From the whole galaxy of Saturday Night Live stars floating around out there, the one who has returned to host the show most often remains Chevy Chase—fitting, if no longer anywhere close to cherished. Chase was the show’s first breakout star and the first such figure to leave (prematurely, by almost anyone’s retrospective reckoning), meaning he was available to host as soon as the third season. (Technically, the second half of the second, but even in the loosier, goosier first five years, that wasn’t happening.) He was a regular drop-in until Season 22, when he was apparently particularly badly behaved, smacking Cheri Oteri and irritating Will Ferrell.
At some point in the relatively near future, stand-up comic John Mulaney will tie and presumably then break Chase’s record of hosting eight times. This week’s episode was his seventh, which means a former writer who made a couple of middlingly received Weekend Update appearances when he was on staff has now hosted more times than Will Ferrell or Tina Fey (both six); more than Bill Murray or Kristen Wiig (both five); more, even, than Morwenna Banks (holding steady at zero).
None of those people are baby boomers—not even Chevy Chase. (He was actually born just a few years shy of the postwar boom.) But as Mulaney moved further into the upper echelon of SNL hosts, he seemed to impose his sensibility on the episode, perhaps even more than usual. And this week, that meant coming for his elders, if not specifically any of the alumni he’s zipping past. No, his main target was those boomers (and in one especially stinging ad, their grown children too). The whole show had a unity of vision that sneaks in a few times per season, and was unfortunately last seen in the Shane Gillis episode.
This one went further, though. It went so far, in fact, that Mulaney appeared in the first funny cold open the show has managed all year, and maybe funnier than anything they pulled together in that slot last year. Remarkably, he wasn’t doing an RFK Jr. impression, though in his subsequent monologue he proved that he could have pulled it off. No, they—and I don’t want to discredit the current staff, but Mulaney did mention his friend and ex-coworker Simon Rich in his goodnights—wrote an honest-to-God sketch about a CIA officer (Mulaney) briefing the world’s tech titans (Jeremy Culhane as Elon Musk, Jane Wickline as Dario Amodei, Andrew Dismukes as Mark Zuckerberg, and more!) about how unlikely it is that a beautiful woman would be sincerely interested in them rather than a spy. With Mulaney not really playing a full-fledged character, it took on the tone of his stand-up, with some nice augmentations via some actually-funny impressions that haven’t been run into the ground. This is what regular viewers of SNL might call a miracle.
So it was in his actual monologue where Mulaney first ruminated on aging parents with a mixture of affection and satire, doing an extended routine about only recently diagnosing his dad, and with him his entire generation and maybe also the Greatest Generation, as potentially autistic (before eventually segueing into his RFK Jr. voice, a deftly executed hairpin turn despite a line, stepped on by applause, about a bumpy transition). Later, there was a pretaped ad for a home health aid called “Sister,” and a live sketch set at Woodstock where a bunch of good-time hippies consider a proposal that they buy up all the houses, hoard all the money, and scare their kids away from mostly-harmless substances. It all feels like Mulaney has maybe had a couple of fraught trips home in the last couple of years. Regardless, it made for such a strong, seasonally appropriate bit of pre-Thanksgiving riffing that Tommy Brennan’s Weekend Update song, a weaker-tea mix of similar ingredients, felt a little wan despite directly addressing what Mulaney was circling more broadly.
The material was so thematically unified (at least for a show that’s uneven almost by design) that I somehow forgot about Mulaney’s tradition of mounting an elaborate New York-centric musical sketch featuring Broadway parodies until it turned up, on schedule, after Update. I’ve said this before, but this lost some magic for me back in the second go-round, when they abandoned the single-musical format in favor of an anthology; here, the subject also felt more diffuse, with supposedly Central Park-based songs veering into the Lincoln Tunnel for some reason. (Well, the reason was a guest-appearing Bowen Yang, who also turned up in the cold open, promoting his stint in Broadway’s Lincoln-centric Oh, Mary!) But it was still amusing enough, and “amusing enough recurring bits could have technically been replaced with something better” are the kinds of quibbles you have to scrape up when an episode is this strong; unquestionably the best of the season so far, and competitive with last season’s best, too. By the end of the first Phoebe Bridgers song, the question was how much Mulaney and company were going to run up the board. By the time Weekend Update only ran 11 minutes or so, composed mostly decent jokes to boot, the answer was “considerably.” Other longtime hosts, including several of the aforementioned alumni, have become reliable indicators of a better-than-average episode. But Mulaney is gunning for, and earning, the top spot that he’ll almost certainly reach by decade’s end.
What was on
As mentioned, almost every segment was at least pretty good. “Sister,” mock-cheerfully running through the eldercare responsibilities stereotypically but not unrealistically sloughed off from grown male children to their siblings, was the episode’s instant classic. The rest were almost better in context than as future best-of fodder. For example, it’s not that the extended gag about an Air Turkey flight full of passengers attempting to pass off their hair transplants (and other procedures) as injuries was bad so much as it was wonderfully dependent on Mulaney’s initial delivery, simultaneously functioning as the set-up and an instant punchline through his phrasing. It’s a nice reminder that a throwaway sketch doesn’t have to abdicate big laughs.
