Saturday Night Live: “Kerry Washington/Eminem” (Episode 39.05)
I was sort of surprised last week when Saturday Night Live didn’t even address Kenan Thompson’s comments about how there aren’t any black women on the cast. What surprises me just as much is that this week’s host Kerry Washington is only the third black woman to host so far this decade, after only Gabourey Sidibe and Maya Rudolph. Not only was it great to see SNL start off this week by addressing this problem, but it also brought about one of the best hosts this year in Washington.
The aforementioned skit referenced just how difficult a position SNL has created for themselves, as in a Obama state dinner sketch, Washington would have to play Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce. I loved the actors breaking character to ask “Kenan won’t do it?” and then having a cavalcade of white cast members show up doing Matthew McConaughey impressions. A message claiming that SNL will try to solve this problem in the future, unless of course, they fall in love with another white guy first, was followed by Reverend Al Sharpton stating, “what have we learned from this sketch? As usual, nothing.” I’m glad the show addressed this, but let’s hope they don’t just take it as a joke and ignore it for season 40.
Washington’s monologue had her solving the SNL cast’s problems Olivia Pope-style, trying to take care of a unwanted picture of Bobby Moynihan eating an entire cookie cake in bed with his sleeping girlfriend and helping Thompson find his keys, even though being covered in someone else’s blood should have maybe been more important to him.
Now I’ve never really loved Nasim Pedrad, but man, after these last two weeks and her post-monologue skits, she’s really won me over. This week she plays Heshie, a moderately successful person from Yemen who has become a motivational speaker. She has the help of her son doing sound effects and Washington as her assistant. It’s basically Pedrad doing wild movements to weird sounds while giving medicare advice, but she sells it hard.
SNL’s latest iteration of their Lonely Island-free digital shorts was a parody of the Ylvis video “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” that actually worked stronger than it probably should. You have Jay Pharaoh asking the question, “what does my girl say?” as Washington questions the ladies on his phone.
The weakest part of the night were the few sketches before Eminem’s first song. First was the return of “How’s He Doing?,” but it’s been a while. There’s not much new here, as the panel continues to praise Obama even though the black approval rating is at an all-time low of 93.6%. After was Miss Universe Moscow 2013, where new countries were competing, such as Miss Moldova, who thought she had already won; Miss Bolivia, who has a nose covered in cocaine, and Mrs. Greenland, since she’s the only woman in Greenland.
Then came Eminem. For “Berzerk,” he was joined by Rick Rubin behind the turntable and I assume the backing track that Eminem occasionally couldn’t keep up with. For his second song, “Survival,” Rubin was replaced by Skylar Grey and the whole proceeding went a bit better. But Eminem’s performance can best be explained by this tweet from Eugene Mirman: