlebrow sketches.
Best sketch of the night
Similar to “The Black Lotus,” SNL excels at spoofs of contemporary entertainment as with this week’s “Mario Kart Trailer.” The mix of the committed dramatic performances by Pascal and the cast with HBO dystopian house style creates an entirely believable world. It’s a stupid concept, but one you can definitely imagine going into development. The design and post-production teams continue to impress by putting together such professional packages in such a constrained time frame. They certainly deserve to form their union. It’s hard to pick a favorite part. The best part might be Pascal’s serious delivery in Mario’s cadence or the perfect casting of Chloe Fineman as Princess Peach, but it’s probably the tortoiseshell bullets.
Worst sketch of the night
It was difficult to narrow down just a single worst sketch of the week. It wasn’t that the sketches were particularly awful, but rather they collectively felt pointless. I’ve landed on one that felt tailor-made for me. “The Big Hollywood Quiz” promised a hilarious dive into popular culture and film history. For perhaps the first time in an SNL game show, the contestants were oddly qualified and knowledgeable about the subject matter. However, when questions shifted to the most recent films and television programs the contestants were bewildered. The joke is that the contemporary media landscape is littered with so much content that nothing connects. While the observation is accurate, it’s also not very funny.
Swiftest sketch of the night
Cold opens often focus on current events, but tonight’s has to be one of SNL’s quickest turnarounds. After a few days of politicians and news programs obsessing over a Chinese balloon drifting across the United States. Essentially hot air and latex became the hot-button issue of national security and a potential catalyst for a new cold war. It is one of those real-life events that is so ridiculous it’s easy to imagine it as an unused storyline from Veep. Kenan Thompson’s character perfectly captured the gravity and frivolity of the situation complete with a birthday balloon prop. The peak of the sketch was Bowen Yang’s appearance as the balloon, which proves his preternatural ability to give life to inanimate objects (like his iceberg a year ago).
Derailed sketch of the night
Framing a sketch around Pascal as a hot teacher in an assembly full of Gen Z students was a good concept. The generational clash and linguistic misunderstandings were ripe for comedy. However, as soon as the sketch was about to get really interesting it took a crowd-pleasing twist. Proposing that the Gen Z vernacular might be the result of stunted developmental issues resulting from the pandemic was a twisted take that should have gone further. Instead, the sketch swerved into a cameo by Pascal’s longtime friend Sarah Paulson, which thrilled the crowd, but derailed the sketch.
MVP of the night: Ego Nwodim
Bowen Yang seemed like a shoe-in for the title this week since he appeared in nearly every sketch. However, a final performance by Ego Nwodim changed everything. Looking past reusing the same exact set for two consecutive sketches, Nwodim’s titular role in “Lisa from Temecula,” was probably the funniest part of the episode and the rest of the cast would agree. Nwodim had everyone in the scene breaking character in response to her delivery and physical comedy. It was Nwodim’s knack for portraying aggressively confident, exceedingly delusional, and perpetually suspicious characters combined with the visual gag of the shaking table that made for the night’s funniest moment. The deadpan reading of “oh, cause we black” resulting in Yang losing it should earn Nwodim an Emmy nomination this year.
Stray observations
- They should invite Sarah Paulson to host.
- Did everyone else notice the two shaky camera moments?
- I’m almost certain I’ve heard ‘a condom in Nick Cannon’s wallet’ joke somewhere else this week, but can’t remember where.
- Ego should get to do more character work. “Lisa from Temecula” could be a recurring character like Debbie Downer.
- Reusing a set back-to-back. I wonder if SNL is going through budget cuts.
147 Comments
Pascal Goes BASIC For SNL
I give this pun comment a C…ehhhh C+ 🙂
But not a C++, ANathanofFillions?Why do you hate America?
You gotta catch me before I get my morning Java to get a pun that bad past me
Compiler jokes always make me LALR
Punsters assembler!
You guys should write for SNL; I’m sure you’d make a fortran!
Oh no… did he show his python?
They did a pretty decent job COBOLLING those sketches together.
I laughed 404 times at this.
“You can dodge it!” “No… its red.” Funniest thing I’ve seen from SNL in a while. I’d actually watch this absurd hardcore Mario Kart. Also Pedro Pascal, I’ll take him over Chris Pratt any day.
