With this past weekend’s season finale, Saturday Night Live is set to mark its 50th anniversary when it returns to screens in the fall. However things shake out come this time next year, season 50 is guaranteed to be remembered as a historic part of television history.
Season 49, however … not so much. The show hasn’t risen above OK for a long time now, but this past season was dire even by those low standards. In terms of memorable sketches, picking 10 to highlight proved more difficult than usual. Which isn’t to say there were no diamonds in the rough …
Weekend Update Joke Swaps
This biannual tradition, which the Weekend Update co-hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che celebrate during the Christmas episode as well as the season finale, has become the highlight of the segment. Jost and Che are able to lean fully into their innate smarminess in their attempt to out-offend and humiliate one another. These last two times around, Che upped the ante by bringing on a pair of older women – an actor playing a civil rights activist and an actual practicing rabbi – to sit in silent judgment as Jost is forced to deliver the sexist, racist material Che wrote for him.
Beautiful Girls
The tail end of Season 49 proved to be its weakest chunk, but thankfully it went out on a (comparatively) high note with the finale, which saw the host Jake Gyllenhaal at his best while mincing about on stage for this musical number. As the effete ringleader of a group of bland but lascivious “beautiful boys” in a 1920s dance review, Gyllenhaal displays a similar energy to his fellow returning host Ryan Gosling, with their chiseled leading man looks belying their natural comic talents and goofball energies. But whereas Gosling can’t help but ruin most of his sketches by breaking, Gyllenhaal always keeps the train on the track.
Fast Fashion Ad
One of the increasingly rare cases of SNL actually delivering a pointed political jab at its audience, this send-up of Chinese clothing brand Shein and its despicable business practices, which the narrator of a fake ad continually denies without prompting – “No prisoners involved,” “Premium fabrics with no lead” – manages to succinctly call out not only fast fashion companies, but the American shoppers who continue to support them.
NYPD Press Conference
Rounding out the trio of sketches from Gyllenhaal’s episode is this fun tribute to American character actors – also known as “Oh, him[s]” – that comes in the wake of the real-life New York City street assaults on the likes of Steve Buscemi, Rick Moranis and Michael Stuhlbarg. This one isn’t a gut-buster by any means, but its nice to see shoutouts to the likes of Walton Goggins and Stephen Root. Jon Hamm’s always welcome presence also kicks it up a notch.
The Anomalous Man
This pre-filmed black-and-white parody is a clever idea – what if The Elephant Man were a douchey fuck boy – that takes a bit too long to get to the reveal and then wraps up too quickly once it does. However, it earns entry on to this list for the special effects alone, which, as has been hinted at online by the sketch’s star Sarah Sherman, were created by or at least with the assistance of the legendary effects artist Rick Baker. Baker is the genius behind some of the most memorable makeup work of all time, as seen in classics such as An American Werewolf in London, Videodrome, Thriller, Men in Black and more. The SFX used to transform Sherman into the titular freak are probably the best ever seen on SNL.
OB-GYN
The set-up and payoff for this short sketch are wonderfully simple: an expecting couple meet their new OB-GYN, the preposterously named Dr Fat Daddy (Kenan Thompson), who explains that he got the moniker during his previous career as the “pit master at Fat Daddy’s BBQ Palace”. He then proceeds to handle his patient like she’s a piece of meat on the grill, going so far as to lick his fingers after checking her pH levels. SNL is often at its best when it forgoes complicated set-ups and just commits to being silly and a little gross.
Beavis and Butt-Head
This sketch – which sees a livestreamed political debate go off the rails when the guest notices two audience members (Ryan Gosling and Mikey Day) bear an uncanny resemblance to the cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-Head – managed to achieve a level of mainstream attention that SNL hasn’t enjoyed in ages, with Gosling and Day dressing up as the iconic duo for a red-carpet premiere of the former’s new film The Fall Guy. This is another case in which great costume effects do most of the heavy lifting, although the idea that the central characters have no knowledge of their animated doppelgangers is a great conceit. And while Gosling’s episode was hampered by far too much breaking by him and the rest of the cast, in this sketch none of them can really be blamed, given how ridiculously perfect he and Day looked.
Jumanji
Much like the above entry, this bit of 90s pop culture nostalgia from Kristen Wiig’s episode manages to hit the exact right notes of randomness and specificity. By the time Wiig’s paranoid partygoer and Andrew Dismukes’ frustrated host start loudly arguing about what, exactly, it means for someone to get “Jumanji’d”, the audience is rolling in the seats.
State of the Union Cold Open
Ever since the Tea Party movement took over the Republican party, conservative politicians have become too grotesque, ridiculous and insane to successfully satirize, making SNL’s job a hell of a lot harder. However, every once in a while, one will come along who make for the type of easy layup the show used to hit all the time. Such was the case with the Republican junior senator Katie Britt, who delivered the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address with a mixture of stilted awkwardness, high-school theater-level dramatics, and Get Out-style creepiness. While many expected SNL to give the role of Britt to its resident impressionist Chloe Fineman, they instead brought on a big-name guest star: Scarlett Johansson. This proved to be the absolute right decision, as Johansson sank her teeth into the role, delivering a real performance that perfectly captured Britt’s unsettlingly clownish persona.
Washington’s Dream
Initially, Nate Bargatze appeared to be an odd choice to host SNL. While he’s grown increasingly popular thanks to his Netflix specials, he’s hardly a household name, and his intentionally awkward everyman vibe seemed ill-suited to live sketch comedy. Well, more the fool us who doubted him, because he turned out to be one of the highlights of the season, especially in this blisteringly funny sketch about George Washington attempting to inspire his troops by regaling them with his dream of an America governed by a convoluted and nonsensical “system of weights and measures”. Bargatze does stumble over some of the tricky dialogue he’s tasked with, but his deadpan delivery more than makes up for it. I’d go so far as to claim that this sketch marks the peak of Season 49, even if it did air on only the third episode.
