Saturday Night Live Didn’t Really Know What to Do with Phoebe Waller-Bridge

If you somehow weren’t aware that Phoebe Waller-Bridge was British, Saturday Night Live was determined to let you know. The Fleabag creator and recent Emmy winner hosted this past weekend’s episode, and SNL made sure to pull out what have apparently become standard sketches whenever a Brit hosts the show. If you were hoping Waller-Bridge’s sharp eye for character-based comedy would somehow rub off on SNL you’d be disappointed, outside of a monologue in which her voice was noticeable.

The first Brit skit (sorry, sketch—I’m a sucker for lazy rhymes) was a repeat of a sketch from last season’s Claire Foy episode. It’s the one where Mikey Day plays a British soldier at the front line (last time it was World War I, this time World War II) writing letters back home to his wife. His letters are long and sincere, her replies are short, emotionless, and increasingly absurd. The Foy sketch worked much better than the one this time, and not just because it was new and original. The specific scenarios in that sketch were more absurd and thus funnier, and also Foy was better at playing her character—she seemed utterly sincere about her increasingly ridiculous replies, genuinely in love with Day’s character even as she described what was clearly an affair with Kenan Thompson. Waller-Bridge didn’t have the same level of material to work with, but she also didn’t seem as fully committed as Foy, and that hurt the sketch overall.

The other British standard was a sketch about the Royal Family. Fortunately it wasn’t a repeat of the lazy “home video” sketch the show has done about them a few times, where multiple cast members trot out their hit-or-miss accents in a sketch that’s usually aimless. This time the sketch was framed as a documentary about a scandal that rocked the family in the ‘70s, as a low-ranking member married an American who happened to be a Rudy Ray Moore parody played by Kenan Thompson. With his dirty rhymes, flashy suits, “party records” and kung fu blaxpoitation movies, Thompson is clearly playing on the Dolemite star’s persona, and if the juxtaposition of that stereotype with the reserved and serious British nobility sounds like a lazy set-up, rest assured that Thompson makes the whole sketch work with his typically excellent performance. Thompson is excellent at portraying men who are being giddily inappropriate, and between his timing, delivery and physical comedy he can get legitimate laughs out of even the most predictable jokes.