“It’s a me… Mario…”
I didn’t recognize Sarah Paulson.I knew she looked really familiar, but I couldn’t place her, and I’ve seen every season of American Horror Story.
she was great when she really broke on the scene in “Down With Love”
The CGI in the Mario thing was fucking awesome…did they just take the stuff from the trailer and change it? I’m not sure if Lisa Temecula was helped by all the breaking or hurt by it, but at least the people breaking were IN THE SKETCH as opposed to Jimmy Fallon nearly ruining cowbell when he only had a few lines and should have been kept far away from it. This ep was kind of mid, but not terrible. Some of the sketch endings were terrible, as usual. The spy balloon was great, obvi. I feel terrible for Pascal that his musical guest was Coldplay. God imagine coming to host and they’re like “your musical guest is Justin Bieber and you have to celebrate his entire catalog.”
I also wonder if they switched out one of the white boy players for Devon Walker’s manager to make the “’cause we black” line funnier. If so, kudos, because Bowen completely lost it.
The episode had rizz
“Published yesterday”Then where was it until about 20 minutes ago?
What is Kyle Mooney doing these days? Could they have not enticed him back to the show to play Baby Yoda to Pascal’s Mandalorian? What a missed opportunity.
I know people really like the Mario sketch but the reason you can “imagine [it] going into development” is because it went into development. There was a weird, dystopian Mario movie and it was much stranger than anything in the sketch, so that made the sketch kind of a miss for me.
The real shame is that Bob Hoskins could have been a fantastic Mario, if he was actually playing Mario.
I got the joke before they said the joke, which didn’t make me look forward to watching the rest of the sketch.
Yeah, that was my reaction. This joke already literally happened 30 years ago. I guess their options were limited, seeing as how they’ve already done live-action Sonic and Pokemon, and there aren’t really any other kid-oriented video game franchises with the same level of cultural reach. Kirby? Pac-Man?
this was based on mario kart it’s a completely different IP 😉
See now, they’re as different as night….and later that night
YEAH! Why enjoy that joke when we can pretend that the 90s Super Mario movie was just like the fucking last of us.
God, get a fucking life!
How do you do a review (btw, did I miss the grade somewhere in there?) and not include the actual best sketch of the night; Wing Pit.
Wing Pit was hilarious, best filmed piece SNL has done in a long time. Not just my lowly opinion either, it actually trended on the rotting corpse of Twitter last night. When is the last time a sketch trended? Yeah, thought so. It was great.
The Mario Kart film piece was solid as well. Most of the sketches were decent but someone is gonna need to explain that Sarah Paulson is Mommy and Pedro Pascal is Daddy thing to me. It feels like one of those times where I realize I’m getting old and this is just some trend the whippersnappers are doing.I’d grade the episode a solid B, led by the strength of the two filmed pieces. Pascal was great in his role as host. He had a couple line flubs because he was hiding some laughter, but he’s got so much charm that you just laughed along with him.
I kinda wanted to order from Wing Pit
Hard to pass up a kiddie pool of ranch dressing
Reminds me of the hotel with biscuits and gravy hot tub
Agreed. Needs to go right alongside “Wake Up and Smile” as one of the best escalation sketches they’ve ever done. Shocked that it didn’t even get a mention.
or Totino’s
Lol that was good.
I’m pretty sure Trae doesn’t watch the whole show before reviewing.
Because then you couldn’t clickbait the shit out of this through contrarianism.
Wing Pit and Mario Kart easily best of the night, among the best in recent SNL and probably will be the peak of the season.
I liked Wing Pit, though it sure reminded me a lot of Taco Town with a little extra violence.
Yeah, I got strong Taco Town (crossed with Totino’s) vibes from this skit, and I approve mightily.
I couldn’t stop laughing through the sketch, which is a very unusual response watching, you know, Saturday Night Live. The Mario Kart sketch was fine. They did a similar thing with the Oscar The Grouch sketch a few years ago. Once you take a beloved children’s entertainment and turn it dark, it can lose its luster if repeated too many times. Though I haven’t ever played the video game so I probably couldn’t appreciate well they riffed on it.
Sarah Paulson looking like Kari Lake these days? Nice random cameo if you didn’t know Pascal and her are good friends apparently. She should definitely host. I’d give the episode a B too.
The Wing Pit was great, went totally overboard
I couldn’t have said it better.
