After a high-profile premiere, this week’s Saturday Night Live, hosted by Amy Schumer with musical guest the Weeknd, was a less flashy and a more stable output.
For years, comedy fans lamented that the show had begun to favor bland celebrity hosts over genuinely funny people: after all, George Carlin hosted the very first episode, 40 years ago, and just did stand-up. Now comedy is cool, hosts such as Melissa McCarthy, Louis CK, Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman and Kevin Hart have turned in some of the best episodes in recent years.
With her background as a stand-up and three years of the excellent sketch show Inside Amy Schumer under her belt, Schumer was an obvious and excellent choice. Her monologue was a stand-up set about the state of women in Hollywood and her awareness of being a role model to young girls. “She doesn’t have a Malala poster in her room, trust me.”
It’s really only when a great comedian hosts that the SNL monologue makes sense as a part of the show. But when they do, it’s often the strongest material of the night.
Otherwise, the show was consistent if not hugely memorable. We already knew Schumer to be an excellent sketch comic, so her gameness and perfect timing were no surprise but very welcome. The show so often lurches between high and low bits: on Saturday night it glided smoothly over several perfectly decent sketches.
The cold open was another parody of Fox News’s morning show Fox & Friends. Focused on the chaotic race for speaker of the House, it got in a couple decent impressions and a few good lines.
“I always agree with whoever’s the loudest” – but the best jokes were, as always, in the long list of “corrections” that scrolled by at the end: “Twins are not the result of group sex”; “King Cobras are not elected”.
"Jewish people do exist" and all the Fox and Friends corrections from @nbcsnl. pic.twitter.com/LE3gAIhw22
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) October 11, 2015
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the episode was the show’s willingness to address gun violence, a worthy and relevant topic that is nonetheless an odd fit for a sketch show. Schumer has been an outspoken advocate for gun control since a shooting took place during a screening of her film Trainwreck, and here she was part of a dark parody commercial for guns, which ended bleakly with the catchphrase: “We’re here to stay.”
The topic came up again during a town hall sketch, where Schumer played a six-year-old girl advocating for, amongst other things, the right to bring a firearm to school, and obliquely during a sketch in which Schumer, as a Mary Todd Lincoln portrayer during a re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, refused to let her husband be killed and repeatedly “ad-libbed” punching John Wilkes Booth in the face.
Gun control was also the subject of lopsided “debate” during Weekend Update, where the show seemed to lose its nerve and not take too much of a stand after all.
There were some definite highlights. A porn parody slowly unfolded into something much weirder and funnier, while Kate McKinnon as Colin Jost’s grumpy neighbor on Weekend Update will likely return with her “apology” letters to various annoying tenants: “I’m so sorry your baby is a car alarm.”
Maybe because the show has leaned so long on celebrity cameos and topical gimmicks, 90 minutes of reasonably solid sketch comedy almost feels like a letdown, as if the show is just filling space until they finally get Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders to drop in for a quick gag. Even this episode wasn’t entirely without surprise guests, with Nicki Minaj performing with the Weeknd.
Having Schumer in the middle of things served as a reminder of how much more she can do in her tightly edited, 10-episode seasons than SNL’s live, sprawling schedule will allow. But if SNL keeps having such worthy hosts – next week is SNL alum Tracy Morgan – it will have a shot at re-establishing itself as a sketch powerhouse.
