Saturday Night Live: “Gal Gadot / Sam Smith”

Saturday Night Live ditched the cold open last night for an appearance by country singer Jason Aldean, who briefly honored the victims of the massacre that took place during his concert in Las Vegas last Sunday. “So many people are hurting—there are children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends,” he said. “We hurt for you and we hurt with you, and you can be sure we’re going to walk through these tough times together every step of the way. Because when America is at its best our bond and our spirit is unbreakable.” Then he played Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” because, I guess, why not hit two completely incomparable tragedies with one stone? Yikes.

Like the episode as a whole, host Gal Gadot’s opening monologue never quite gets off the ground. She leads with a few jokes about her Israeli background, switching to Hebrew to tell her relatives that SNL’s writers don’t know anything about Israel other than that hummus exists, so they have her eat hummus in every sketch, and also they seem to think she’s “the actual Wonder Woman.” The joke, you see, is that people in show business are so stupid they don’t understand show business. Leslie Jones runs on as a Times Square street performer who plays, that’s right, Wonder Woman. She and Gadot go back and forth about their differing tools for the job—Gadot has the Lasso of Truth, Jones has vodka—and then the segment ends. Ha ha, poor people.

After the monologue comes a commercial parody previewing a slate of new shows on E!, namely Kendall’s World, about how Kendall Jenner is not very smart. Finally, in 2017, jokes about the Kardashians.

Gadot returns for a live sketch with Kenan Thompson. They play a couple on a Bumble date. It slowly emerges that Thompson is playing OJ Simpson. Gadot’s character grew up in Bosnia-Herzegovia during the Bosnian War, so she totally missed that part of the ‘90s and has no clue who OJ is. He is eager to keep her naive. Why do people recognize him? Because he’s a famous athlete. Why do some people hate him? Because of racism. Why is he still single? “It’s a mystery.” At the end of the sketch he leads her out of the restaurant to take her home. He looks at the camera and says, “I still got it.” Thank you, SNL, for a sketch about how funny it is when men deceive women into sleeping with them.

Probably the episode’s highlight, though that’s not saying much, was “The Chosen One,” a Pete Davidson-helmed digital short. He returns as Chad, a stoner dude playing video games when a glowing portal opens in his closet. He follows it into a Narnia-type land where an elf (Mikey Day), a dwarf (Beck Bennett), a centaur (Thompson) and the realm’s queen (Cecily Strong) inform him that he is the only one who can save it from something or other. Chad is pretty nonplussed about the news, grunting his assent as they describe the trials that await them. The jokes are refreshingly silly and the role is a great one for Davidson, though it gets kinda weird when Strong-as-fairy-queen promises that if he succeeds, she will give up her virginity to him, which of course he misunderstands and takes off his pants right then and there. Is this plot point a staple of the genre being parodied? I don’t know but I do know that it’s possible to write comedy in which every female character is not a sex object. The sketch ends with him playing with the sword he’s given as though it’s his dick, in case you needed another reminder that men write this show.

And in case you needed yet another, the next sketch features Thompson and Bennett as two National Geographic photographers lost in the desert. On the verge of death, they start hallucinating. Thompson sees his wife’s personal trainer (Gadot) at a lemonade stand, seductively beckoning him over. Bennett sees the staff of his local Jamba Juice (Day, Jones and Kyle Mooney) yelling at him to come pick up his smoothie. But wait, the sketch escalates! In Thompson’s sketch, Gadot takes her shirt off. Then, in Bennett’s, Day and Mooney take off theirs. Upset that his dying fantasy isn’t sexy enough, Bennett tries to imagine his colleague’s wife’s personal trainer, who I guess he’s seen a picture of, and he succeeds, and she appears at the Jamba Juice counter eating a strawberry, then gets escorted away by Day and Mooney, while meanwhile Jones replaces Gadot in Thompson’s fantasy, which Thompson says he’s cool with. The sketch ends.

Another commercial parody stars Aidy Brant as an on-the-go mother to Melissa Villaseñor’s high school-age basketball player. When her windshield cracks before the big game, Bryant dials up Safelite Autoglass to fix it. Bennett plays the charming salesperson who, it gradually comes out, is breaking the windshield so he can repair it and flirt with the daughter character, who is 17. Of the five sketches so far, four have been about horny men.

Then Sam Smith sings a song. He’s a talented young man and I wish him all the best.