Trae comments about SNL using the same set for two skits and wonders if the show is having budget problems. I think they probably spent a lot of money on the Mario Kart sketch and even more on the thousands of wings they bought for the Wing Pit bit. I even noticed the had a big ‘ol plate of wings on the kitchen counter in a later bit. Did they hand out barrels of wings at the after party?
Absolutely, that was up there with “Colon Blow” as far as I’m concerned. Amazed it didn’t rate a single mention in the review
Yep. A comment thread on years of SNL reviews here is they often have a great premise that they either don’t do enough with, or just cannot fill the time they are alotted, and “Wing Pit” manages to escalate perfectly and not overstay its welcome (I think while funny throughout, the “Mario Kart” sketch wasn’t as successful.) You know it’s going to start piling comical amounts of wings, but the swerve to “we own the cops” and the chicken god kept it light throughout.
Ha, I tried to lookup the Pedro Pascal fancams thing. The most referenced example was this TikTok creator, who has been making similar videos (the kids call them “edits”) for a while now.https://www.tiktok.com/@dvcree?lang=en
Ah, got ya. I figured it must have been based on some kind of real thing. So what’s the point of calling them Mommy or Daddy? They just think they look like cool parents or something?
The joke was that the kids have glommed onto the teachers as parent figures because covid messed them up, but also because they’re hot and older.
The whole escalation of the sketch was hilarious, but really I’m still laughing at “five ethnically troubling sauces”
I live in Temecula. What a random city to reference.
It would have been cute if they ended the hospital sketch with The Californians logo.
I kept waiting for a joke about the bullshit spiked shell in Mario Kart.
man i dunno if i’m particularly in a good mood every time i’ve watched an episode or something but i think this has been a really solid season. i laughed a ton at this episode and thought they had some great premises that were executed really well.maybe i’m just thankful i don’t have to sit through another pete davidson music video ever again.
Yeah, I agree with this. I mean not every episode has been great and I didn’t personally enjoy this one as much as most this season, but even here most sketches drew a chuckle from me.I think this review is leaning on this general thing that you always have to be disappointed with SNL because it wasn’t as great as it was. Note, I’m not saying that people should like it, but rather that there is at times this laziness in the critique. However, having written that, I will also admit the age old truth that comedy is so subjective.
i think it’s way better than it was a few years ago.
I wouldn’t say its been a solid season. The first couple of months were dreadful. But the last 4 to 5 episodes have all been solidly entertaining
I think it took them a bit to figure out what to do with a Kate-less cast and they’re slowly figuring it out
at the same time i don’t think kate or any of the legacy acts (keenan excluded) were doing particularly good work by the end there.
I think they were leaning really hard on Kate towards the end of her run. “Eh, it doesn’t matter if the sketch is sub-par, just let Kate do her Kate thing and it’ll be fine.” Without that crutch they’ve been forced to adapt, which is ultimately a good thing.
haha, well fair enough, but by my metric ‘first couple of months were dreadful, but the last 4-5 episodes have been solidly entertaining’ IS a solid snl season.
I 💯 agree!!! I laughed at so many sketches this week, and usually I’m lucky to laugh at one. Also I really liked the game show this week – it had me laughing the whole time. It’s funny because it’s true: the tv/film fare has gotten so obscurantist lately and it’s not really that good. I’m not sure all the reasons for it, but I’m glad SNL called it out and skewered it.
I laughed out loud several times (which I rarely do watching TV these days) and thought the only lame sketch was the one where they insulted the one woman at the restaurant. The charm of the host really helps, and I love me some Pedro Pascal. I also love me some Michael B. Jordan, so I thought last week’s show was great, too. I’d give this week’s show an A-.
I want to see Mario Kart…
Wow was that Hollywood game show sketch brutal. It felt particularly tone-deaf picking on Andrea Riseborough and the one female-directed film nominated for Best Picture this year. Yikes.
Are you sure she is she butt of that joke? I feel like the implication is the viewers are choosing garbage and ignoring women in media.
Who watches SNL? Losers who say yikes. Thanks for giving me an easy way to answer the SNL question in the future.
Surely it says more about the marketing/consumer appetite for those films, right? It’s not SNL’s fault no one’s heard of them.
I wish this show would ditch some of the current recurring sketch ideas. There’s always a Jeopardy style game show bit, which is odd since besides Jeopardy who even does game shows anymore? There’s the “hanging out at someone’s house” bit, which usually involves either some eccentric guest, or someone meeting the eccentric parent of their date, followed by “group of friends having dinner, hilariousness ensues”. It’s all so incredibly stale.
