Although the midterm elections are heating up, Saturday Night Live takes a rather lukewarm look at them, kicking the Halloween episode off with a PBS News Hour segment featuring three controversial Republican nominees who have become recent favorites in their respective races: Georgia and Pennsylvania Senate candidates Herschel Walker (Kenan Thompson) and Dr Oz (Mikey Day) and Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (Cecily Strong, who’s been absent these past several weeks).
All three are moronic con artists and political novices who have nonetheless won over much of the voting populace by waging culture wars against big city crime, “drag queen story time”, and “children in school identifying as Pokémon”.
It would be easy to call this cold open lazy, but frankly, there’s not really any other way for the show to handle modern Republicans, who have become indistinguishable from even the broadest caricature. There is a tangible air of pointlessness and hopelessness hovering over everything, owing to the knowledge that some, if not all three of these individuals are going to win their contests no matter how obviously unsuited and dangerous. It makes for a depressing start to the episode, but then, these are depressing times.
Jack Harlow pulls double duty as host and musical guest. The rapper’s halting, monotone monologue is comprised mostly of jokes about his appearance – he looks like the goat-boy from Chronicles of Narnia, “if you tried to draw Justin Timberlake from memory”, and “the guy who rips the tickets at half at the movie theater”. He briefly engages with the live audience, by which I mean he speaks to one young woman for about five seconds. There’s a lot of dead air here, which does not bode well for the rest of the episode.
In the first sketch, Harlow and Heidi Gardner play a southern bride and groom whose vows are disrupted by the distracting presence of the best man, Clint (Andrew Dismukes), who showed up dressed like The Joker on account of it being a Halloween wedding. The guests vote on whether Clint should “get to be Joker,” with the final result being delivered by the real Jeff Probst from Survivor. It’s not the worst premise, though there’s too much setup, while certain cast members can’t help but come off as smug theater kids when putting on their hillbilly accents.
In a message from Skechers, employees and executives boasting about how they kicked Kanye West out of their headquarters earlier this week when he dropped in unannounced. But as much as they tout their zero-tolerance policy when it comes to antisemitism, they can’t hide how flattered they are that the rapper would seek them out: “Two years ago, could you image that headline: Sketchers too good for Kanye?” It’s a pretty good send up of the mercurial and masturbatory nature of corporate culture, but SNL really needs to go harder at Kanye, especially considering his long and embattled history with the show.
Live from the sidewalk of one of New York’s busy bar districts, The Post-Halloween Red Carpet special sees Strong and Day’s TV personalities interviewing all the “stars” of the “post-Halloween scene”: Drunk Girl Who Can’t Find Her Uber, Guy Who Really Wants You to Ask About His Costume, Frat Guy Dressed as Tampon, Guy Who Lost His Friends, “an impossibly drunk” Dora the Explorer, and a guy who may be dressed as Dahmer (but may also just be a pervert). As always with these caricature-rundown sketches, it’s good for a chuckle here and there, while feeling both rushed and draggy.
In an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Harlow’s recovering addict pitches a Pixar movie to the group. His concept – about “lost luggage trying to find its way home” – throws the meeting off track when all the other members start giving positive feedback and trading ideas about the film’s characters, voice work, and soundtrack. Things build to surprisingly good musical crescendo before culminating with a surprise appearance from none other than Tom Hanks.
This is followed by a horror movie trailer for 2020 Part 2: 2024. A group of Democrat-voting friends freak out over the prospect of a second Biden presidential campaign, their fears stemming from his advanced age, political setbacks, and many public fumbles and gaffes. But things get even scarier when they consider the alternatives, particularly the ghastly prospect of another Bernie or Hillary run. It’s a decent spoof of liberals’ penchant for freak outs and capitulation, but given how much the previous season of SNL tried to hammer home the (always unconvincing) idea that Kamala Harris was the brains of the Biden operation, the fact that she’s so quickly cast aside here comes off as suspect. The show appears to have realized that she might not be the Chosen One after all, but it also seems afraid to mine any humor out of her.
This is followed by a loud and obnoxious sketch in which Harlow and Bowen Yang play a pair of pretentious waiters/bartenders.
In Weekend Update, Colin Jost covers Elon Musk buying the hellhole that is Twitter, dismissing worries that he’ll ruin it by noting, “It’s not like he bought Disney World. It’s like he bought the rest of Orlando.” He and Michael Che also take aim at Musk buddy (and fellow former SNL guest) Kanye West: “Goodwill … will no longer accept donations of Kanye’s clothing, which is ironic because Kanye’s lost enough money that he might need them.”
We then get the welcome return of Bobby Moynihan as Drunk Uncle, who angrily yells, slurs and weeps his way through various rants on Halloween (“Halloween is socialism”), quiet quitting (“We used to quit loud, because they hired a lady manager and we were scared”), Chris Pratt (“Barf – not my Mario”), and, of course, Kanye (“I’ve been listening to a lot of what he has to say and you know what … I think he might be crazy”). The biggest laugh of the segment – and the night as a whole – comes from him casually referring to Jost as “Seth”.
The minute Hanks showed up earlier, it seemed a foregone conclusion we would get a sequel to his instantly iconic David S Pumpkins sketch from 2016 (Moynihan turning up only made it more obvious). Here, Pumpkins and his skeleton buddies return to baffle a new group of theme park attendees, who, like their predecessors, have never heard of the character. Other than learning that Pumpkins hails from Ibiza, there’s almost nothing to distinguish this sketch from the original. Still, I suppose some credit is owed to the show for waiting a whole six years to go back to the well.
Things wrap up with an episode of The View. The hosts – Whoopi Goldberg (Ego Nwodim), Joy Behar (Sarah Sherman), and “the B team” (Chloe Fineman, Punkie Johnson) – are still stewing about their recent interview with Ted Cruz being disrupted by climate activists. They attempt to move on by welcoming Harlow (as himself) to the table, only to argue among themselves about it. They ask Harlow for his take, but he’s only interested in getting into Goldberg’s pants. Despite telling him that “I have been closed for business since before you were born”, her walls of celibacy quickly crumble. Not a classic by any means, it nonetheless continues the show’s streak of closing out strong (at least by recent SNL standards).
Despite a rough monologue, Harlow ended up doing fine as host. The show used him wisely, giving him plenty of material without asking him to do anything outside his comfort zone. The same could be said of the episode as a whole – it didn’t take any big swings, but also didn’t have any huge strikeouts. Like last week, a solid, if not particularly memorable, outing.
