A Christmas Miracle: Kevin Hart’s Saturday Night Live Was Just Fine
Photo by Will Heath/NBC
The final Saturday Night Live episode of 2017 included, among other things, a sketch about a guy shitting his pants, a sketch about a horny llama with a big dick, a monologue joke about how Kevin Hart hits his kids, a monologue joke about how he respects women for their child-rearing skills but they just aren’t fun, a sketch about a guy whose nagging wife compels him to undress and presumably hump an enormous stuffed bear, two rockin’ songs by Foo Fighters and a delightful photoshopped image of Colin Jost with cornrows. In other words, it was one of stronger episodes of the season.
Dave Becky client Kevin Hart is a natural host, all boyish energy, physicality and a peerless competence with cue cards. His monologue started as a funny, honest exploration of his anxieties over the imminent birth of his third child. It got weird, though, in a bit about how raising kids forces you to make up new words, such as a wordless urgent exclamation one uses to say, basically, “don’t do that.” The sound, he said, becomes so ingrained in us that if you go up behind a stranger and make it, they’ll flinch, “‘cause it always follows with a hit.” The implication, I suppose, is that he strikes his children? Does that track? I think that tracks. And this was a punchline! Then he went off on a stemwinder about how he respects women because they’re so good at taking care of kids, but what they’re not good at is being fun. Dads are the fun ones, you see, and being fun is the harder job. This from a guy who last week admitted to cheating on his pregnant wife. Cool!
Most of Hart’s characters were good old-fashioned oddballs in normal worlds: an incomprehensible Shaquille O’Neal (on stilts!) on Inside the NBA a guy in a business meeting who clumsily fakes a family emergency when he needs to go to the bathroom, a superhero pulled over by cops and busted for drug possession, a fitness personality named “Active Jack.” That second sketch, “Office Phone Call,” was probably one of the episode’s highlights, despite certain, er, played-out elements of the premise. It was a classically structured three-beat sketch whose action escalated to an obvious, but still surprising climax; its third beat inverted the premise in what was, I daresay, a moving turn. Pete Davidson, always a pleasure, featured prominently.