John Mulaney takes his time (and shares it with the VP) on his latest Saturday Night Live

Lorne Michaels doesn’t like to project much regret in interviews. He seems to prefer coming across somewhere between unflappable and philosophical, which is to say he’s often aloof. This sometimes means that his reflections about mistakes or triumphs—but especially mistakes—in the history of Saturday Night Live have to be extracted from between the lines. We can infer when he feels a particular hire may have been a mistake when they’re let go (more often than not, prematurely) after a season or two. And maybe we can infer that when he turns writers-turned-performers like Tina Fey or John Mulaney into near-permanent hosting fixtures in their alumni afterlife, he’s (dare to dream!) recognizing how it would have made sense to get them more camera time when he had them at his regular disposal. It’s like he gets a chance to answer the usually-hypothetical question of “if not now, when?” and create the illusion that on the continuum of a definitionally time-crunched show, there is somehow time for corrections to be made. (What this says about his apparent desire to keep things cool with Shane Gillis is unsettling.)

Then again, maybe he’s just retconning these figures into greater on-camera prominence, so that with the passage of time, people might forget that they weren’t on-screen that much when they actually worked there, and keep Michaels firmed embedded in their career narratives. (Sort of the inverse of the Steve Martin effect, where he hosted so often that people later assumed he was a cast member.) And of course, Tina Fey was an on-camera presence; she was dynamite on Weekend Update. But she also seemed to set the precedent that at least one Update anchor needed to avoid sketches whenever possible—which seemed odd to anyone who, say, regularly attended the Sunday-night ASSSCAT shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in the early 2000s, where Fey would perform improvised sketch comedy and keep pace with Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch just fine. It would continue to seem weird, as Fey starred in 30 Rock, made movies, and did SNL drop-ins and hosting gigs, that most of her famous SNL bits came after her six years on the show.

Mulaney, for his part, got an on-air tryout or two while he was a writer; I want to say it was two Weekend Update pieces, one (or the only?) of which discussed how his father was a spokesperson for Rockport shoes, unbeknownst to anyone at Rockport. (As a Rockport enthusiast who wore them to every grown-up job I ever had until such time as I’d give up and just wear regular sneakers, I found this very funny.) Obviously, despite my enthusiasm, it wasn’t seen as having gone particularly well, and Mulaney remained a writer—only to turn into such a frequent host, he hit the five-timer mark faster than anyone besides Steve Martin and Buck Henry. This week’s episode brought him to six—tied with Fey (and Scarlett Johansson, and Elliott Gould, and Drew Barrymore, among others). Only seven people have hosted more times than this, and one of them is dead. Another is whatever happened with Chevy Chase.

Yet Mulaney will probably never quite blend in and get mistaken for a former cast member, because his episodes, perhaps more than any other recurring host outside of a few Martin episodes, have an increasingly auteurist bent to them. That’s not to say that they’re perfect, that they’re immune from various SNL pitfalls, or that Mulaney is some inimitable visionary who writes exclusively next-level sketches. He has no fewer than three recurring bits. (And beyond that, of course he’s not single-handedly writing every sketch just because he used to work there.) But this latest episode in particular felt confident in every single piece it put up, and in putting Mulaney front and center, even if that meant not actually doing as many pieces as usual. This is a long-winded way of pointing out that there was a grand total of three live sketches performed this week (not counting the cold open, which always feels like a different thing).

Some of that is just luck of the draw. If you have a host who does a stand-up monologue, you’re getting something more robust in a spot that might otherwise be the most perfunctory of the night, but it’s also going to eat up some more time. If there happen to be more than one Update guest, as there was tonight, that’s another few minutes gone. Oh, and if the fingers-crossed next president of the United States drops by at the tail-end of her campaign, extending a cold open that already feels obligated to include five different political impressions? Honestly, it’s a wonder they had time for any proper sketches at all. Yet one of the best parts of the episode, beyond that nothing in it bombed and the further good luck of Chappell Roan putting on a couple of lavish numbers that included a seemingly brand-new song, was how the sketches never seemed to abruptly end in a panic or cop out on a good premise or even speed-run through a bad one. Quite the opposite: Sometimes they would patiently develop even if the audience was left with no earthly idea why anyone wanted to do a sketch about Little Richard ruining a family sitcom in the early ’90s. These sketches weren’t exactly slow-burners, but their patience fit Mulaney’s performance style. His stand-up is built on his specific explanations and elaborations and tonally precise turns of phrase, rather than rapid-fire punchlines.

