March 27, 2021 – Maya Rudolph / Jack Harlow (S46 E15)

by Carson

SNATCHED, VAXED OR WAXED!
Spring Breakers assemble amidst COVID-19

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— Although it’s another rote game show sketch, this is a fun premise and could really go somewhere.
— Wow, Rudolph is making A CHOICE with that accent.
— Chloe: “Hi, I’m Madison. I go to the University of High School.”
— This sketch is fast and lively, which is refreshing, but I’ve barely found anything actually funny. You can usually count on a small handful of sturdy one-liners, but nothing is really hitting me here. Maybe it’s the energy of the piece that’s kind of drowning things out.
— Beck’s cop reveal got nothing. Nor did it deserve anything.
— Melissa is playing Pitbull’s cousin. Is this a real person? It’s a fun performance nonetheless.
— Fuck, they’re still insisting on that sloppy group LFNY.
— I’m not sure if the cold opens have actually improved in the post-Trump era, but I’ve got to say: even when they’ve been lousy, it’s a very refreshing kind of lousy. It’s like having a completely stuffed nose for four years and then having your nasal passage open, only to find out that you live downwind from the dog food factory. It’s not perfect, but you’ll take the change. This is my way of saying: “This stunk, but in a refreshing way.”
STARS: **

MONOLOGUE
SNL anecdotes told to AND, PUJ, LAH by MAR come from The Breakfast Club

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— Not much to say about the first couple of minutes of this. Maya delivers a couple niceties, a couple near-jokes and then some more niceties. *shrug*
— Ah, Maya has invited the three new featured players. This could be fun.
— Andrew reveals that he was five when Maya joined the show, which is disgusting. Maya agrees.
— Ah, I see. The featured players are being given nothing to do besides giving stilted straight man reactions. Is that the joke here?
— Maya starts conflating her history on the show with The Breakfast Club. THAT’S the joke. Wait, that’s the joke???
— I kind of appreciate Punkie’s refusal to keep a straight face.
— That…that’s it? That was…nothing. Punkie and Lauren were props, the writing felt like half of a first draft and Maya seemed to just be aimlessly vamping through it. I mean, it was awkward, so that’s notable, but comedically it fell short of even being a feeble attempt.
STARS: *

HOT ONES
spicy wings turn normally-cool Beyonce (MAR) into a wet mess

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— Parodying exclusively online content always feels like a weird approach from SNL. It’s like the snake eating itself in a way.
— Mikey is adding some extra nasal stank onto his Sean Evans impressions. Not that a Sean Evans impression is anything to really “study” though.
— It’s an exceedingly simple premise, but it’s expert use of Rudolph to have her Beyonce as a Hot Ones guest.
— Maya: “I still can’t tell if this is beneath me.”
— “Hitler’s Anus Roasted Reaper Sauce” is a pretty funny name. My 14-year-old hot sauce-obsessed son can attest, however, that a Scovel Level of 135,600 is really nothing special.
— Maya: “Yeah, I’m not going to drink a big glass of milk on camera. That’s not a good look for ‘Yonce.”
— Writing-wise, this is basically nothing. But as a pure performance piece for Rudolph, it’s really on par with her well-received season 32 “Star Spangled Banner” performance.
— Speaking of Season 32, here comes a very Deep House Dish performance from Kenan.
— The tease of removing Beyonce’s wig and then having it immediately shut down seems like a weird bait-and-switch.
— I liked the shift in Rudolph’s voice when she says “Shut it down.”
— I liked this, but I feel like the writers and performers left a whole lot on the table in terms of escalation. This was knocking on the doors of greatness, but I feel like it kept itself in second gear.
STARS: ***½

BOOMERS GOT THE VAX
immunized older generation flaunts its well-being

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— Ah, this week in “Already dated 2021 takes”: complaining about baby boomers receiving vaccines first.
— I’m OK with the conceit here. I think when I first saw it live, I was more appreciative. But Millennial resentment can be a fun, even cathartic approach.
— Hey, Melissa gets the hook! Good for her! Good for us!
— This is all totally fine and good. No lines are jumping out in any significant ways though. Rap parodies tend to roll that way. I think people get so excited for the music videos that they’re generally more forgiving if the comedy component doesn’t quite measure up. Not saying this one doesn’t measure up, it’s just not laugh out loud hilarious.
— Great shift with Kenan going full “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” Biggie Smalls. That’s a really fun detail.
— Mikey: “Me? I spend my time playing tennis / Two things that don’t work: me and my pennis.”
— Ego’s Edith Puthie (who first appeared in the premiere) is sufficiently dirty, if not particularly tied to the video’s premise.
— Light fun, despite it already feeling like a million years old.
STARS: ***