Weekend Update opens with some as-on-point-as-Weekend-Update-can-be jokes about gun violence. The tragedy in Las Vegas has sparked a debate, Colin Jost quips, between people who want common sense gun control and people who are wrong. Michael Che proposes a gun buyback program in which you trade in guns for a half-inch of penis enlargement. Sure, all right, whatever. Jost runs through some Trump jokes and laments Jeff Sessions’ rollback of discrimination protections for transgender people, which, hey, Colin Jost, maybe before you assume this moral posture you could acknowledge some shitty jokes about trans people you doubled down on? Seems like a reasonable request.

Kate McKinnon comes out as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a segment perfectly devoid of humor, then Jost and Che do some one-liners comparably devoid, and then Che criticizes the rollback of birth control protections with this line for the ages: “Women are basically putting their bodies through global warming just so I can keep pretending to have a latex allergy.” Ha ha, yeah, a woman’s right to birth control about you, Che! It’s about you lying to get laid! Jesus Christ, you guys.

Oh! I lied earlier when I said “The Chosen One” was the episode’s highlight. The actual highlight was Davidson coming on Weekend Update to talk about his experience with borderline personality disorder. His advice for people who think they might be depressed is to see a doctor, make healthy choices, and if they’re in the cast of a late night show, the show should do more of their sketches. It’s a good bit! Serviceable and self-deprecating, serious and light-hearted. At the end of it, when the crowd is applauding, Davidson asks Jost, “How have I not been fired?” Great stuff.

The next sketch sucked. It’s about a princess (Gadot) who I guess is poor for reasons I must have missed when I wasn’t paying attention to the opening voiceover. A trio of mice (Bryant, McKinnon, Mooney) make her a dress for some fancy ball, but here’s the thing: The dress looks like shit. When she refuses to wear it out, they make fun of her for being poor. It’s actually pretty vicious and weird! Bennett comes in as her date, learns that the mice made her the dress, and asks Bryant out to the ball instead. But why?, the princess asks. “Oh sorry, I don’t date poor chicks. It gets messy real fast.” Wow!

The next sketch also sucked. I don’t really want to get into it but it Alex Moffat plays some spy-type dude making an exchange with some other spy-type lady (Gadot), who I guess is holding some valuable flash drive for ransom, and for some reason they’re doing the exchange over video chat, and the chat keeps cutting out and switching to this webcam channel where Bryant and Strong do gross stuff for money, and, I don’t know, it keeps switching back and forth between the two channels, muddying up the deal, and then Moffat accidentally wires the ransom money to the webcam ladies, and also Thompson and Luke Null are in the sketch too.

Then Sam Smith sings another song. God bless you, Sam Smith!

Finally we arrive at the Wonder Woman parody, sort of. Diana (Gadot) is hanging out on Themyscira with her fellow Amazons when two women (McKinnon and Bryant) pull up in a rowboat. The bit is that they think the Amazons, like them, are lesbian, that this is an island full of lesbians, an island where they can live the rest of their lives happily boning hot women, but it turns out it’s not, none of the Amazons are gay, even though they do rough-house a lot and admire each other’s bodies and all that. The joke is also that Gadot is really hot and they want to fuck her, so it’s very frustrating for them when she lays their heads on her breasts in a sort of sympathetic gesture that doesn’t track logically but hey, clearly someone wanted Gadot to say “tits.” She offers to make out with McKinnon, to see if she _{feels anything}, and they kiss, and everyone cheers!, but she doesn’t feel anything, so McKinnon and Bryant leave the island. An animation shows them ending up at the Greek Island of Lesbos, ha ha. I don’t know who wrote the sketch and but it very much played like the most obvious male fantasy you could fantasize about an island of powerful women warriors. If it was in fact a woman’s fantasy, still I gotta question the choice to give this episode yet another sketch where the joke is that women are hot.

In the episode’s final sketch, Gadot plays a daytime talk show host whose schtick, I guess, is solving problems with tough love. In this case she brings on a tough-guy cop-type character (Thompson) to deal with a rebellious teenage girl (Heidi Gardner) who hates her mom (Bryant) and also is addicted to straws (this was funny enough). He threatens to take her away to his boot camp and asks if she’d like that, if she’d like it if he were her daddy. The joke of the sketch is she takes this literally—she does want a daddy, because, you see, she has no father figure, which apparently is why she misbehaves—and then so does everyone else, and he gets pressured into adopting her.

That’s it, that’s the end of the show.

Seth Simons is Paste’s assistant comedy editor. Follow him on Twitter.