If anything about Saturday Night Live is true, it’s that the show loves to have Michael Keaton host during an anniversary season. 10 years ago, as SNL’s 40th season was nearing its conclusion, Keaton stopped by for the 17th episode and brought the house down—delivering one of the most memorable monologues of the last decade. Back then, Keaton was in Studio 8H promoting his new (and eventual) Oscar-winning film Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance); this time, a little sequel flick called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is sweeping across theaters.
Last night marked Keaton’s fourth hosting appearance, and he’s the first “classic host” to return for the show’s 50th season. Personally, I still think “Bobby Watches Grandma” is an all-time underrated ‘90s skit in the show’s pantheon. Keaton is the kind of actor you want hosting, because he—despite not being a member of the Five Timers’ Club—goes 100% and buys into the very sentimentality that has kept the lights on at SNL for five decades. What’s special about Keaton is that he was an actor who hosted the show before he broke big in Hollywood; his first hosting stint was in Season 7, six years before he’d star in She’s Having a Baby, Beetlejuice and Batman all in a matter of 20 months. There’s something magical in that, as there is something magical in the fact that musical guest Billie Eilish made her own fourth appearance on the show last night. Keaton’s best SNL attributes have always been his ability to service the sketches without pulling the attention off the cast surrounding him. So, how good was his fourth stop at Studio 8H?
We are just 16 days away from the presidential election, so it should have been no surprise that we got another helping of Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris last night—this time in the form of a Fox News interview the vice president held earlier in the week. A familiar face—Alec Baldwin—guest stars as journalist (and deplorable scumbag) Bret Baier, a “businessman made in Minecraft” and a “Legoman,” probing Harris about her penchant for viral moments and playing incorrect video clips of Trump. Baier’s attempts to goad Harris into saying something he and his cronies can use in baseless attacks is met with a stern rebuttal, and a “Ja’Biden”- and Megalopolis-quoting Harris says something that could be a good thesis statement for the show’s cold opens this season: “The pleasure is none of ours.”
The sketch pokes fun at Trump’s recent “enemy from within” attacks (and Fox News’ cut-and-paste clip manipulation that, in real life, Harris denounced swiftly), having the former president cite Big, Freaky Friday and Hannah Montana and then dance vigorously to gay anthems like “It’s Raining Men” and “YMCA.” We get some LOL-worthy bits from Trump (James Austin Johnson), like “They said I was ‘threatening’—not true. I would never threaten anything except, perhaps, violence” and “America is a terrible place full of jerks and idiots, but we love it—it’s really bad,” but we also get him shouting “Scarface!” after mentioning that he’s been investigated more times than Al Capone, only to mention that Al Pacino nearly died from the great hoax of COVID-19. Just like last week, JAJ does an incredible job capturing Trump’s non-linear, non-sensical ramblings—weaving through conspiracy theories with ease.
If you’ve been sticking with me through these reviews this season, then you already know that I despise Dana Carvey’s tiring Joe Biden impression. It’s a one-note, one-catchphrase bit that hopelessly goes nowhere each time Carvey comes onto the screen. What this week’s cold open made clear is that, no matter how annoying and exhausting Alec Baldwin was when he was an every-other-week guest star as Trump five years ago, he remains one of the best non-cast members SNL has ever made a regular—even if his presence this week meant that a cast member lost out on air time, which is still, begrudgingly, a shadow lingering over Season 50.
“You look mahvelous!”
There’s a first time for everything, and last night marked the first time all season that the best sketch of the episode was a pre-recorded bit—all thanks to Please Don’t Destroy, who finally made their first appearance of the season. The bit—John Higgins and Martin Herlihy celebrating their birthday by going skydiving—finds the troupe stepping out of their office and onto a plane 10,000 feet in the air. Ben Marshall, who plays the skydiving instructor, can’t stop talking about all the bad vibes he’s getting (“I just have a weird feeling in my stomach,” “Luck’s not on my side”). The other instructor (Keaton) just lost custody of his kids (“Maybe there’s just a small part of me that always wanted to die”), and the pilot (Emil Wakim) is watching a “how to fly” TikTok on his first day on the job.
