Saturday Night Live: “Daniel Craig/Muse” (Episode 38.3)
So far this season, Saturday Night Live hasn’t taken too many big chances with its guest hosts. Seth MacFarlane was sure to have a flair for the theatrical, and while Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a disappointment compared to his first hosting gig, he was certain to be up for anything. But the first guest this year who presents himself as a giant question mark is Daniel Craig. Craig has never shown his comedic side, but for the most part after this episode, he still hasn’t.
The inevitable presidential debate opened the show with a twist, as the skit showed Obama’s internal monologue. There were some good elements to it, like Sudeikis’ perfect Romney stare, Obama trying to figure out what to get Michelle for their anniversary and Chris Parnell’s appearance as Jim Lehrer.
Craig’s opening monologue was one of his best contributions of the night, when he showed an In Memoriam tape, also called “Or All The People I Done Killed” from all his action films. This segment showed two things about Craig: 1. He doesn’t have any experience with comedy in his films and 2. He was mostly going to be reading cue cards during the night, and usually not convincingly.
The next segment featured a bunch of construction workers catcalling at women passing by, with Craig as Jasper, a new worker who is terrible at it. Craig is thrown in to the show with some strange dialogue and a weird character that only works about half of the time. The reveal that Jasper’s father was a construction worker who was killed for catcalling was so odd that it was a highlight of the bit.
A pretaped commercial showing the lesser-known Bond Girls allowed much of the female cast to show off their rarely shown impressions. Vanessa Bayer as Diane Keaton and Kate McKinnon doing double duty as Jodie Foster and Ellen DeGeneres proved that SNL should utilize these characterizations more often. A big surprise was Nasim Pedrad as Lea Michele. Pedrad rarely makes me laugh, but this impression was hilarious and right on the nose.
The MSNBC segment showing Al Sharpton and Chris Matthews freaking out about Obama’s failures seemed like more of the same that we’ve seen from these news parody segments. McKinnon once again was great in another parody for Long Island Medium. McKinnon is becoming a weekly MVP and is on her way to becoming the standout newcomer for this season.
While it was one of the weirder skits in a night full of weird skits, a bit involving a team going to colonize Mars and starring Bobby Moynihan as Kirby, a man who just missed his kitty cat, was too unusual not to get some laughs. Even though the skit showed the worst of Craig’s hosting, Moynihan is usually great when he’s given the lead in a skit.
Probably the best segment of the night was a better-than-usual Weekend Update. Meyer’s headlines were much stronger, and the guests were fantastic. McKinnon once again impressed as Cecilia Gimenez, the woman who ruined the ‘Ecco Homo’ painting, and an appearance from Big Bird was so adorable, it was hard not to love. Moynihan easily won the adorable award this week, after playing with a kitten in the aforementioned skit, and then wide-eyedly hugging Big Bird during the end of the show.