On paper, this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live should have been a slam dunk. Returning host John Mulaney is one of the few recent hosts to understand how weird and fun the show should be. It helps that he once was a staff writer at SNL, but in the years since he’s become a popular stand up comedian, he’s been a consistently charming personality and an even better host. Plus, it featured one of the better American rock bands of the past twenty years as the musical guest in The Strokes. What more could you ask for? Turns out, this episode was mostly reheated leftovers from Mulaney’s last episode where he was hosting.
Mulaney’s greatest hits were out in full force last night. The most egregious example was the Another Uncle Meme sketch, where Mulaney gets memed at work. Despite a few solid memes of Mulaney (“When you in a sex cult but you still a virgin” reads one), it ends abruptly and awkwardly when his character claims he’s on the dating site ChicksinPrison.com because the people on there are “easier to control.” Yikes. The Cinema Classics sketch, which is usually used as an excuse for the host to dress up in period garb and goof around, was focused on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. While Keenan Thompson’s host character, Reese De’What, stole the show with a line about getting drunk on rum, Mulaney and Kate McKinnon did their best acting in a series of deleted scenes.
As an SNL host, one could do a lot worse than what happened this week. Mulaney’s jokes about Andrew Cuomo (“He would walk out everyday…a little too excited”) and the 2020 election (“On November 3rd, there’s an elderly man contest”) weren’t exactly fresh, but he sold them with his classic tense-but-humorous demeanor and style.
The evening’s best sketches weren’t anything specific, but broadly funny things. From Chris Redd’s funk music video Strollin’ starts as a solid voter ad (“Y’all saw the ads? They need us,” ad libbed Thompson), before turning into a groovy depiction of voter suppression where Mulaney repeatedly tells a group of Black voters they can’t vote at a specific location. When they eventually end up walking down a highway to get to a polling location, the sketch hits a peak. The shorter Democracy PSA was a highlight of the polarization that Americans experience, while they each claim that getting along would be nice but unlikely. Weekend Update was average this weekend, but I chuckled when Michael Che laughed about having to be drafted into a race war against Colin Jost.
Off of their new album The New Abnormal, The Strokes played two solid cuts, starting with “The Adults are Talking.” It’s the opener from Abnormal, but it always felt like one of the more average songs from the album, one that’s just begging for a bigger ending. Instead, the song winds with an appealing tension, only made better by the tight guitar playing of Albert Hammond Jr and drumwork by Fabrizio Moretti. The other song was “Bad Decisions,” the crowd pleasing single, but the song’s explosive resolve fell flat live. On the record, when lead vocalist Julian Casablancas sings “with youuuu,” the guitars move into a frenzy and climax with perfect ferocity. Hearing it live was one of the bigger disappointments of the year. When Casablancas dropped a random “f***” into former song’s halfway point, it felt like a fun moment to be experiencing live on SNL.
It was a fleeting feeling, one that the show disappointingly hasn’t matched yet this season. (note: Dave Chapelle was announced as the host of the first new episode after this Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, his last hosting appearance was the first weekend following the election of Donald Trump in 2016; no musical guest has been announced at the time of posting)
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