A KAMALA HARRIS UNITY SEDER
Kamala Harris (MAR) & Doug Emhoff (MAS) welcome politicians

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— *sigh* The inevitable Kamala Harris piece. Apparently it was slated for the Cold Open, but someone got cold feet about leading the show off with this piece. 
— They’re trotting Martin Short out to play Doug Emhoff, which elicits some token applause and then a second wave of applause when the audience actually recognizes Short.
— There’s a Lawrence Orbach element to Short’s performance.
— The Short/Rudolph dynamic is seemingly much-celebrated, but I can’t really figure out why. The steamy interactions between the two aren’t doing much for me, though it seems like the two performers are tickled.
— I do like how Rudolph refers to Joe Biden as “J’Biden.”
— Aidy as Ted Cruz. *long sigh* That’s FOUR episodes in a row of this stunt.
— None of the jokes are landing. You could blame another lousy COVID crowd, but SNL usually delivers better one-liners. These are all extremely warmed over.
— Chloe’s Elle Emhoff performance is giving me extreme “peak Tina Fey years” vibes in every negative possible way (actually, her performance in the cold open was similar). I’m starting to get second-hand embarrassment for the performers in this piece.
—Turns out Fey acolyte Emily Spivey made a return to the show to co-write this piece. That might explain the above comment.
— Kenan arrives to do what he does best—gently glide through iffy material without losing face. His scene came and went.
— Alex enters as Joe Biden and is the first person to successfully land a joke. There’s enough to the impression for me to like. I wish the show would trust him to hold down his own scene. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
— Short gets attacked by Joe Biden’s fake dog, which is a very SCTV kind of joke.
— Cecily enters as Marjorie Taylor Greene and it also goes by without much impact.
— It seems like Short’s hand has, at times, come perilously close to grazing Rudolph’s boob. Rudolph seems very aware of this.
— The ending, with Short deciding that he wants to kiss Rudolph, seems to have caught Rudolph off-guard, almost as if he were calling an audible. It doesn’t really work, but I don’t know what could have possibly salvaged this mess. It was completely muddled from the get-go and was unable to deflect away from the poor sketch construction with solid jokes. It just flopped from beginning to end. I would give it extra points for the odd smile or two, but to render Martin Short completely unfunny is unforgivable.
STARS: *

NFTS
(PED) & Janet Yellen (KAM) talk cryptocurrency a la “Without Me”

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— Two rap videos in one show. That’s a lot of “almost comedy.”
— I know the boomer piece had a Notorious BIG homage, but this shameless Eminem parody somehow feels even more…needless. I think with the other piece, the “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” element was brief and not overt, but this really does feel like Pete just shamelessly indulging. Maybe the jokes will deliver.
— Chris Redd shows up in Morpheus gear to confirm the basic conceit of this sketch: references to 1999 culture are funny (?).
— Chris: “Non-fungibles / Gifs of Ron Funches eating Lunchables / Or pics of Colin Jost’s face: very punchable.” Glad they could slide the plug in.
— Jack Harlow gets a verse. This one is a little more informative. This is like a modern Schoolhouse Rock, though somehow less funny.
— This felt like the ultimate endgame of what I have seen with SNL’s 15-year foray into rap videos. I get the thrill of a well-produced, visually bedazzled video, but on a comedy show (or a comedy-skewed variety show), you’ve got to have something tangibly humorous. Comedy is subjective, I know, but I don’t know if it’s enough for something to simply “feel” like comedy. It has to have some objective comedic elements, no?
STARS: *

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “Tyler Herro” & “Whats Poppin”

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— Blue: I know Colin Jost famously has a “very punchable face,” but right away I feel like Jack Harlow could give him a run for his money. 
— Some… interesting lyrics here.
— Wow, already we’re moving into another song. That first song just came and went for me. I had no real feelings about it.
— Damn, I love this track, especially the repeating piano line. Unfortunately, Jack’s rapping is nothing special.
— Are Jack’s backing vocalists even singing? They look like they are, but I can hardly hear them.
— I spoke too soon; I can hear the backing vocalists now. But their vocals sound pre-recorded.
— Feeling pretty conflicted about this song—I think I would love it if someone other than Jack was rapping. His rapping just wasn’t anything special to me, nor did I find him very charismatic to watch perform.
STARS: ***

WEEKEND UPDATE
Sidney Powell’s (CES) unreasonableness is her defense against lawsuits