It’s a shame that the audience didn’t seem too keen on this one in the moment, because it exemplifies exactly what Please Don’t Destory do best: absurdity unfolding across a seemingly high-stakes situation. A grandpa-shaped apparition appears in a selfie, while Herlihy declares his romantic love for a reluctant and spooked-out Higgins before kissing him on the cheek. “We’re jumping into the unknown,” Marshall says. “That’s why we do this, to figure out who we really are.” Then, as he and Higgins are about to jump, their parachute deploys prematurely and they get sucked out of the cabin and into the plane’s turbine. It’s good to have the boys back.
“Yipee! Jerry Rubin died last week.”
Well, Update was Update—a Trump-heavy first half of the segment, since the election is two weeks away and all. Wakim made his Update Desk debut, commenting on the election as a child of Lebanese immigrants and riffing on his upbringing as a Christian Arab. “We’re like Black dudes with anime backpacks,” Wakim quipped, received with a level of applause Michael Che would get after making one of his infamous anti-women jokes. Just moments later, Wakim’s final joke bombs horrendously—only for him to recover by saying Colin Jost wrote that joke for him. It was a promising moment for the new cast member, showcasing his ability to stand up straight in a high-pressure situation. Jost’s reaction to the misdirection solidified the move. Game recognizes game.
Jost and Che trade bits about candles, Elon Musk, Biden’s old age, bathrooms, Tom Brady, National No-Bra Day and Halloween candy, and we even get a “Jost is in the KKK” joke from Che—one of the more chuckle-worthy moments of Update this week. Luckily, Sarah Sherman made her triumphant return to the desk last night and saved the whole shebang, delivering an absolutely maddening sermon on Victoria’s Secret’s recent all-inclusive fashion show. “Where are my Midwest 4s at?” she boasts, before going on a tirade about the kind of underwear she wants to see represented on the runway—namely the diapers she wears with an oversized T-shirt that says “New Orleans” across the front. Sherman, with her “resting rabbi face” and all, has been playing a lot of “straight woman” parts this season, so it was nice to finally see her stretch out last night, giving us the four best minutes of the show.
“In a word? Chaos.”
The first post-monologue skit last night wasn’t bad, as we got Mikey Day and Heidi Gardner playing two Shop TV hosts who are positively chuffed about their new Halloween infomercial. The Cookie Guy (Keaton) stops by to present his new product: zombie eye cookies that look like boobs. We get an SNL-sized helping of innuendos—including a masterfully blurred shot of the Cookie Guy squirting ghost-white cream all over the cookie Day is holding. Someone calls into the show: “Do those cookies come in different ethnicities?” Then, a 500-unit order made by the Pelican Bay State Prison comes in. Not a ton of laughs came in from the audience on this one, as it’s a bit that SNL has wrung dry over the years, but it’s a formula that rarely bombs. And, in an episode without any really good, water cooler-worthy non-pre-recorded sketches, serviceable is a merit-worthy accomplishment.
I’ll also give a shoutout to the “Horror Choreographer” sketch, which featured Day having an absolute blast doing very sensual, animated, “sassy and flirty” movements as Michael Myers on the set of a new Halloween film. The reason for all the flamboyancy is his Broadway-influenced coach Beau, played by Keaton. It’s one of those sketches that works for the first two minutes and then, by the four-minute mark, fizzles out quickly—a typical archetype for a lot of SNL sketches these days, but not an alien fate whatsoever.
“You are weak like H.R. Pickens!”
It’s hard to give the “worst sketch of the night” designation to anything but the 10-to-1 sketch, which featured two families together at a restaurant bonding over drinks. The dad (Keaton) sees a waitress (Gardner) and mistakes her for an old lover from 40 years ago. They share stories and find kinship in the overlap of their broken romances. It’s a heartwarming premise, sure, but it’s not funny. “That’s the magic of tabeside guac,” SNL wrote on X/Twitter; too bad there wasn’t much magic to be found here. The SNL band does a great job scoring the scene, though.