Game show sketches are easy to write and stage. The thing is, if done right, they can be some of the funniest things. Look at either classic Jeopardy or the Black Jeopardy sketches. But they can also just come off as very lazy, like last night
Some game shows have been really, really funny, and it’s also a chance for them to slip in some really off-the-wall stuff. I look forward to them.
“What’s My Name?” is still my favorite. Bill Hader made his game show hosts sadistic and I absolutely loved it.
I say the same thing whenever this kind of complaint comes up, it’s a weekly hour and a half live sketch comedy TV show. The very premise of the thing is insane. So, yeah, they’re going to have some sketch comedy crutches, like a game show sketch, or a commercial parody sketch, or a talk-show sketch, or a “crazy guest” sketch. Because it’s freakin’ absurd to expect any group of writers to come up with 10-15 completely original, never-been-done-before sketches that can be staged and produced in ONE week, every week.And just because:
A solid gold, all-time classic.
“…besides Jeopardy who even does game shows anymore?”Have you watched network primetime TV lately? Currently there are nighttime versions of Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Password, The Price is Right, Name That Tune and Lingo. Not long ago, former SNL cast member Leslie Jones was hosting a primetime Supermarket Sweep.
1. Chinese balloon cold open: Topical, tight; genuine laughs.2. Pedro Pascal monologue: Good one-liners. Appealing low-key delivery. Nice of his mom to let him borrow her blouse.3. Big Hollywood Quiz: Another game show? But it worked, first because of Bowen Yang, then because of the premise and writing.4. HBO’s MarioKart: Great production values and the just-on-the-far-side-of-plausible premise made it work.5. Post-Coma: C+. Slight but funny, enough to make the cast almost break.6. High School Tech Assembly: One of those sketches where its premise and intent are clear, but so thin that you’re left with, “Okay…I guess?”7. Wing Pit commercial: A funny paean to wretched excess that drove “turns/elevation” through the roof.8. Musical guest Coldplay: “‘Too Much Birthday,’ starring Coldplay,” says Jill, nailing it. And they should look out for copyright-infringement litigation for appropriating Warner Bros’ Marvin The Martian…or maybe they licensed him. Good for Coldplay getting this much mileage out of the same one-chord song they’ve been recording and performing for 25 years.9. Weekend Update: Subpar accent work hampered the British rappers desk piece, which wasn’t that good to begin with. The rest of WU was good, as usual.10. Overprotective Mother: Excellent deployment of Spanglish, as well as Pascal’s and Hernandez‘s performances.11. Angelino’s: Reasonable premise, good performances, but stuck for an ending, so went with an unnecessary tacked-on button.12. Coldplay II: For the second time this year, a pasty Brit is accompanied by a choir. And for the second time this year, I kept wishing the pasty Brit would leave so we could just enjoy the choir’s work. Also, thanks to Jill, I couldn’t look at Chris Martin without seeing Kendall Roy. Another one-chord drone indistinguishable from their entire recorded catalogue, this one 18 years old.13. Tough Steak: Two restaurant sketches back to back? Saves on sets and set-changes, I guess. At least the cast thought it was funny, even if it wasn’t.
(It’s “shoo-in,” not “shoe-in,” which isn’t anything.)
Nice to see AVC fixed the issue of this url going to a 404.
What was happening?
There was this issue. The url was going to a 404. AV Club fixed it. It was nice to see.
There would be an error code in the middle of the screen, which a message underneath saying no series matched that titleid.
This article posted around 130am Central Time but led to a 404 error page. Did the author hit the wrong button?
Did anyone notice that the fancam assembly sketch used the song “Big Boy Season” from the Keke Palmer episode? I think the joke with that sketch was that it actually is a tiktok trend to make fanvids of Pedro and call him Daddy, and Sarah and call her mommy. But if you don’t get the reference the whole sketch is pointless.
That Hollywood quiz show sketch was odd as with the other sketches I thought they had a workable premise, even if they didn’t always connect with me personally. There, though, it seemed to be poking fun at something in this utterly baffling manner.Like even the indication that the entertainment for USA Today, which is a mainstream publication, would have difficulties answering of those questions just makes it impossible to connect with anything else happening. Like I think there is a generally smart commentary to make about the growing disconnect between different observers of the industry because of the drastic changes, but it doesn’t seem to know how to make any point. As a result, it’s just weird and not in an endearing way like a lot of the other sketches.
