Nate Bargatze returns to Saturday Night Live for another unassumingly solid episode

It’s an obvious point that bears repeating: Contemporary first-time Saturday Night Live hosts do not typically return less than a year after their first gig unless something goes very right. In the show’s first five years, it wasn’t unusual for Steve Martin or Buck Henry to host multiple times in a season, but in recent years, it’s pretty much just John Mulaney (who has repeatedly hosted less than a year after his previous time, and in 2020 hosted twice in a calendar year) and, uh, Chris Hemsworth (who also hosted twice in a calendar year, and then, weirdly, not since). This is all a longwinded way of saying that Nate Bargatze has joined some kind of obscure club. He hosted last season to a response of “who?!” from a decent chunk of the SNL audience, anchored an instant-classic sketch, acquitted himself well in the rest of the episode, and now he’s back.

Though Bargatze doesn’t have the same infectious energy that Mulaney does – presumably derived from the latter knowing the show forward and backwards, plus the extra zing of his particularly polished, sometimes hotly anticipated stand-up – his own stand-up persona does seem to unlock something in the show. Whether he’s simply agreeable enough to showcase the writers’ best ideas without worrying about whether it plays to his strength or if the writers and cast just knows exactly how to pitch toward his non-acting style, he’s now hosted two episodes where it feels like, for better or worse, the show was totally in sync with his sensibilities without depending entirely on his strengths.

Bargatze still managed to disarm a second time, maybe in part because his stand-up doesn’t have the precise calibration of Mulaney, or someone who like Jerry Seinfeld, whose sitcom performing style I thought of while watching Bargatze in sketches. Their deliveries aren’t at all similar, but Seinfeld was a deceptively strong sitcom actor, knowing just how to underplay opposite his more technically skilled co-stars, and just when to let himself push at the boundaries of his own self-consciously, possibly intentionally limited range. Bargatze isn’t even all that polished on stage; obviously he knows what he’s doing, and I laughed out loud at his offhand example of asking a Door Dasher to check a gas station for Nerds candy, but he affects a kind of regular-guy casualness that lets the seams of his routines show as he sometimes stumbles over his words.

Yet in sketches, the guy nails it, with his unnervingly steady eyes and usually-unsmiling mouth. Maybe he’s not to the point where fans would yearn to see him actually join the cast, as occasionally happens with frequent hosts, granted. (Obviously, Steve Martin and Buck Henry would have done great. Equally obvious, Justin Timberlake would have become a nuisance within half a season. More fantastically, Emma Stone could absolutely do it if she were maybe twenty percent less charismatic and therefore less of a perfect fit for the big screen.)  Bargatze’s limitations would become more obvious on a weekly basis. But that he feels like a mainstay host after twice in under a year is itself a major (well, minor, but major in the sketch-comedy-hosting realm) accomplishment.

It’s all the more impressive when you realize that technically, a lot of these sketches had antecedents on his previous episode. I’m not just talking about the directly sequelized Washington sketch, about which more shortly. The “Sábado Gigante” game/talk/variety hybrid that was entirely in Spanish, with Bargatze’s tourist wandering through the proceedings with unfussed and unforced bafflement, felt like a relative of the sketch from last year where he played a white guy embarrassed to have won a Soul Food cooking competition; both take advantage of his unassuming-white-dude persona, and refuse to cast him as a more boorish, bulldozing type. Also, the waterslide sketch, where EMTs and water-park employees debate whether it’s OK to send a dead body down the slide, was structurally similar to last year’s airplane sketch, where passengers get sidetracked in a debate over which job is hardest. The individual results of those two sketches were mixed; one makes the highlight reel for this episode and the other doesn’t. But they both show remarkable command of what to do with this plainspoken comic who I literally only ever see on episodes of Saturday Night Live. In the 50-season history of the show, there are multiple cast members who have done less than Bargatze already has.

What was on

The episode had two clear sketch highlights: cleanly written, familiar enough to grasp the game early on yet surprising enough for laugh-out-loud punchlines, and, again, perfectly attuned to Bargatze’s strengths as a performer. The first placed him amongst some of the newer cast members; this would be an absurd calculation to actually perform, but the four main players of “Water Park” – Bargatze and Michael Longfellow as EMTs; Devon Walker and first-seasoner Jane Wickman as park employees – may have fewer minutes of on-screen SNL experience than any recent sketch I can remember. (The cast has simply been too crowded for many sketches without someone who’s done five or six seasons already.) They’re all effective here, particularly Longfellow, who probably has the most naturally funny delivery of the folks he was hired with (of which only he, Marcello, and Devon remain), but hasn’t always had much opportunity to show it off in strong sketches. He and Bargatze nail the passive tone here, and while Wickman doesn’t seem fully comfortable on camera yet, her underplaying what becomes the sole voice of reason helps the sketch, too; its simplicity could easily be ruined by someone yelling about how crazy it is to implicitly suggest sending a dead body down the water slide, rather than carrying it down 255 stairs.

