Saturday Night Live recap: Josh Brolin returns in a gleefully odd episode

All of Los Angeles may be gearing up for Sunday’s Academy Awards (here are our 2024 Oscar predictions, FYI), but here in New York, we were too busy watching Josh Brolin strip down to his skivvies and shrivel up his sandworm in a cold plunge smack-dab in the middle of Studio 8H. (More on that in a bit.)

Yes, the Dune: Part Two star was back for his third hosting stint on Saturday Night Live—his debut was in 2008 and his follow-up four years later—with fellow pro host Ariana Grande pulling musical-guest duties, and the strength of Brolin’s sheer enthusiasm for being back on “the greatest show on Earth” mercifully yanked us out of the quicksand of the past few, lackluster episodes. Like Adam Driver and Emma Stone before him, Brolin was energetic and eager for every irreverent, oddball idea the writers threw at him last night, from shrimp towers to spinning wheelchairs to sandwich kings.

Cold open: Red states go Scarlett

Sure, when it comes to last week’s “State of the Union,” nothing could possibly be funnier than reality. However, if you were going to try your hand at mimicking the utter lunacy of that rebuttal video from Alabama Senator Katie Britt, calling in a favor from Colin Jost’s Oscar-nominated actress wife is a good place to start. ScarJo unnervingly nailed Britt’s nightmare-inducing delivery and exaggerated expressions, made even better by some nicely bitchy writing. (“Tonight, I am not just responding to the State of the Union. I am also selling these gorgeous bejeweled cross necklaces for QVC…you can wear it from da church to da club!”) Throw in a Get Out bit with a classic Kenan reaction face and you’ve got yourself the strongest political cold open of the season.

Opening monologue: Brolin breaks the ice

Speaking of cold opens, as mentioned, Brolin gamely capped off his opening monologue by dropping his drawers and submerging himself in an ice bath to imitate the same “penis in your stomach” nervous excitement he felt at being back at SNL. Before he froze his dunes off, however, he got ’em warmed up by performing a moody recitation of that pseudo-erotic poem he wrote for his Dune co-star Timothée Chalamet. But he assured everyone that said ode wasn’t as “super creepy” as it sounded: “I write poems about everyone I work with. This week, I wrote a poem about Kenan!” Cue another reliably daffy reaction from Thompson, as Brolin cooed over his “ageless face” and “sugar cookie cheeks.”

The most “Wait, what time is it?” sketch of the night:

This one had us checking our clocks: it had the horny absurdity that we’d sooner expect from a post-“Weekend Update” bit, when the hour hand stretches closer to 1am and the humor leans wackier. So it was a delight seeing Josh let it all hang out—literally, it was the second peek at the actor’s underwear in under 10 minutes—so early in the show. Brolin and Heidi Gardner play a newly open married couple who get a little too, uh, stimulated when their bank branch gets robbed. (“What am I supposed to do, just watch? Watch helpless while you have your way with my sssupple wife”) The physical comedy between both performers was butts-up great here and I, like the studio audience, roared at Gardner’s reaction to Marcello Hernandez’s thief. (“Ohhh, look at that. A barely legal Latino!”)

The most ridiculous prop of the night:

We can’t entirely wrap our heads around how a simple wine-and-cheese party turned into a knife fight between Thanos and a house cat named Tiger but this batty bit was made even dumber by the absolutely derpy hand puppet that played the feisty feline. Amping up the absurdity was not only Brolin’s dedication to ridiculously heated lines like “Your cat is just one big damn slut…bussing it open for every lap!” but also, the increasingly visible presence of a stage member’s hairy arm inside the puppet, sticking out from a hole in the couch like a bad dadaist dream.

The best sketch of the night:

Now, about that shrimp tower: in a pre-taped bit, Brolin played a 19th-century Austrian aristocrat named Kinski who was trying to impress an archduchess (Sarah Sherman) with a giant, lavish display of crustaceans. (Shrimp are “the thinking man’s mozzarella sticks,” after all.) His desire to please the archduchess, however, was quickly replaced by worry that she was going to ruin his shrimpy shrine and he, of course, handled it by throwing her out the window more than once. The bizarre premise was beautifully heightened by the Bridgerton-like setting. (Props overall to the production design team this week, between this and both of Ariana Grande’s theatrical music performances.)

The second-best celebrity cameo of the night:

Speaking of music performances, we enjoyed Brolin and Andrew Dismukes’ cheesy ballad about watching your seatmate’s movie while on a plane, but our favorite musical number this episode featured Ariana Grande and Bowen Yang as Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge. That Baz Luhrmann flick is known for its pop-song medleys, which were allegedly much, much longer due to worries over song rights. Cue the Wicked co-stars joyfully corpsing through a musical mash-up that includes TLC’s “Creep,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and several reprisals of “Happy Birthday.”

Stray observations

• Very much enjoying/judging the surprisingly not small subset of the Internet who mistook Joan Grande—on hand to introduce her famous daughter’s second musical performance of the night, the Eternal Sunshine track “imperfect for you”—for theater legend Patti LuPone. Open the schools!
• It was a surprisingly short “Weekend Update” segment this week, with no “here to comment” cameos from Colin Jost and Michael Che’s fellow castmates. (A bit with Chloe Fineman as a real estate broker was reportedly cut.) It’s apparently the first “Update” without guest commentaries since John Mulaney’s episode back in season 47.
• We’ve got another SNL minibreak coming up: the show won’t be back with a new episode until March 30, with comedian-slash-Poor Things’ star Ramy Youssef as host and rapper Travis Scott as musical guest. The Dakota Johnson/Justin Timberlake episode will re-run next Saturday but, truly, watch anything else.