Adam Driver's Intensity Props Up a Wobbly Saturday Night Live

Adam Driver is both super-intense and deeply funny, a combination that works to make his Saturday Night Live appearances (this is his fourth) a bracing exercise in Method comedy. For someone whose stock in trade is wall-punching commitment, the Ferrari star is always game to stick his head through a prop airplane seat to play a tetchy and creepily articulate infant. Plenty of hosts have done the “unintentionally suggestive home shopping pitchman” schtick, but few have leaned into the deadpan innuendo like Driver. And when a sketch calls for his character to engage in an edgy showdown with Andrew Dismukes’ identically (if outwardly) chipper holiday host over the Christmas buffet’s last remaining trivet, Driver’s your guy.

Tonight’s wasn’t a great show, exactly—several sketches played to expecting silence, their oddball energy as appreciated (by me) as they were sometimes half-realized. But there was Driver, fully inhabiting sketch after sketch, ending an off-kilter episode an admirably weird authority. Driver’s monologue, which allowed him to show off his actual piano chops, was the sort of absurdist musical litany (this time of Christmas wishes and observations) that Zach Galafianakis used to do, albeit sort of rushed and undeveloped. Still, Driver brings a prickly energy that buoys anything he’s in, an eminently strange vibe that seems poised to spill over into unpredictable hilarity. That this outing never quite got to the hilarity part very much still gave Driver another solid showing as one of those Saturday Night Live hosts who should be above the gig but, instead, obviously have a blast.

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The Best and the Rest

The Best : Case in point is the Christmas party sketch, a conceit that never kicks into high hilarity but yet allows Driver and Dismukes a showcase for some rewardingly conceptual underplaying. As two seemingly innocent holiday dads whose stalemate over the inviolability of their chirpy “beep-beep” small talk develops into a full-on blood feud, the two actors are matched perfectly, Dismukes’ innate facility with intense weirdo behavioral comedy finding a suitable partner in Driver’s identically mustachioed would-be host. The sketch rides a thin blade of holiday family awkwardness that seems best suited for the 10-to-one slot, but I am never one to complain when that sort of idea-driven, offbeat sensitivity is, instead, featured on the top half of the show. Driver’s, “Oh I see—you want to die tonight,” in response to Dismukes’ refusal to back down on placing his Christmas casserole on the one remaining spot at the crowded table is delivered with signature Adam Driver dead-eyed menace, even as he and Dismukes (and, eventually, Kenan’s gun-displaying third competitor) all maintain a veneer of holiday gathering politesse. Emblematic of the show overall, it’s not a laugh-out-loud yuk fest as much as it is the sort of acting showcase that commands attention.

The Worst: Similarly, there weren’t any low-lows tonight, either. (Apart from the cold open, which suffered from this Saturday Night Live’s curse of glib topicality.) The similarly wintry get-together that was the ski trip sketch was another oblique trip into oddball character weirdness, with Driver and Bowen Yang’s gay couple happily chiming in with their friends’ plans to conceive a child. Thankfully and sort of remarkably, the sketch largely avoids the tired SNL joke structure whereby everyone points out the underlying absurdity powering the joke (here the couple’s stubbornly blissful rejection of biology) until all comic energy sputters away, and Driver and Yang are both contained and bristly as their hetero pals gentle prod at their seemingly doomed conception plan. That said, there’s a disconnect between the conceptual humor of the couple’s plan and lines like Driver’s, “Funny enough, I had a dream where my son came out of my ass.” I am all for the first post-monologue sketch not being some game show or celebrity-driven impression-fest, and there’s enough oddity to this sketch that I can’t ding its tonal lapses too forcefully. Still, this was both hazy and crude to equally disappointing measure.

The Rest: The filmed piece about Mikey Day looking up his childhood pal during a visit home to his parents’ house has a great engine in Driver, his long-ago playmate turning out to be a nightmare of conspiracy theories, gay-bashing, sex crimes, and sketchy associates. Subverting the feel-good holiday trope of reconnecting with old friends with a gradually unspooling series of alarming texts makes for a nicely paced reveal, with the stinger that it’s all a commercial for a certain social media site (where you could find out in advance if, for example, your childhood bestie isn’t allowed within 1000 feet of schools) a cozy button. Again, putting Adam Driver in this sort of edgy bit only makes it slash a little harder.

