‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Undercover Kylo Ren, Aladdin, and Adam Driver (videos)
It was pretty easy to figure out precisely what “Saturday Night Live” was going to be talking about during their cold open this weekend: The recent Republican debate. We know that the GOP debates often bring out plenty of commentary all across the board, and of course they told some very silly jokes in here. Taran Killam played Ted Cruz, whose Canadian birth has been a hot topic.
Also, we got more of Darrell Hammond as Donald Trump, which suggests more and more to us that this is just the order of things for the rest of the season, or at least as long as both he and Cruz are in the race at the same exact time. Maybe Taran will take Trump back in the event that Cruz does end up losing the race. This was funny for the most part, but most of it was stuff that we’ve seen before, even if we do love Ben Carson as played by Jay Pharoah.
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As for some sketches from the show…
Adam Driver monologue – “Star Wars” humor. Of course Leslie Jones is the one person who hasn’t seen it. This was moderately funny, but also straight down the middle of what we have come to expect from these.
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NFL on NBC – This was a nice way to make good on the coverage earlier in the night. It was mostly the same video replay over and over again with commentary from Driver and Beck Bennett. Bonus points for relevance, even if they couldn’t predict the score.
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Undercover Kylo Ren – Maybe this will be the sketch of the night once we’re through with this review, because this was pretty fantastic. Full disclosure: We actually haven’t seen “The Force Awakens,” but we still found this really fun without even getting all the references. We are familiar with “Undercover Boss,” and they got those jokes correct.
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A Whole New World – Nobody expected an “Aladdin” parody, and as ridiculous and cheesy as it was, the terrible special effects at the end plus Driver’s insistence on keeping the song going made this pretty wonderful.
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America’s Funniest Cats – Every now and then you have a really great sketch that kills for 75% of its runtime, but has no clue how to end it. This was this sketch pretty much to a T. It did a lot of wonderful stuff in between Driver’s manic host and the two “French hosts” (Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon) coming in to give their depressing take on cat videos. It just lacked an ending.
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Weekend Update – The jokes for the most part were pretty mild, but Colin Jost got the best material talking about the idea of Mayor Bloomberg running for Mayor of New York City and how absurd that could end up being. The Pete Davidson performance piece was a little weaker than usual, and did we really need the return of young Laura Parsons to read depressing news stories? We’d much prefer a return for Daisy Rose or Jebidiah Atkinson, who has not shown up this season.
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Social Puppeteering – What a random sketch this one, but with really great writing talking about what the dangers of completely emotionally devastating someone else’s life by coming up with elaborate-but-fake schemes.
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David Bowie tribute – You can head over here to see more about this.
Golden Globe party – This was a super-fun sketch for late in the show, one that revolved around what happens after parents win a Globe and tell their children to go to bed. Really great performances by Driver and Vanessa Bayer as the stars, and Liev Schreiber put in a surprising cameo near the end.
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Doctor’s appointment – This was virtually a reprisal of a sketch from earlier this season, which featured Aidy Bryant’s character popping in and crashing some various adult scenes. This time, Driver and Beck Bennett went completely silly playing a doctor and patient for a particularly awkward visit.
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Overall, a very fun show. We’re not sure it will go down as an instant classic, but we have to say that when it comes to the sketches themselves, there was no real miss beyond maybe “Weekend Update.” Grade: B+.
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