The Hollywood Quiz sketch had an idea with no idea how to execute it or a good sense of what they actually wanted to say with that idea. You can see the seeds of the idea in who they chose the contestants to be—a film studies professor, an entertainment writer for a print publication, and a podcaster. There is something there with talking about how different commentators latch onto (and get left behind by) different parts of the culture. But the sketch doesn’t do anything with it. I don’t know exactly how you make it work—maybe have the podcaster that they scoffed at school them in contemporary pop culture? Although I don’t see how that’s inherently funny or incisive commentary. It’s just such an aimless sketch, it really felt like a waste of time.
The Hollywood Quiz sketch worked great for me, mostly because I was equally as clueless as the contestants when it came to anything remotely recent, including bona fide movie stars in critically acclaimed movies I’ve never heard of. If you actually know that stuff, it loses that spark of recognition. (Could I come up with three movies from the 2020s? With enough time . . . but I’d rattle off about fifteen shows, first) but just the recognition that I’m in the same boat as Ego with Andrea Riseborough. (Career?) was enough to get me.
I thought it was weird that they’d have Sarah Paulson on the show in the same episode where they made a Women Talking joke……then I IMDB’d, and found out she wasn’t actually in the movie. Don’t really know why I thought she was (other than Sarah Polley being the director), but it’s a Berenstain Bears -esque mental mix-up.
The sketch was a good observation and definitely something that is true but it needed to be developed a bit more. It was still had some funny bits to it. The bit where they new all those movies from 1988 but none over the last five years was funny. Also kind of true
I’m really confused by all of the negative reactions to this sketch. I thought it was the best live sketch of the night by a significant margin. Maybe it’s because I’m a long time, rather vocal “there’s way too much TV now” person but I thought it was excellent—if not fully examined—commentary on the absolute content overload in the Prestige Drama era. I kept thinking about a moment I had a few years ago in which a co-worker kept raving about some show I’d never heard of, only to find out it was on fucking WGN America, which I only then discovered 1) still existed, and 2) had any original programming. It’s just funny to see what people latch on to and what goes completely under peoples’ radars in this era, now that it’s actually impossible to keep up with it all. I wonder if some of these negative reactions are from people too young to have really experienced TV in the Before Times, when the amount of content on TV was actively limited by the number of hours in a day and days in a year (and the number of networks cable companies were actually willing to carry), and it was conceivable for a single person to keep up with most of it. And before every network decided they had to become HBO Lite.
My brother in Christ, are you ok?This was a much better episode than you are describing.
Right is… Trae (who?) high or something? Best episode in ages.
My brother in Christ
Can this die off, please? It’s all over the goddamn place, with people acting like they’re witty for repeating it. (not even related to my attitude toward religion, though I’m generally anti; it’s just so worn into the ground at this point)
It’s shit like this that makes me think COVID really did permanently damage the brains of everyone under the age of 20..
Why do you care if people act like they’re witty, though? lol Weird complaint. Everything people do isn’t for your personal amusement, and it’s okay if you don’t find it funny. Everyone doesn’t think everything you say is funny either, and that’s alright.
That only covers the first couple of times you see it. I’m complaining about it being endlessly driven into the ground; even if it was funny, its relentless overuse would merit bitching about.
Well fair enough. To quote Sven from the esteemed Norwegian documentary Frozen 2, “you feel what you feel, and those feelings are real.”
My brother in Christ, are you ok?
“Can this die off, please?”
Can you fuck off and leave people be?
100%
That’s just the state of the AV Club now. Dennis Perkins has moved over to Paste now, he’s still doing SNL reviews and he puts much more effort into them than these ones.
Man, we must have been watching different shows last night. I haven’t laughed that hard at an SNL episode in years. Pedro Pascal was game, he was ready, and he slayed it. You can tell the cast was having a blast too because of all the corpsing (I haven’t seen that much corpsing since the Jimmy Fallon days).And it wasn’t tired humor, a lot of it was absurdist humor – almost Pythonesque. Really my favorite episode this season.
This is the correct take. I thought it was very strong and I laughed multiple times.
agreed best episode in a looong time. i didnt even know who this guy was but every sketch actually landed. even the game show was a funny take on how hollywood is losing ground to streaming services. a lot of actually intelligent commentary including how everyone was obsessed w a spy balloon but is ok with tik tok.
