‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Elizabeth Banks and Aron’s List, Ignited, Young Ben Carson (video)
Tonight’s “Saturday Night Live” episode started off with a touching tribute from Cecily Strong. You can read a little more about that here, since for the rest of this article, we’re going to focus more on silly comedy and the sort of stuff we always like discussing in this spot. As always, we’ll be covering the show live as it progresses.
Elizabeth Banks monologue – This was great. Maybe we are going to be judging the show in part in comparison to the awful mess hosted by Donald Trump last week, but we really liked Elizabeth Banks trying to direct herself through a musical performance. (Best part, her ordering Bobby Moynihan to not be one of the dancers.)
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Aron’s list – Hilarious commercial for sexual criminals doing your household chores. We’re not really sure exactly what this was mocking, but Vanessa Bayer’s delivery coupled with Kenan Thompson and Pete Davidson helped to really sell this.
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Black Jeopardy – Also incredibly silly, but for the most part really funny with Banks playing the one white contestant not understanding how it works. The sketch probably could have lost some of the middle and focused more on the beginning / end, but we’re not going to be too hard on a decent idea running a little over.
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Ignited – This easily makes up for the mediocre “bad girls” video sketch from last week. It was all about the moment many of the women officially realized … well, let’s just say an important moment in their lives. From Kate McKinnon realizing she was a lesbian thanks to Hanson to Aidy Bryant loving a character from “Dinosaurs.”
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Theater performance – Yep, we’re doing this whole “scenes from a high school theater show” again. We were so upset going into it, but we actually liked it? It was just really obnoxious and over the top (especially Aidy talking about her mother like she was dead, even though she was in the audience).
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Weekend Update – It was a little long tonight and Kyle Mooney as Bruce still is not working (try to find a new character?), but for the most part, really strong. The Pete Davidson bit was pretty funny, the jokes mostly hit, and we had the return of Olya! She’s one of our favorite characters, and even her reaction to a knock-knock joke is priceless.
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Young Ben Carson – We feel like “SNL” really wanted this to work and Jay Pharoah’s impression of Carson was pretty good. We’re actually not sure why it didn’t work, other than maybe because it just tried a little too hard to reference all of the surprising things that Carson has said about his past.
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The Bureau – A short but ridiculous sketch based around one very-simple but effective premise: What would happen if someone got a charity reward to film a role for a show, only to learn that he was really doing something that will ruin his life?
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Uber ride – Mike O’Brien is back! This pretaped bit with him and Banks forging a bond felt like it was meant for earlier in the night, but it was not nearly as funny as we probably wanted to be. It was instead charming, but not something we’d want to watch again.
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“So ghetto” – This sketch went on far too long. The joke of it (Banks played a woman who was actually in a ghetto situation with friends who were obnoxious hipsters) went on far too long, and it never really went to roll-on-the-floor levels.
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In the end, we found this show very funny. The last ten minutes could be cut, but for the most part, Banks did great and this was a nice way to spend Saturday night. Grade: B.
We’ll have videos tomorrow. For now, head over here to get some other TV news on all we cover via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: NBC.)