BOY lists ways to combat the spate of hate crimes against Asian Americans

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— Saucy rant off the top by Jost and a great follow-up by Che.
— I will never get tired of the clip of Joe Biden falling up the stairs. It feels weird, in this post-Trump era, to see the show shift its focus on Biden. You can tell it’s a little bit trickier to navigate, especially since modern day Republicans are such shameless ghouls. But clips of Joe Biden falling up a set of stairs are the kinds of gifts that make the transition a lot easier.
— Che jokes have been pretty strong so far while Jost has been pulling in the “foto funnies” and clapter-bait.
— Man, Cecily’s face as Sidney Powell is uncanny. She’s absolutely golden at playing all these Republican freak shows.
— Cecily makes a reference to her “Mee Maw” which is a straight lift from Seth Meyers’ Lindsay Graham impression on Late Night.
— Great performance by Cecily, though this wasn’t necessarily an all-timer.
— Colin’s “National Puppy Day” joke got some hearty groans.
— Great Sesame Street joke from Colin. I think I prefer Colin when he’s not stuck having to make political jokes.
— Che’s Jeffery Epstein joke confirms that, like the Catholic church sex scandal, Epstein is a free spot on the edgy joke Bingo card. It’s effectively edgy, but no one is really going to have to be taken to task for it.
— Bowen delivers a commentary as himself in the wake of Asian hate crimes. I’m interested to see if he is able to thread the needle of talking about a tough, emotional topic and, you know, being funny.
— Bowen is getting impassioned, but I still feel a little perplexed by what I assume are the laugh lines. Bowen can thrust a punchline as good as anyone, but I literally have no idea what Bowen means when he says “Let me know when you feed your white kids chicken feet.” I can’t even tell if that’s supposed to be a joke actually. There’s a serious tone that is offset by Bowen’s natural sassy bite, but the conceit remains elusive. Like me, the audience seem like they’re trying to give Bowen the benefit of the doubt, but don’t know how to interact with this piece.
— Bowen’s serio-comic tone ended leaning more to the former and I get that the moment probably called for it, but I can’t help but find that even as a straight-faced impassioned plea, the piece lacked clarity.
STARS: *** 

CHOREOGRAPHERS
old flames (KET) & (MAR) are rival substitute Broadway choreographers

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— I referenced a very 2006 performance from Kenan earlier in this episode. Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.
— Ah, it’s a Kenan/Maya two-hander. Perhaps we’re really digging up the ghosts of Season 30.
— The water cooler/water bottle confusion thing was really not worth the time.
— Kenan and Maya are two of the campiest performers the show has ever had (particularly early Kenan and late Maya) and this is diving headfirst into that unabashed campiness. It always feels like a high-risk/low reward proposition, which scarcely seems worth the risk. The two leads are laying it on extra thick tonight, with the rest of the performance standing in eerie silence, almost as if they are in awe of the incessant vamping.
— The comedic repetition is doing very little for me, but I’m trying to give this the benefit of the doubt.
— OK, the Jon Benet Ramsey/Annie confusion got me. That one was pretty dang funny. The audience agrees.
— The camera incorrectly cuts to Maya during Kenan’s line, but she calmly turns her head to her scene partner as if to guide the camera over to him. Very professional.
— Kenan’s little dance routine is very silly, causing me to chuckle in spite of myself. I see that Lauren, stuck in another deflating straight role, is also enjoying the silliness of the performance.
— OK, so this is *objectively* a terrible sketch. But I won’t damn it too harshly because unlike a couple of other sketches tonight, it had jokes that worked and the kind of self-consciously silly Kenan performance that can go a lot further in 2021 than it did in 2005. Still though, this stunk.
STARS: *½

2021 BARFLY AWARDS
Sally O’Flappy (MAR) is biggest booze-soaked winner

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— Cecily is so great playing drunks. She’s like a Millennial Foster Brooks.
— I like Aidy saying “reward” instead of “award.” Nice touch. Also her go-nowhere story was pretty funny.
— I kind of like these sketches that give a large cross-section of the cast a chance to play a type. It’s fun to see what everyone’s interpretation of “playing drunk” is.
— Rudolph is doing a very familiar voice, but her scene runs by so quickly I can’t complain.
— Kyle looks like Anthony Peter Coleman (not the reviewer). I’m not as crazy about his drunk voice.
— Oh, more Maya. I guess it’s not going to be so short and sweet.
— This sketch seems a wee bit chaotic and incoherent. It’s by design, but it’s also not giving much to latch onto. I’m not an anti-award show parody guy by any means, but this one is really meandering. I enjoy some of the individual performances, but they’re all such quick hits that they’re not even getting enough time to hook the audience with jokes. It’s not a disaster, but it’s too deliberately messy to really connect.
STARS: **

