‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Chris Rock talks Boston Marathon, Freedom Tower; Pete Davidson, ‘Shark Tank’ sketches

Tonight, “Saturday Night Live” brought us an episode that had Chris Rock, Prince, and probably a whole lot of controversy as a result of some of what we saw. This was pretty apparent not too far into the show at all.

We’re going to have some updates of the show throughout the night, so be sure to stay tuned for a little more on that. Typically, we sort the sketches into good and bad, but for this show, we’re doing something different and going straight through. It’s important for the trajectory of the show.

Megyn Kelly cold open – Oh look, more politics that aren’t funny! Bobby Moynihan’s Chris Christie is probably the worst impression that Bobby does, and it was also weird to see another sketch about Ebola so soon after the last one.

Chris Rock monologue – This is a tough one, since we know that there are going to be so many different opinions all about this. Was Chris Rock in the wrong for telling jokes revolving around the Boston Marathon and the Freedom Tower? That’s up for each viewer to decide. We do feel like art is art, and the job of comedians is to find a way to make you smile, no matter the circumstances. Rock joking about tragic events was not his way of disrespecting the victims; for him, disrespect would be avoiding the subject out of fear of political correctness.

Personally, we laughed quite a bit throughout this, and we were deeply hurt and saddened by all of these tragedies. You can have it both ways.

YouTube sketch – For some reason, someone decided that the show needed to mock viral videos. It actually did get funnier as it went along, but overall, this felt like a very weird 1990s sitcom with a computer added.

GoPro – A total miss. Some of these commercials are really funny, but jokes about colons just aren’t that interesting, or that original.

How’s He Doing? – This PBS sketch has been done a few times now, but we’ve always liked it for the most part … even if the entire premise is at least to a certain extent predictable.

Weekend Update – Not one of the better editions of the show. The jokes were pretty funny, but Pete Davidson was the only thing close to a home run. Let’s pretend that Suge Knight / Katt Williams bit ever happened.

“Shark Tank” – If you are going to potentially offend, you need to be really edgy and funny in the process. Spoofing the ABC show with ISIS and terrible impressions was not a good way to do it. At least the show did a good job making fun of the format of the show.

Swiftamine – A very funny idea for a sketch that should have been a whole lot better than it was in the end. Taylor Swift wins people over. We get it.

THAT Sketch – There is nothing to say about this sketch at all. It may be the most terrible sketch that we’ve ever seen on the show. This almost taints the entire night. We don’t know what happened; did Leslie Jones or Rock flub a line, or did a cue card guy screw up? Regardless, this was painful, there was no story, and really, the show should be embarrassed with this.

The robbers – We chuckled, but it came after that Jones / Rock sketch and we were honestly still turned off from it. We almost feel like this would have been better as a live sketch, since it could have lifted the energy.

Women in the Workplace – Thankfully, Vanessa Bayer, Kate McKinnon, and Cecily Strong helped to save the show at the very end. They gave us a few laughs, and we almost wish they had been in more of the show.

Overall, this was a very strange show. It started sloppy, was very funny, then became okay during “Weekend Update.” Then, it was awful and almost unwatchable. In the end, we wanted to like this so much more than we did, and some good sketches don’t compensate for some terrible duds. Grade: C-.

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