That particularly has been both the inspiration and the curse behind Mulaney’s signature bit as host: mounting a full-scale musical spoof over some kind of New York-based grodiness. The first time, the dawning realization that for some reason, this was going to be an escalating series of Les Misérables riffs about diners inexplicably having lobster on the menu was sublime. But later iterations didn’t just lose that sense of surprise; they also diminished the conceptual discipline in favor of a more revue-style approach, mixing and matching songs from various Broadway shows and, even more annoying, a few movie musicals, too.

The ship has sailed on this sketch adhering more tightly to a set of rules that, I concede, may not strike many as especially important. But this edition, starting with Pete Davidson buying a gallon of milk at a Port Authority outpost of Duane Reade, somehow felt more affirming: of a fresh batch of NYC annoyances; of the joys of springing really silly Broadway parodies on even a suspecting audience (yeah, some low-hanging-fruit Disney tunes, but also: Andy Samberg doing the opener of Hamilton as a dead bear); of Mulaney’s deathless love for this routine in general. It went on for eight minutes, immediately making me feel silly for thinking Dan Bulla’s (very funny) filmed piece about a monkey astronaut maybe ran a little longer than expected. That’s what Mulaney episodes are really for, right? The writerly pieces with more jokes and odd notes than conceptually necessary—where the a puppet primate character called Beppo gets mercilessly blown up and gets to make a weirdly adorable return to Earth. Where Little Richard is implied to have genuinely shot a dog on a sitcom set. Where Sarah Sherman stands around on set for minutes at a time just for a Margaret Atwood topper. If not now, when?

What was on

Besides the aforementioned space monkey, the episode managed to bring back “What’s That Name?” for an election-themed edition with sharper bite than anything in the designated Political Humor sections of the show.

On the other end of the episode, looking at the upcoming election on a more granular level, a fake ad for a New York City assemblyman unfortunately named Harvey Epstein was purely absurd, but perfectly placed in a live broadcast that, where I live at least, featured about 80% political ads fighting over who will do the best job of securing the Nassau County border. (I wish I was joking.)

What was off

I haven’t talked much about Weekend Update so far this in these recaps because there isn’t all that much to say about a decade-long anchor-team tenure that really ought to be wrapping up this season, since “three years ago” is no longer an option. But in an episode that was mostly quite good, the shrugworthy Update jokes stood out more than usual. As for the big cold-open thing, well, maybe I’m softer on it knowing that regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we’re unlikely to see many of those five-for-one impression sketches again, whereas Jost and Che will be here at least through May and possibly 2035. In terms of the actual Kamala Harris cameo, there’s almost nothing the show can do with this stuff that wouldn’t be met with multiple layers of derision. It was fine. A little cute, a little dorky.

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

Michael Longfellow has a very specific deadpan thing, and he tweaked it perfectly into menace as host of “What’s That Name?” (and it can’t be easy to follow Bill Hader in a Mulaney-centric sketch). That might seem like a minor thing to hang an MVP title on, but really, most of the cast (save perhaps Kenan as Little Richard and Heidi Gardner as Reba) was in utility mode this week, to good effect.

Next time

I don’t typically feel one way or another about Bill Burr, but I did feel a wave of relief upon learning that he’s replaced Dave Chappelle as the stand-up host elected to get us through whatever potentially Trying Times may lay ahead. (Or, perhaps more likely, Chappelle turned Lorne down?)

Stray observations

• • Literally dozens if not hundreds or possibly thousands of people joked about how an episode hosted by John Mulaney featuring music from Chappell Roan will inspire record levels of acting normal on the internet. There’s a perverse part of me that wishes that either or both of them did something more to drive their parasocial networks insane. But “do a solid episode” is probably the better choice in that department.
• • I like Chappell Roan but “Pink Pony Club” sounds like it could fit into Rock Of Ages and that doesn’t sit right with me! However, doing a non-album track (apparently called “The Giver”) for the second song is a baller move.
• • The Update bit with Marcello and Jane as the Couple You Can’t Believe Are Together leaned into whatever stereotypes that might have formed about each performer: That Marcello is very loud, and Jane is very recessive. But it leaned so hard that it swung back around to really working.
• • 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? Again?! She wasn’t completely absent, but this season could use more of her in general.