Adam Driver as a creepily articulate and menacing baby is a sight I’m not likely to wash away any time soon. The sketch, with Sarah Sherman’s apologetic mom tending to her 2-years-gestated little angel while her fellow passengers can only look on in horror, only works thanks to Driver’s conception of just what an infant with a grown man’s vocabulary but a baby’s understanding would sound like. Delightedly referring to mom’s iPad as “the Peppa Pig device” and responding to his mother’s game of teddy bear peek a boo with a furious “You killed him, you bitch!” is, in Driver’s deadpan delivery reliably amusing. It’s a gimmicky bit. But the guy can take a gimmick and run with it.

The second filmed piece sees Driver and various cast members in old age getup as the nation’s grandparents who are, collectively, sick and tired of being used as fodder for their grandkids’ TikTok prank videos. Being a cranky old cuss myself, I’m not on the TikToks, so I’ll take Saturday Night Live’s word (and my awareness of boorish internet culture) for the piece’s relevance. The pranks themselves give the cast and Driver some fun reactions. Driver’s veteran stammering that he “has 81 confirmed kills” after being dunked on in the WalMart toy section is a highlight, while his further revelation that he helped segregationist George Wallace barricade schools only layers in how the put-upon oldies have their own skeletons.

Weekend Update update

“It’s gonna be one of these kinds of nights, huh?,” mused an off-camera Che after another of his zingers elicited hard-earned groans from the crowd. (It was about presidential nepo baby and all-around kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claiming he only flew on pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous plane to make sure “none of those girls were vaccinated.”) It’s that sort of chummy outrage-baiting that this iteration of Update thrives on, with other mixed responses coming after Che joked about ex-cop murderer Derek Chauvin being stabbed by a cellmate 22 times (“but Chauvin still wouldn’t stop choking him”) among others, something the anchors clearly relish. They’re pretty good jokes, even if the deliberate provocation sometimes overshadows the actual meat of the fake news. I liked better when Che broke accustomed joke structure in introducing a joke about New York Mayor Eric Adams’ plummeting approval rating only to segue into the next joke after musing, “Now that sounds low…” Switching gears works really well at confounding audience expectations, too.

Marcello Hernandez got another standup segment, here being reliably adorable relating how his childhood as the only male in an all-woman household informs his outlook. Framed as a piece about rising depression in men gives Hernandez an excuse to do a few voices and take some shots at men’s lack of expressed empathy compared to women, and, again, Marcello is pleasantly adorable. Actually addressing the fact that the rats’ nest of “societal and genetic issues” that might contribute to this epidemic of depression is a lot harder to do standup about is at least self-aware about a very overused Update correspondent formula.

In one of the more baffling celebrity drop-ins in a while—Julia Stiles! With Chloe Fineman turning her holiday sexy gift segment into an excuse to don a leotard and reenact Stiles’ climactic hip-hop ballet dance from 2001’s Save the Last Dance, the sketch initially skips along on Fineman’s lithely precise moves, until Stiles’ unexpected appearance got a huge (if confused) audience pop and the two performed the finale in (iffy) synchronicity. Clearly something Chloe was dying to do (and with the game Stiles seemingly in town), it’s random enough to appreciate for the out-of-nowhere goof it is.

Recurring Sketch Report

The home shopping sketch saw Driver’s buttoned-down chocolatier blithely marketing his solid candy Santas, which, when unwrapped, look unerringly like a giant, brown dick. That’s the joke, folks, with Heidi Gardner and Mikey Day’s glad-handing hosts desperately attempting to avoid the inescapable imagery. (The little ridge around the top is necessary to make Santa’s hat look right in the foil, Driver explains.) As in previous Shop TV installments, the constant barrage of straight-faced innuendo and Day’s signature brand of aghast protestations is a matter of personal taste. (Naturally, Driver’s entrepreneur tosses in a pair of decidedly testicular chocolate balls as a bonus.) Again, having Driver on hand can only help (the guy commits), but this sort of leering old school, lightly smutty schtick is for the cheap seats.

