Saturday Night Live review: Chance the Rapper highlights
With that, Chance decided that he was going to make a lot of money tonight performing a “Thanksgiving Song” — hey, there are no great Thanksgiving songs out there! He brought out some other cast members to do backing vocals and they were all game to engage in a little bit of the silliness here. The lyrics were cheesy and the humor was such that we’ve seen on many a Thanksgiving episode in the past — but Chance had fun with it! He did get dangerously close to breaking on two or three occasions, but he eventually did make it all the way through the song. (The best part of this may have been how fast the background singers were able to pop in and out of the sketch.)
You can read our full take on the cold open over at the link here. The funny thing here is that Chance actually could make money from a song later in the episode if he put it on iTunes.
Bruce Wayne’s Thanksgiving – We have a feeling that someone probably has had a take on Batman like this before. Yet, it was still funny. Bruce Wayne was holding a food drive, and while there some of the people receiving food from him started to complain about Batman’s excessive use of force. Chance did a good job kicking off this sketch, and from there it only got increasingly funnier as some of the other cast members upped the ante with their own stories. (Apparently, everyone got their jaw broken by Batman.)
Come Back Barack – Apparently, making an Boyz II Men style song about missing Barack Obama was something we needed in our lives. The combination of Kenan Thompson, Chance, and Chris Redd (who’s having a good week so far) was really great — we don’t think the song got the laughs it deserved for the line about the dog.
Family Feud – This was one of the funnier versions of Kenan’s Steve Harvey over the years. It wasn’t just a parade of impressions; instead, it was a story as to how Steve Harvey met the son he never knew he had (Chance). As it turns out, Chance also does a good Steve Harvey impression!
Eminem performance – This was vintage Eminem, as intense and angry as ever. Read more on that over at the link here.
Weekend Update – We questioned before the show as to whether or not we were going to see a joke or two about Al Franken, and the show went in way harder on the former writer than we thought they would. The correspondents this week were all repeats — this started with Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon is great, but do we need this every week?), and then it continued with Bruce Chandling (why are we still trying this?) before Pete Davidson came on. Pete’s take on Staten Island may be one of the best takes on Staten Island that we’ve seen in a while — he EVISCERATED them.
Hockey Update – This was a very good post-update sketch with Chance playing a sports reporter who apparently knew nothing about hockey or covering the hockey game. This was really all Chance delivering with the comic timing and he deserves every bit of praise that he gets for this. Very well done.
Hip-hop history – Hey, for those wondering if Davidson is going to be featured in almost any other sketches this season beyond Weekend Update, this was your chance to see him. We did prefer his Weekend Update piece than this odd little “tribute” to a rapper who doesn’t know rap history.
Career Day – This was a good case of a really lame sketch lifted slightly by the commitment that Mikey Day and Chance had to the ridiculous material. Basically these two guys played students who were a little too obsessed with their father’s unexciting careers.
Babysitting sketch – Apparently Heidi Gardner is becoming a major player during these end-of-show sketches. This was actually a new version of an old sketch that we’ve seen with Amy Schumer and others: A adult film that gets really weird when Aidy Bryant’s innocent kid character shows up, not really understanding what’s going on. Still, one of the better iterations of it.
CarterMatt Verdict
This was a very good episode of the show — the hip-hop history and Bruce Chandling were the big misses, but with everywhere else this may have been the funniest version of SNL this year. Chance was versatile, fun, and willing to do everything from taking his pants off during Career Day to doing a silly Steve Harvey impression. We definitely want him back.
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