I don’t know what this reviewer was seeing but you are right about this episode. The other thing is 1, 2, 4 days later, I watched some of these sketches again (Waking Up, Lisa From Temecula and Italian Waiters) and they hold up… Funny, maybe even funnier, the second time around. Pedro Pascal was a charmer and a blast to watch, and the cast clearly enjoyed him.
I thought it was a pretty great episode, and will probably rewatch it . In the past few years I’ve rewatched a few episodes of SNL:Benedict CumberbatchRami Malek (wasn’t a fan of him but his SNL ep made me like him more)
Does it seem like every SNL musical guest lately is secretly writing an opera? After Coldplay’s gospel choir, Lil Baby, and whatever the hell Sam Smith was doing, I really need Jack White to bring the noise when he shows up.
You must have watched something else last night
Calling Yellowstone “Succession but outside” is solid.
Have you ever considered that you just don’t like SNL?
Bowen Yang seemed like a shoe-in for the
title this week
*shoo-in
The deadpan reading of “oh, cause we black”*’cause
The Lisa from Tecula sketch had us laughing out loud.
Probably a combination of all of them “breaking” and the physical comedy of the table moving.
It was probably the most we have laughed all season, which, in my opinion; has been very weak.
But when Pedro breaks and Bowen can’t help it either, it is laugh out loud funny!
The other Nick Cannon condom joke was from this week’s American Auto. I couldn’t place it until I saw an article highlighting the weeks best tv lines and it was on there.
“Ego should get to do more character work. “Lisa from Temecula” could be a recurring character like Debbie Downer.”
Listen to Comedy Bang Bang podcast. She has numerous caharcters on there. Also she has her own podcast called “Entreè PeeE Neur’s Entrepreneur Tour”
.No overall grade ??.
D.L. Hughley did the Nick Cannon joke on The Daily Show this week.
“ The joke is that the contemporary media landscape is littered with so much content that nothing connects.”I think the joke is just SNL marveling at how much very popular content has no resonance with their audience or anyone in the pop culture obsessed world. If you were a writer at SNL, you would need to know what’s popular enough to make jokes about. They are told that Ginny and Georgia is the most popular show on Netflix, but if they did a parody of it, would anyone in the audience appreciate it? Basically the same sketch as “What is Burn Notice?”: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/burn-notice-game-show/2751223
The expression is “shoo-in”.I suggest that these reviews be done by someone who is familiar both with idomatic expression in the English language and with comedy. Because this reviewer ain’t it.
I don’t disagree, but your leaving out the second “i” of “idiomatic” in this particular context reminds me of early internet days and dating website profiles, and how often people would say that they were “inteligent”, or how much they valued “intelegance”, and the company other “intelligant” people. I honestly think “intelligent” and “intelligent” were misspelled more than they were spelled correctly, which I always got a chuckle out of, especially because – ah, you get why it was kind of funny. You’re clearly an intanglint person.Now I chuckle when I see some variation of “Betty Davis/Kathryn Hepburn/Warren Beaty! My all-time favorite movie star!!”
I thank you for the correction on the spelling of “idiomatic”. Another error was that I left the final -s off of “expressions”. I should have typed more carefully.Notwithstanding my sloppiness, I assert that my point stands about the ignorance on the part of a supposedly “professional” writer about an ordinary idiomatic expression. The error that I called out was also not caught by the writer’s editors, which makes it all the more embarrassing.
Strange review! I thought this episode had almost all back to back bangers. Lots of fun and Pedro felt so much more comfortable than a lot of the other hosts I’ve seen lately.
These reviews are really peculiar.
Recent SNL has such an awful tendency to over-explain everything in their fake movie/tv trailers. A good parody should hew closely enough to the format that it could be mistaken for real if not for the obvious satirical elements. No trailer ever has said something like, “HBO is doing it again with another iconic video game…” If it simply said something like, “From the producers of The Last of Us…” and then led into Mario Kart, it would still be funny — and actually be a better parody.
Wing Pit was good, but it escalated too far to be an excellent “escalation joke” IMO. And I’m pretty sure that the writers were thinking of impunity, not immunity.
Was anyone else bothered by the fact that last week SNL was being championed as an ally for queer performers because Sam Smith wore a dress, and this week an entire sketch centered around a a man wearing a dress?
I don’t get it. Why does the AV Club give their SNL reviews to someone who clearly hates SNL?