It didn’t hurt to have a top-tier musical guest, either. Phoebe Bridgers may not have matched the same level of guitar-smashing fireworks that she did during her last stint as musical guest, and despite her recent Primetime acting experience, she didn’t turn up in a sketch like she did when she appeared with Boygenius. But she chose a perfect pair of complementary songs with “Bobby” (probably the most driving track on Lost Weekend) and “Still Standing” (one of the most delicate). At first, it looked like her stage set-up was restrained by post-Kanye SNL standards, but she did a little with a lot when her blacklight makeup revealed a signature skeleton look at the end of “Still Standing.”
What was off
Ashley Padilla’s Kathy character is not one I was hoping to see again, though I probably should have expected to. I swear it’s not just me, either: My eleven-year-old daughter and the friend she’s been palling around with they were literal babies, still awake on their sleepover, were allowed to watch the show until Weekend Update. They excitedly lit up at the offer, laughed through the first 30 minutes or so, and within a minute of that Cathy sketch, they were both out cold. Next commercial break, they retreated to bed, something no amount of coaxing could have gotten them to do. The tweens have spoken! At least it’s in character that Kathy nearly cleared the room.
But also: Not only did dipping into a recurring character give this episode a classic feel (even if it’s nobody’s Wayne’s World-style fave), Mulaney and the writers did their best to drag what was otherwise a completely formulaic rerun sketch into novelty simply by upping the hostility factor, with Mulaney’s character at one point vowing to physically fight the nuisance of a recurring character. Intentionally meta or not, it helped. Something else made the reappearance retroactively worthwhile, too. The show executed a rare Monty Python-like callback by organically working Kathy into the Central Park musical. I admit, after half-smiling through her sketch, I laughed with absolute delight at her revived “you guys talkin’ transpo?”
So, again… no true duds here. The real knock against this episode is that with Phoebe Bridgers as the last segment of the evening and eleven segments total, it seems pretty likely that they had to cut another five-to-one sketch. Based on the rest of the episode, we have to assume it was probably a funny one. Hopefully it or something else from dress will be online in a few days.
Most valuable player
This really felt like Mulaney’s show all the way down. But among the regular cast, Jane Wickline nailed the same trifecta she hit last week: a solid impression, a strong pretape performance, and a silly walk-on. Meanwhile, the guy who got it last week, Jeremy Culhane, impressed again, this time with a pretape where a travel-show brewery tour descends into homoerotic uncertainty. It may have qualified as another instance of a long way to go for what it was, but it’s worth considering that this joke is the kind of thing the show would have played really crass or nasty circa 1994, and now manages to turn into something oddly delicate, melancholy, and well-acted. In a season with too little Andrew Dismukes for my taste, Wickline and Culhane have been consistent highlights.
Next time
Wow, even the promos tonight were on fire; this is where we find out that the first December host will be Amanda Seyfried. Sadly, she will not be pulling a Chalamet and serving as the musical guest in-character as Mother Ann Lee, but we can console ourselves with rapper Don Toliver, also making his SNL debut. Presumably he also hungers and thirsts.
Stray observations
• I should find it hacky that Mikey Day, when denied his role as Guy Noticing Stuff Is Weird, resorts to walking into sketches and screaming, but I find it weirdly endearing in a Will Ferrell sort of way.
• It’s both easy and probably unfair to assume comedy-centric hosts, especially comics, bring their own writers along with them. But with Mulaney shouting out Simon Rich in the goodnights, and the cold open so vastly improved, I had to wonder if Rich (who just wrote a screenplay for the excellent Artificial, where Elon Musk is a doofus supporting character) specifically had a hand in the tech-CEO piece. (Apologies to any current SNL staffers if I’m off-base.)
• On Weekend Update, Jost and Che kept the self-regarding jokes to a relative minimum (though the “Jost owns a ferry” family of punchlines can probably be retired now), and landed some pretty strong ones, particularly the lines about Rudy Guiliani seeing his shadow, Jensen Huang losing your house in the divorce, and Iran’s only demand (J.D. Vance leaving).
• As a Jane Wickline fan riding the high of an episode where almost everything seemed to go right, you can imagine what a bait-and-switch it felt like when Colin Jost introduced a Weekend Update song… from Tommy Brennan.
• You know who’s good at singing, through? Veronika Slowikowska. It doesn’t quite count as a running gag, but her doing “Don’t Rain On My Parade” is the latest escalation of the growing realization that this lady has pipes. The singing washing machine strikes again!
• Other times I’ve felt similarly pandered-to by the happenstance of the host/musical guest combo: Jack Black/Jack White (Season 51); Maya Rudolph/Vampire Weekend (Season 50); John Mulaney/Jack White (Season 43); Lena Dunham/The National (Season 39, and the only time I’ve seen the show in person); Maya Rudolph/Sleigh Bells (Season 37); Christina Ricci/Beck (Season 25). I’d love to hear yours in the comments, while I puzzle out what these patterns can tell me about when I’m getting host Haley Lu Richardson with musical guest the Hold Steady.
• Congratulations (?) to David O. Russell’s Madden, appears on Prime Video next Wednesday with the distinction of co-starring the hosts of the best and worst episodes of the SNL season so far.
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