(Dis)honorable mention goes to “Forbidden Romance,” one of this season’s worst pre-Update sketches. The joke—a white man (Andrew Dismukes) singing a song about his Black girlfriend (Ego Nwodim) in the 1950s Midwest—was set-up perfectly, only to tumble into a very uninteresting performance of Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister.” Yawn. Not even Kenan Thompson could save that sketch from its own hopelessness. Bonus points, however, are given for at least trying to be funny—unlike a certain aforementioned 10-to-1 ruse.
“If you have a $50 bill, we can give you 50 singles.”
We got two recorded sketches last night: “TikTok” and Please Don’t Destroy’s “Skydiving.” The TikTok sketch was refreshingly well-done, getting its kicks off cramming as many of the app’s trending creators and ideas into as few minutes as possible—including AJ and Big Justice, the absolute chaos of live-streamers, Keith Lee, TikTok shops, tradwives, the Call Her Daddy podcast, Harry Daniels serenading Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and Billie Eilish, and Kamala Harris’s HQ’s account. These kinds of segments are always hit-or-miss, largely because you have to have a certain level of internet brain-rot to really understand most of the references. If you’re always on your phone, “TikTok” was probably a major winner last night; if you had no idea who anybody in that sketch was, then you were probably left scratching your head—or you thought it was a commercial instead of an SNL bit. Toeing that kind of line is necessary, though, as the show has to keep one foot in the door of 2024’s zeitgeist. Even with the old-school Keaton involved as a host, the show didn’t let itself get too nostalgic last night.
Your very precious lunch hour…”
The post-Update sketches were relatively abysmal last night, save for the first half of the Halloween segment. “Uber Game Show” was a particularly low moment—as Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman are taking a rideshare to JFK Airport for a Miami trip, only to end up on a ride that becomes a conspiracy theorist’s game show. Nwodim gets a moment to take the lead here, playing a whacky and distrusting old geezer who questions vaccines, the presidential election and the media. Keaton comes in for a moment as an equally delusional weirdo, but the sketch just never gets off the ground. “Cash Cab But For Right-Wing Freaks” isn’t necessarily the most enjoyable premise in the world.
Not Ready For Primetime Power Rankings
1. Sarah Sherman Getting a spot in a lackluster sketch like “Uber Game Show” aside, Sarah Sherman’s Update piece saved the show for me last night. It was such a pleasant reprieve after a pretty underwhelming string of Update bits lately (“Monica a Happy Amazon Employee on Prime Day,” “Noel and Liam Gallagher on Oasis’ Reunion Tour” and Jane Wickline’s party song were all either mediocre or excruciating to watch), and Sherman’s chemistry with Jost continues to be a pleasant and underloved part of SNL week after week. I can’t wait for him to step down from Update, but I will certainly miss him and Sherman going head-to-head after he does.
2. Mikey Day I can’t believe it myself, but Mikey Day went and had himself a great SNL episode this week—doing a very sensual Michael Myers and a very gay Shop TV host and having a ball doing both. Day and Dismukes have done a good job shouldering the “straight man” role in most bits this season, so it was nice to see Day tackle some more colorful work.
3. Ego Nwodim Nwodim remains in the power rankings this week, after turns in “Forbidden Romance,” “Uber Game Show” and “Tableside.” It’s not great that they were the three worst sketches of the night, but Nwodim, even as a segment spins its tires horribly, commands the screen every time she’s on it.
Goodnights
“It sounds like you might need medical attention.” —Colin Jost
“For the last time, Colin, I will not play doctor with you.” —Sarah Sherman
SNL is off next week and will return on November 2nd, as John Mulaney returns to host the show for the sixth time with musical guest Chappell Roan.
