‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Jason Sudeikis, Jay Pharoah, and Jonah Hill can’t save weak show (videos)
If there was one thing that felt for sure like a given with this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” episode, it was this: There would be a sketch mocking Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton in some shape or form. This is just the sort of thing that the NBC show likes to do!
What the show did tonight that was especially timely was use the real election results that came out tonight across many primaries and caucuses, and one of our pre-show predictions did turn out to be true: The return of Jason Sudeikis as Mitt Romney.
Given that there are only so many chances to see Romney on the show these days, this was really the perfect time to reprise this impression. The impression of him was as funny as it ever was, and it may have been more exaggerated than ever as “Romney” talked about being aggressive against Trump (Darrell Hammond) in a way that only he could.
We’ll have some more updates on the night soon; stay tuned!
Jonah Hill monologue – The whole bit with Future fell flat, so we almost wish that the entire thing was just bringing out various cast members to mock Jonah. Did you see him at the Roast of James Franco? He was great in taking the barbs there!
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Racists for Donald Trump – It was at this point we got a little annoyed with the show, mostly because we’re absolutely certain that there are some other things out there beyond Trump that are funny and there’s so little that can be said at this point. At least the cold open had Sudeikis.
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Newscast from Wisconsin – This was the sort of live sketch that probably could have been funny if it was about more than just the accents. Some of the characters were entertaining, but that was really all there was to discuss here.
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Wrestling story – It’s not a great sign that we’ve had so many consecutive misses here, especially since the show had a few weeks to work on this. At first, we liked the idea of an almost “Friday Night Lights” story about an inspirational wrestler (Hill), with the big twist being that nobody was actually being nice to him at all. It was like “The Truman Show,” and they were all in on the act. It was just more sad than funny, and the whole “there was also a murder tonight” joke didn’t generate a big laugh from the audience.
PTA Auction – How much time do we want to spend on this? The best part was Beck Bennett; the worst was the rest. Given that the show did such a biting sketch mocking Donald Trump, them then going to the lowest-common-denominator with Hill as a Sultan paying millions for high-school internet stars was predictable and lame. It also felt under-rehearsed for some reason.
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Weekend Update – There was some humor to be had with the Vanessa Bayer bit and with the return of the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation with at a Party, but to us the real scene-stealer tonight was Jay Pharoah basically going out and doing impressions of almost every black comedian he has in his repertoire. (For some reason, the chemistry between Colin Jost and Michael Che just felt off here!)
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“Clue” spoof – We were incredibly stoked about this at first, only to eventually realize that this was really just the same sketch from Jonah’s last appearance (at least if we remember correctly) where everyone just comments on something terrible he did in the bathroom. This is the Jonah sketch we repeat?
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Inside SoCal – We did laugh a few times through this, and we’ll also be the first to admit that doing this sketch is probably way harder than it seems since you’re almost intentionally being bad at hosting this show. On a night when there’s been so many duds, maybe this looks a little better?
Catering – And this is how we close. Jonah played a caterer who couldn’t help by giving all sorts of rave reviews for some of the food … even though the people he was giving this said food to weren’t hadn’t tried all of it.
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In the end, this show was as much of a dud as “SNL” has had this season. If this was the third show in a row, we’d have a little more sympathy. Unfortunately, there were only about ten minutes during the entire episode this week that were really moderately amusing, and it’s shocking given Jonah’s history of having good sketches on the show. Grade: D+.
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