‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Justin Bieber – Calvin Klein spoof, Kevin Hart, and other comedy

“Saturday Night Live” had its first show of 2015 tonight, hosted by none other than Kevin Hart. Did it bring a whole lot of comedy to the table? We’re still in the thick of it as of this writing, but there are definitely some solid ideas in here that paid off into a few laughs.

Then again, the show also started with a pretty enormous dud as far as openings go. We’re going to have some more highlights throughout the show, so be sure to keep refreshing for some more assorted updates as the night goes on. The funny thing is that some of the funnier sketches actually came after “Weekend Update.”

Martin Luther King Jr. opening – Probably the worst opening of the year. Kenan Thompson never figured out if he was doing an impression, and the writing was so choppy. We get the points in here that American definition of progress was skewed, but it should have either been more biting, or just not done at all. This felt timid.

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Kevin Hart monologue – Clearly, Kevin doesn’t like living in a house without driveway lights, and he also doesn’t love evil raccoons taunting him from the outside. This was pretty funny standup material. It was nothing exemplary, but still a solid set that produced a few laughs.

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Justin Bieber – Calvin Klein commercial – Kate McKinnon is always hilarious as Bieber. When you add to this silly writing and mocking a ridiculous commercial, you get gold. There were multiple spots throughout the night, and they were easily the best part of the episode.

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Why’d you post that? – We actually feel bad for Hart in this sketch, since some technical difficulties at the start really derailed it. The rest of it was funny, but it is hard to get some momentum going after starting things off like that.

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Brooklyn street stories – This was some bizarre combination of every neighborhood of Brooklyn rolled into a single sketch. It was relatively funny, but went on far too long and had a weird ending.

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James Brown – Hart’s impression of the soul legend is not terrible but this sketch definitely was. The entire joke here was that nobody wanted to follow along with what James wanted to do. Basically, this was dull after thirty seconds.

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Soap opera reunion – So we just had an entire sketch that was themed around someone having fart music whenever they walked around. Yep, that’s right: “SNL” has just turned into an episode of “Two and a Half Men.”

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Weekend Update – Colin Jost had most of the funnier jokes tonight, including some really strong ones about Bill Cosby and Rhode Island. There were also some clunkers. Mrs. Santini (McKinnon) was the only guest, and we’re slightly bummed that she did not do Olya. This was a very short Update, and not a particularly strong one.

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Medieval musical – This was almost like a parody of “Galavant,” which was in turn a parody of other shows. This started out really annoying listening to these people sing, but it actually became more and more hilarious as it went on. Kudos to Kevin for the commitment here.

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Kevin Hart’s son – The writing and the ending here were pretty bad, but who knew that Jay Pharoah did such a great impression of Hart?

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Confessional song – The last sketch of the night, it was Kevin singing a weird song about some of the secrets that his friends were carrying. Mildly funny, especially the whole bit about his Muslin friend eating pork, because there was gelatin in the gummy bears.

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The first half of this show is awful (save for Bieber), but the final three sketches were all right. Consider this as the way that this shot got an above-passing grade, since we have no clue what was going on most of the night. Grade: C.

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