Political Comedy Report

The cold open was yet another C-Span hearing, this time a take on the recent university heads semi-disastrous testimony to Republicans concerning their institutions’ responses to the rising tensions on campuses surrounding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Well, I’ve been asking for Saturday Night Live to actually have to wherewithal to tackle that thorny topic, so, be careful what you wish for, I guess.

The fact that the ongoing Gaza bloodshed has evoked a wide and complex range of violent disagreement in this country is here presented as a limp noodle of easy academic-bashing and Republican impression mediocrity. Chloe Troast continues to stake out territory, here as New York GOP Rep. and hard-pivoting right wing sucker-fish Elise Stafanik. It’s a committed performance, albeit in service of some watery non-satire, with Stefanik’s bad-faith badgering pitted against the presidents’ lame non-answers about the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate among their respective student bodies. (The sketch does highlight Republicans’ desire to focus cynically on the anti-Jewish hate rather than the other kind.) On Update, Colin Jost picked up on the theme, referring to the immediate post-hearing resignation of UPenn President Liz Magill’s unwillingness to serve up an acceptable sound bite, and there’s no doubt that Magill and her colleagues’ responses to Stefanik’s strident baiting came off as a parody of bookish abstraction.

But complexity isn’t a vice, and Saturday Night Live jumping up and down on it in service of saying literally nothing at all isn’t satire. The issue of bigots seizing upon the Israeli government’s bloody attacks on Gaza in response to Hamas’ bloody attacks on Israeli civilians to push their own hateful agendas is damnably tricky to turn into comedy. But, you know, that’s SNL’s job, if the show chooses to take it on, and this sketch was another topical heap of room temperature tapioca. That some students have leapt into full-on hate speech against their Jewish and Palestinian fellows under the guise of righteous activism is a tough freaking thing for institutions (as the presidents futilely tried to explain), testing those schools’ commitment to the free exchange of ideas. (Free speech absolutists are awfully selective about what hot-button issue is protected.) That was the point Magill and others were trying to make, however flimsy their arguments looked in the face of politicians’ typically blunt calls for simplistic blanket statements. (Especially coming from Stefanik, whose own racist conspiracy mongering has been increasingly called into question.) That there’s no place for intellectual complexity in Congress is a valid target for political comedy. But eschewing complexity in comedy is pure death.

“This was all very useless,” Troast’s Stefanik states to blessedly conclude the sketch, a sentiment that would be more on-point if it didn’t refer to the sketch instead of the inept grandstanding and ill-composed intellectualism of the hearing itself.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

Sarah Sherman didn’t get to do any Sarah Squirm things this week, instead finally getting into the unobtrusive ensemble groove in a few sketches with some low-key character work.

Chloe Troast is jumping the featured player line. Good on her, although that meant Longfellow, Walker, and Kearney all fell back a bit.

10-to-One Report

In a night where at least three sketches could have wound up in the Saturday Night Live10-to-one spot, “Tiny-Ass Bags” is perhaps the least out there. It’s still fun, as Marcello Hernandez, Ego Nwodim, and Driver all pitch their boutique’s line of absurdly tiny-ass bags. I’m inevitably going to compare this to the ex porn star pitch-person sketches, which closed out many a show with similar parades of absurdist details and catchphrases, with this one’s own pitch for recurring status not holding up well in comparison. Still, the list of things the salespeople claim can be contained in their wee wares (clothes for a worm, the Honey I Shrunk the Kids kids, “a reasonable amount of cocaine,” a single mitochondria) made me chuckle. You know, just a tiny bit.

Parting Shots

Tonight’s in memoriam card: 1976 one-time host and sitcom legend Norman Lear, who only made it to 101 . “ The Snake-Handling O’Sheas ” remains one of the most bananas sketches of the early years, while I’m always tickled that Lear basically tossed the young Lorne Michaels’ timing out the window so he could do an overlong joke with his daughter .

Che, on Nick Cannon spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to take his 12 children to Disneyland: “That is how bad condoms feel.”

Musical guest Olivia Rodrigo popped in to help out in the tiny bags sketch, but I much preferred her theatrical, prop-smearing performance of the sort of kick-ass “ all-american bitch .”

Next week is hosted by someone named Kate McKinnon—ever heard of her? Musical guest Billie Eilish.

Adam Driver’s Intensity Props Up a Wobbly Saturday Night Live

Adam Driver is both super-intense and deeply funny.