Saturday Night Live opens with a new episode of Fox & Friends. Hosts Steve Doocy (Mikey Day), Ainsley Earhardt (Heidi Gardner) and Brian Kilmeade (Bowen Yang) report on the $1.6bn lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems has brought against Fox News over its 2020 election conspiracy-mongering. Much like the network’s viewers, who’ve been kept in the dark about the case, the hosts don’t seem to know anything about it, with Kilmeade confusing Dominion for “the little yellow guys with the overalls” and Earhardt mistaking her boss Rupert Murdoch for convicted family killer Alex Murdaugh.
Lazy jokes about Fox News personalities’ private texts and short pop-ins from Mike Lindell (James Austin Johnson, whose impersonation of the MyPillow founder isn’t quite as good as former cast member Beck Bennet’s) and OJ Simpson (Kenan Thompson) follow, before things wrap up. You’d think the show would use any opportunity to twist the knife into Fox News, but this cold open is utterly dull and pointless.
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce hosts. The two-time Super Bowl winner, fresh off his victory over the Philadelphia Eagles, admits that he was nervous about doing a monologue, until he remembered that he’s “really good with words”, rolling footage of pep talks he’s given to his teammates that consist of him yelling “MORE! MORE! MORE! MORE!”
He talks about what an honor it was making history playing against his brother, Jason Kelce, a center for the Eagles, in the Super Bowl. Kelce reminisces about his troubled high school and college days (“It just goes to show: if you smoke weed and you’re bad at school you can win the Super Bowl twice!”) and his short-lived reality dating show (“That show is owned by NBC Universal, so it should be on Peacock, but Peacock said, ‘Nah, we good’”), before signing off with his trademark “MORE! MORE! MORE! MORE!”
It’s always a dicey prospect when SNL brings athletes on to host; for every Peyton Manning or Charles Barkley, there’s a Deion Sanders and JJ Watt. While the jury is still out on Kelce at the end of his monologue, he does seem more comfortable a comic performer than others of his ilk.
But then comes the first sketch and, to mix sports metaphors, Kelce immediately knocks it out of the park. He plays a pink-suited dandy taking in a lunch at an American Girl Cafe with his dolls Clare and Isabelle. His servers, naturally weirded out, grill him as to whether he’s on any sex offender or government watch lists, but since he’s not, they can’t kick him out. Kelce has a blast divulging way too much information about his dolls’ anatomy, sassily insulting a little girl from one table over, and flirting with another family’s boy toy, all while the waitstaff keep checking to make sure he’s not aroused. Things wrap up with an honest-to-God great stinger, a rare occasion on the show these days.
On a new Please Don’t Destroy, Ben, Martin and John decide to start sticking up for themselves by taking a self-defense class from Kelce’s instructor, Kurt Lightning. John and Ben are called to the front of the class for a demonstration, only to be instantly destroyed by Lightning’s offense, while Martin gets into a fight with an old lady. Things only escalate from there, leading to a twisted game of Russian roulette. A return to form for PDD and another solid outing from Kelce, who shows off a lot of potential as a comedic actor.
Next, Kelce plays Dylan, the lover and nurse of recently deceased senior citizen Glenda (Ego Nwodim). At her funeral, in front of her flabbergasted children, he displays her dead body – as per final wishes – propped up in a chair, wearing her favorite oversized Tweety Bird T-shirt and sunglasses, cigarette dangling from her lifeless mouth and liter of Dr Pepper in her cold grip. He’s rigged the corpse so that it also talks, dances and eventually flies off to heaven. Things are quite unfocused here, but Nwodim gets some laughs by going full Weekend at Bernie’s.
Bowen Yang finds himself in need of a break from his expensive and emotionally draining female besties. His solution: Straight Male Friend. As said Straight Male Friend, Kelce’s meathead gamer offers a “low-effort, low-stakes relationship that requires no emotional commitment, no financial investment, and other than the occasional video game-related outburst, no drama”. Kelce continues to impress, delivering the line of the night when he apologizes to Yang for “being a pussy about my dad dying”.
Then, Gardner and Kelce play exes who run into each other at a chic bar. Gardner’s character initially seems fine, even after meeting Kelce’s new girlfriend (Chloe Fineman). But as soon as she learns the two are engaged, tears start shooting out of her eyes – literally. The more she discovers about this new woman’s seemingly perfect life, the harder and faster the waterworks fly. It’s only once she introduces Kelce to her new beau – played, of course, by his brother Jason – does he follow suit, breaking down and violently weeping. SNL has had a decent run of prop-based sketches of late, owing mostly to Sarah Sherman, but the sight gag in this one simply isn’t outrageous or memorable enough to build an entire premise around.
On Weekend Update, Michael Che brings newly cancelled comic strip character Dilbert (Michael Longfellow) to the desk to discuss creator Scott Adams’s (latest) psychotic and racist Twitter rant. Dilbert pleads ignorance over Adams’s racist leaning; despite the fact he’s long known him to be “the Trump-supporting cartoonist who did magic in his spare time and did a great Kevin Hart impression”. The droll office drone now seeks to make amends by radicalizing himself, preparing for the oncoming race war and declaring “I woke up this morning ready to take the streets and paint the city with the blood of the white man!” Longfellow is well cast as Dilbert, but the fact is that Adams’s protracted public psychosis and self-immolation is beyond parody.
Later, Colin Jost invites on Punkie Johnson and Mikey Day to talk Oscars. This is just an excuse for Day to rib Johnson about her astounding lack of knowledge when it comes to celebrities and entertainers, despite being one herself. Fluff, but enjoyable fluff.
Finally, Jost begrudgingly turns thing over to Sherman for a new edition of Sarah News. The gleeful psychopath celebrates her 30th birthday – “or, as Colin calls it, 15 years too old!” – by making raunchy, self-deprecating jokes about her sex life and tarring Jost as racist predator of the lowest order. A welcome return for what is without a doubt the best recurring segment Update has going.
Nwodim and Johnson then play a husband and wife who call their adult children together for an emergency family meeting, where they break the news of their new “throuple”-hood with Kelce’s hot ex-con Sukray, via song. Not as good as earlier sketches, it still has its moments, most notably Johnson giving his best Michael McDonald.
Gardner and Kelce partner up once more, playing long-distance casual lovers who’ve just done the deed. In bed post-coitus, they’re interrupted by Garrett (Yang), a nerdy Hinge date who Gardner bailed on earlier that evening. In between deranged bathroom interludes where he talks himself out of committing murder, Garrett proposes the three form a throuple (this word was clearly very popular in the writer’s room this week).
The show wraps up with a parody of Netflix’s island-based reality TV show Too Hot to Handle. The contestants – all horny singles who must remain collectively celibate – are shocked to discover that Kelce’s handsome British contestant has been hooking up with Fineman’s gross weirdo, causing them to lose a lot of money, as well as their remaining sex drives. For the second episode in a row, Fineman’s mugging is off the charts. The worst sketch of the episode, but at least it’s short.
It’s too bad the episode petered out in the second half and ended on such a sour note, because the first half was as good as any episode of the last couple of seasons. Blame the drop-off on the show pushing Kelce to background when they should have kept him front and center for the duration. His work for that first half more than exceeded expectations, establishing him as not simply a good comic actor not only by athlete standards, but a good comic performer outright. Crossover-wise, forget becoming the next Payton Manning – this guy might be the next Dave Bautista. At the very least, he needs to become an SNL staple. Dude deserves to take another victory lap.