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest & Adam Levine [real] perform “Same Guy”

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— Blue: I’m feeling the same way about this song as I did the last one– I love the instrumental part, but the vocals are just not doing anything for me.
— Strong backing vocals on this song.
— Oh, no wonder I found the backing vocals to be strong– they’re being performed by Adam Levine! (Though I should say, if Jack Harlow has a punchable face, Adam Levine to me has a punchable voice.)
— Pretty weak usage of Adam Levine, having him sing in unison on the chorus an octave up. His part could have been sung by anyone.
— Adam is now riffing, which isn’t doing anything to make the song more interesting to me.
— The backing vocalists sound amazing, although I suspect they’re singing to a pre-recorded track, given that there are only three of them and yet they sound like a whole gospel choir.
— I don’t like giving below-average grades on the basis of a song itself, instead of the performance, but since there wasn’t much to that performance and I found both of the main performers inexplicably irritating, I’ll give this one…
STARS: **

THE MAYA-ING
MAR & ’70s writer (TIF) haunt SNL a la Kubrick; RAD cameo

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— Ooh, a very different vibe to this pre-tape.
— An odd, but pleasingly odd, little joke about Andrew being forced to wear an NBC page outfit.
— “A Stanley Kubrick Film”? I know it’s a parody of The Shining, but this makes it seem like it was actually made by Stanley Kubrick. Seems like an unnecessary detail to include.
— Great take with Maya going through old host photos (“Oh Jeff Gordon, what could have been”), before landing on a picture of Kevin Spacey.
— “Sum 41. That’s when music was music.” Already this is a very funny poke at Maya’s era of the show.
— The aesthetic ties to The Shining are very strong. This does have a great, creepy energy. And the jokes are landing too!
— Tina Fey cameo. Can’t say I’m enthused, but I’m willing to follow where this sketch is heading.
— Fey plays “Gloria Zelweg, one of the original writers on the show” (but not really). She seems like a Rosie Shuster/Anne Beatts composite.
— Kenan in the Scatman Crothers role. “I’m a cook here at SNL. I take baked Lays out of a bag and put ‘em in a bowl.”
— The two Gillys as the hallway twins is an interesting touch. SNL is a little too obsessed with this specific era of the show (it wasn’t that great—especially Fey’s seasons) and the hagiography aggravates me to no end, but this feels more like a necessary exorcism to get the show’s own history out of its system.
— Great Rachel Dratch cameo. Loved the eye poke at the end.
— Nice touch at the end with Maya being integrated into the original cast photo. Interestingly, this is the second time she would be superimposed into an original cast photo. She appeared in a similar, cute photo bumper from her first hosting gig.
— A very evocative and affecting scene. Not laugh-out-loud hilarious (and it’s an episode that could have really used a real gut-buster) save for the Kevin Spacey gag, but comically compelling in a way we haven’t seen since the last Schiller’s Reel in 1993. Schiller’s work wasn’t necessarily hilarious either, but the vaguely parodic auteurist homages had a very welcome place within the fabric of the show. This was weirdly refreshing and, I think, every bit the equal to some of Schiller’s best work. I would love to see more of this kind of material.
—Written by Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey and Colin Jost.
STARS: *****

GOODNIGHTS

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— The final bumper is an homage to cover of Maya’s mother, Minnie Riperton, whose album Adventures In Paradise includes a great song—“Love And Its Glory”—which directly namechecks Maya.

IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
— A poor poor poor episode of SNL. I will admit to my biases in saying that I’ve never really been the biggest Maya Rudolph booster, though I am not completely put off by her work. Outside of the final film which was an anomaly in every possible way, this episode lacked energy, focus and direction. Strong premises were left hanging in limbo (Hot Ones) and poor premises were given ample space to explore (NFTs). Maya, for her part, was a game host, but was as guilty as anyone for the sloppy execution of the Cold Open, the monologue and the absolutely dire Kamala Harris piece.

MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS EPISODE, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS

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RATED SEGMENTS RANKED FROM BEST TO WORST
The Maya-ing
Hot Ones
Boomers Got The Vax
Weekend Update
2021 Barfly Awards
Snatched, Vaxxed Or Waxed
Choreographers
Monologue
NFTs
A Kamala Harris Unity Seder

TOMORROW
Anthony will blow you away with his insight when he covers Daniel Kaluuya/St. Vincent—a much better episode.