I like sarah paulson but why was she there? Was this the best show of the lackluster season?
No mention of Weekend Update?
COOK MY MEAT!
NOT A SPECK OF RED
I thought the Hollywood quiz show was funny. Also just ignoring Update completely this week? I guess it makes it much easier to write the review if you just skip half the show. Anyway, I laughed way harder than I should have at those British rappers. I don’t think this episode was nearly as dire as you’re making out, but again, maybe you didn’t watch the whole thing.
Oh man, I totally forgot about that segment, but it was hilarious and spot-on. I’m worried not enough people got it to see it return again, but I really hope it does. I mean, I guess grime is a lot better known than it used to be with the popularity of Skepta and such. Hell, there’s even a Peloton commercial right now with some grime track talking about “the ting go BRRRAP” so maybe I’m underestimating the reach of the jokes.
Reading your comment reminds me of the “swish swish swish” sounds during the British rap! I could have used subtitles for the lyrics though.
Can attest the subtitles were next to useless, as they skipped big chunks of the dialogue.Reckon doing them in Real Time is a nightmare.
I watched it way too many times so the lyrics were clearer on repeat viewing. lol
Anyone want to talk about this week’s sponsored sketch that actually ended up being TWO sponsored sketches in one? It was the SNL sketch version of this bizarre Jumper TV spot that becomes an HP ad in the middle from years ago:
I have to respectfully disagree with you. This was another great SNL from start to finish. Mario Kart was the cherry on top, but I do admit when I saw there was ANOTHER game show sketch, I did cringe for a moment, but then it got better because 1) Bowen Yang was hosting for a change and 2) all three contestants struggled with recent movies and TV shows because it’s TRUE; there’s sooo much content it’s hard to keep up with what’s out there. And Pedro Pascal? Perfección!
I’m going to be very bold and say this episode was pretty funny. The balloon cold opener was great, and even the LA mush mouth coma skit, as absurd as it was, made me laugh out loud.
You are not being bold, you and many others, including me, felt the funny. I am not sure what the reviewer was watching but he missed half the sketches and didn’t seem to connect with good ones.
When will they stop with the game-show concepts.It is such boomer-level comedy and the lamest joke vehicle out there.
With all the unnecessary reboots in films nowadays at least we know when the inevitable Smokey & the Bandit remake happens Pedro Pascal will be a natural to fill the Bandit’s Trans-Am seat and go ahead and bring back Gator too while you’re at it.
Easily the best episode of the season yet you continue to shit on it. I mean I get it…SNL and it’s writers suck hard now but at least I wasn’t left wondering “what?” at the end of each sketch. This one deserves some credit…especially Wing Pit. But hey…discord sown and negative reviews clicked so you did your job.
No way. It was a solid B+ all the way through.
There was some really shoddy camera work again this episode. What is going on over there with the tech crew?!
I just gotta say, Ego Nwodim cutting that steak had me laughing so hard I was crying. And then I was trying to tell my girlfriend about the sketch later and was cracking up again so hard I couldn’t even finish talking about it.
“Nwodim’s knack for portraying aggressively confident, exceedingly delusional, and perpetually suspicious characters” is a great description of her skill on Comedy Bang Bang as well. Glad she’s getting good showcases for her talent! The Lisa sketch was very funny but GOD NO please don’t make it a recurring sketch a la Debbie Downer. It’s not a premise that could be repeated without getting old fast, unless she’s doing something different each time.
I love that she still does CBB on the regular when she 100% does not need to at this point. Impossible not to appreciate someone travelling coast-to-coast to play a character as wonderfully dumb as Pastor Pasta, a clergyman whose whole thing is he likes pasta and that’s it.
“A/S/L? Age: never ask a man’s age. Sex: not having it.” — not central to her bit as Pastor Pasta but for some reason that stuck with me.It’s great she still make CBB appearances because getting to experience the insanity of her characters over a longer period of time is truly a blessing.
Her best work was still on Teacher’s Lounge.
I like how you say “I wonder if SNL is having budget cuts” after seeing that Mario Kart sketch.
I liked the Big Hollywood Quiz sketch. Not only was it very true and insightful, but Pascal’s character answering “Wednesday?” for every question was pretty funny. And the host stating an Oscar film made “$23000″ zinged, same with the only movie they could name in the last five years was “Top Gun”. I will agree though they did not give the other two anything to do that was nearly that funny.We do live in a post mass media world where everything is niche.