Saturday Night Live: “Russell Crowe/Margo Price”
Russell Crowe is starring in an upcoming movie with Ryan Gosling (The Nice Guys, opening May 20) and manages to out-guest host his co-star with a pretty solid Saturday Night Live.
Gosling hosted a mostly forgettable episode last December, never quite finding his groove with live television sketch comedy. Crowe, on the other hand, shines on the 8-H stage. Which is strange, as he is a confirmed dramatic actor, though not entirely surprising. Great screen actors often make the best SNL hosts. They know how to bring characters to life, how to turn dialogue on the page into believable conversation on screen. And ultimately, this serves the Saturday Night Live writing staff well.
The episode opened with yet another great message from Hillary Clinton (Kate McKinnon), struggling to explain away the fact Bernie Sanders has won seven primaries in the past couple of weeks. McKinnon’s Hillary gingerly and begrudgingly allows herself to have “real New York” experiences like a street hot dog and a Yankees baseball cap—if only for a moment. The sketch reminds us that the ticket to political insider power seems to be giving up one’s membership in common experience, a point driven home so well by the real Hillary’s subway gaffe earlier this week—though Kate’s version of the incident does take it to its most absurd lengths.
Al Sharpton in the form of Kenan Thompson goes head to head with the real, live Al Sharpton in the second live sketch of the episode in “Politics Nation.” Thompson’s Sharpton has a silly edge, brazenly mispronouncing words while setting up several zingers regarding the African-American perspective on the election. What about all these voter ID laws? No one has ever contacted Rev. Sharpton in a panic: “Help me, Reverend Sharpton! My son is out there on the streets committing voter fraud!” Ditto the Black Voter Approval Rating quotient, ranging from a high of 22 for President Obama to Trump’s bottom-basement rating of -1,048 (“but that could still go down!”). Of course, Senator Sanders has his own problems with minority voters: “Never has a black person said, ‘I’ve got time off this weekend. Anybody want to go to Vermont?’”
Russell Crowe works hard and delivers well in his sketches, disproving the impression we initially get from a rather flat opening monologue which attempts to find the humor in his blockbuster dramatic films. Crowe is genuinely funny, offering us characters with more depth than the simplistic punch lines would have implied. His very first piece, where he plays a hologram in the Henry VIII: The Experience exhibit, reminds us that we probably wouldn’t enjoy meeting most historic figures. Henry VIII fascinates us because we don’t have to put up with his lechery in real life.