Saturday Night Live review: Pound Puppy, bake-off, & Don Cheadle highlights
Related SNL video – Be sure to check out some more thoughts regarding the show and recent episodes at the bottom of this article! If you like this, remember to subscribe to CarterMatt on YouTube for more and be sure to check out our series playlist.
From the opening monologue, Cheadle showed that he had some great timing — we loved his bit about people not knowing what they knew him from, but then also having different facial reactions based on what they knew him from. This was a take we hadn’t quite heard before.
Be sure to refresh this article throughout for some more updates on various sketches.
Fresh Takes – This was a weird sketch — a high-school public-access show featuring some awkward teenagers and then also Cheadle appearing as the teacher. There were some various segments including a failed winter formal proposal, and also Cheadle’s character spilling the beans on various teachers and/or being horrible at their job.
Baking Competition – This has to be one of the weirdest live sketches of the season — but also one of the funniest. This marked a chance to see some contestants show off their cartoon-themed cakes, only for most of them to be terrible, for Don Cheadle’s Cookie Monster to come to life, and for Yoda to be surprisingly phallic. It may be one of the funniest things that they’ve done.
Pound Puppy – The only way to describe this commercial parody is this: A giant fake dog that people can use to have sex in so that their real dog doesn’t notice. We don’t know what else to say other than that the writers may have been on something.
Weekend Update – The jokes tonight were not necessarily shocking — other than, of course, the writers actually going there with R. Kelly. Who saw that coming? Anyhow, we also had an opportunity to see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (or at least the show’s version of them) and then the return of Jules, the guy who “sees things differently” who is basically the guy version of Cecily Strong’s Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With At a Party.
We also had a new character tonight in Mort Fellner, a supercentenarian who came out to talk about a number of other supercentenarians … and how they all died.
Celebrity Family Feud – This is always a crowd-pleaser, and we do think that there were some pretty fantastic impressions in here — think in terms of Kate McKinnon as Glenn Close or Cecily Strong as Olivia Colman. It didn’t have the killer impression that we’ve seen elsewhere, but still worthy of a few laughs.
Dancing bar fight – Apparently, the best way in which to stop a fight at a bar is to play a really happy song so that everyone can dance around for a little while. This was dumb, but a reasonably pleasant kind of dumb.
Roach killer – This was the sad story of a roach who took over, slept with a guy’s wife, and eventually had to be taken down by his kid. This was weird … but a lot of the sketches tonight were weird. While this didn’t completely work, we did appreciate the effort to think outside of the box.
Wedding Pavilion – This was a weird ending to the show — some sort of commercial for a wedding venue that does almost everything. This feels like the perfect spoof of commercials that air across New York City … but, maybe this doesn’t translate everywhere else.
Overall, there were some funny moments within this episode — but we’re not sure anything lived up to the hype early on.
Related News – Be sure to get some more information on tonight’s episode, including our take on the musical guest
What do you think about Don Cheadle’s episode of Saturday Night Live? Be sure to share some of your quick thoughts on the matter below! (Photo: NBC.)