The Mile-High Burger sketch was another major highlight, with Heidi Gardner playing an in-law who accidentally orders a novelty eating challenge during a somber-toned lunch discussing what to do with an increasingly senile father, and then decides to go ahead and try to scarf the whole thing in 10 minutes anyway, in hopes of winning a trip to Hawaii. Bargatze plays her encouraging spouse, with Bowen Yang, Mikey Day, and Sarah Sherman all playing varying degrees of straight; it’s Sherman who has the least trouble keeping it together watching Gardner to do absolute town on the prop burger (and accompanying milkshake). Even a few of Day’s trademark incredulous outbursts don’t ruin the energy of this one, providing some needed catharsis as the sketch continues to rattle off insane details (like how Gardner’s character once ate a whole lasagna to cheer her husband up) as verbal counterweight to the physical comedy. Gardner grotesque shouting “put him in a home!” with a mouth full of burger may have been my biggest laugh of the night.

What was off

It’s hard to ding the show for mostly-lifeless political cold opens, not because they’re unfunny (though that’s often the case), but because they seem so detached from the rest of the show, perhaps even moreso than usual. The show’s reliance on guest stars for stunt-casting political figures has been covered to death, but it’s particularly uncanny (and not quite as annoying!) when that stunt-casting comes from inside the house, because it feels like a whole other shadow SNL is sharing space with the actual show. For 10 or 15 minutes an episode, it’s an alternate version of 2006, where Andy Samberg and Maya Rudolph are back on the show, Dana Carvey makes regular appearances, and Jim Gaffigan is the Alec Baldwin of this world, maybe? In any event, it felt even more like this when the episode stuck a new Lonely Island Digital Short at the end of the episode. It was funny! I laughed! Far more than at the cold open! But a Digital Short with Samberg and Rudolph doesn’t really feel like the show now.

It feels similarly weird to place a perfectly amusing Washington sequel sketch in this category. But it does feel like a blotch on a solid episode, even though the mechanics make sense. The truth is, SNL does far fewer recurring-character sketches these days and is more likely to recur certain formats or formulas instead. On the whole, this is probably preferable, for viewers if not necessarily for catchphrase-hungry fans (what will the tweens yell at recess?!) or merch-sellers at the NBC Store. (Speaking of which: Possibly vintage Dana Carvey-themed t-shirts in the goodnights? I see you, Day and Gardner!) But it does mean that any sketch, no matter how singular it may seem, becomes eligible for a lower-key form of franchising, ahd cheapening. Obviously there won’t be eight Washington appearances per season, Spartan Cheerleaders style. But did that perfect sketch really need to go the way of Mulaney’s increasingly plot-losing musical sketches? (More on this, presumably, in November.) The individual jokes, with Bargatze offering serenely confident pronouncements about the weirdest inconsistencies in the contemporary United States vernacular, are fine – while also feeling like outtakes, which adds up to kind of a bummer, especially on an episode that otherwise performed smart variations on a theme.

Most valuable player (who may not be ready for prime time)

As mentioned, Jane Wickline doesn’t exactly scream blazing, national-TV self-confidence. And yet: She helped anchor “Water Park,” and her song as the only guest on Weekend Update brought some much-needed novelty to the ol’ Update desk. Her song about partying so nonstop that she misses social cues that the party in question has ended feels very TikTok, which is where she apparently made her bones as a comedian, but it also throws back to funny-song providers like Adam Sandler and Jimmy Fallon. I daresay it’s a fuller and better-constructed song than many of the giggling Sandler/Fallon tunes, too. More Jane!

Next time

Ariana Grande presumably enunciates a bit more than usual as a host only, not a musical guest. (She’ll definitely sing a little in the monologue, though, right?)

Stray observations

• • Doing these recaps right after the show airs can be tough, because often there’s a solid cut-for-time sketch that goes up on YouTube the next day. Then again, it’s both hard to avoid and kind of unfair to give the show extra points when, as with last week, the show posted two sketches (one live and one pretape) that were literally funnier than anything else in the actual as-aired episode. Does that make the episode better, or worse? Mostly these function as reassurance to fans: Don’t worry, they haven’t completely lost it.
• • Where the hell was…? Here’s the part of the recap where I ask where the hell a particular cast member was. Where the hell was Ego Nwodim? (Besides gamely dancing through the “Sábado Gigante” intro.)
• • Carvey’s Biden does work for me, I must admit. The diminished capacity all the way around helps, as does, perhaps, the contrast of sitting next to a bunch of non-impressions. Most surprising: how negligible Bowen Yang’s J.D. Vance is.
• • That short sketch with Bargatze as the assistant football coach trying to get money for the jerseys was pretty good, too!
• • Guys, I’m not sure if I’m really buying Coldplay as a purveyor of world music.