41x12 Larry David with The 1975

The phrase "Best SNL episode in years" gets thrown around a lot these days. The show's been uneven since the big departure and influx of new talent as SNL finds its voice in a new era of venerated series. That gives the fans a tendency to overreact to the peaks and valleys. But this really is the best show SNL has put together since the new cast arrived, and possibly stretching back into the years before.

Much of the credit to this goes to host, Larry David. David, who was once a writer on the show in his pre-Seinfeld days, brought his particular energy to the episode, and it paid real dividends from the word go. His monologue was pure Larry David, with a tight five that leaned into his uncomfortable, borscht belt humor, touching on everything from his status as a bad host, to the advantages of being a rich prick over being a poor schmuck, to the shame of being a young Jewish boy who doesn't eat much. It's a distinctive style that turned the usual monologue cliches on their head a bit, and Sanders sold it like a champ.

Two other sketches played on Larry David's signature persona. The first was the superlative "Bern Your Enthusiasm" sketch, the perfect culmination of David's prior appearances as the Presidential hopeful which blended the rhythms of the populist political firebrand with David's own irritable, New York value-having alta cocker self. Aping the presentation of Curb Your Enthusiasm was an easy and effective choice, and beyond just playing on the similarities between Bernie and his satirical counterpart, the pre-taped segment told a tidy little story that sewed together David's alienating style and the closeness of the Iowa Caucus. It was a brilliant take, and the best sketch of a night that wasn't short on good ones.

The second was the Titanic-esque Lifeboat sketch, which featured a brief cameo from the Senator himself. I'm always surprised when politicians make these cameos, and almost invariably these individuals who make their living trying to engage crowds and come off as charismatic seem so out of place in a live comedy setting. Don't get me wrong, Sanders gave it the old college try, and gamely played off of his usual rhetoric (even throwing in a surprisingly good Trump impression), it's just funny how he was clearly the one on screen who wasn't a comedic actor. Still, he did well enough, and the crowd went gaga for him, and David carried the sketch in his guise as the self-interested jerk questioning the accepted social norms that don't really favor him. It had great self-aware lines, from "I can say it, it's olden times!" to "That'll trick 'em", and transporting David's schtick to an old timey setting worked well too.

But what was more impressive in this episode was both how David showed an unexpected amount of range in other sketches, and how the rest of the cast (and writers) rose to the challenge of having a talented comedic voice like David aboard. I almost didn't recognize Sanders as the 90's, almost Jim Carrey-esque animatronic robot in the FBI training shooting range sketch. It was a delightfully offbeat premise--a bit of befuddiling weirdness in the middle of the standard good guy/bad guy police training set ups--and both Kenan Thompson and Cecily Strong gave strong performances as the confused trainee and the stereotypical hardass instructor respectively.

Sanders other two bits of stepping outside his usual persona were fun, even if the sketches were a little less successful overall. His role as the hippie-looking aspiring songwriter in the Songwriting Class sketch started out a little shaky, with he and Pete Davidson not getting their timing right in the early going, but the sketch eventually found its footing and turned into a pleasantly odd bit about David's character fixating on writing a song about an endless conflict between frogs and toads. The other performance, in Kate McKinnon's recurring Last Two People in the Bar sketch, where he looked vaguely like Stan Lee, was another interestingly different riff from him, but the sketch itself was the only real miss of the night. That said, they keep redoing this premise, with McKinnon and her weekly sparring partner sharing various gross or unpleasant details about themselves before hooking up, so somebody must like it.

But even the parts of the show where David wasn't much of a factor shined tonight. The cold open featuring an address from Ted Cruz wasn't the sharpest political writing the show's ever put forward. But it's zeroed in on a take on Cruz--the candidate as an offputting semi-creep, and they're letting Taran Killam run with it. Again, it's a pretty standard SNL tradition to take one exaggerated characteristic and ride it til it dies when it comes to political figures, but at Killam's having fun with it, and it's a solid direction to go as SNL settles into the primary season.

Similarly, the Pizza Roll sketch, which has shared DNA with a similar sketch lead Vanessa Bayer performed during the J.K. Simmons episode, had me wondering where it was going at first. The Stepford-esque rhythms of Bayer's TV Ad Mom were appropriately broad and funny by themselves, but I kept waiting for the punchline. But the sketch's left turn into weirdness and horror, with Bayer's discovery that her Hungry Guys were watching nothing, was a great and unexpected development. In retrospect, the sketch builds perfectly, with the rhythmic chanting growing more and more unsettling until the reveal, and the X-Files promo was the perfect tag for it. And the Cam Newton and Peyton Manning sketch made hay in the inspired stroke of filtering the different perceptions of white and black quarterbacks through a goofy "Ebony and Ivory" set up. Like a lot of SNL's humor in the area, the cops coming in to press Cam underlined the joke a little too much in a sketch that wasn't terribly subtle to begin with, but it was an entertaining way to address the issue.

Finally, it needs to be said the Weekend Update with Jost and Che has arrived. I will cop to having my doubts about the pair, Jost in particular, from the time each made to the desk, but they've not only found a sharpness in the writing for the individual gags, from Jost's riffs on Cruz's showtunes habit to Che's more bawdy one-liner about "the munchies", but they've leaned more into their individual personas, with Jost performing an extended snark on the entrance snafus at the Republican Presidential Debate, to Che's humorous rant about Black History Month. Each is clearly more comfortable out there injecting a little more of their personalities into the material, and it's also allowed them to build a solid comedic back-and-forth that livens the proceedings considerably. Update is a strength, no longer a liability, and that portends good things for the show going forward.

The success carried on with this week's guests at the Update desk. Kate McKinnon's Sturdy Barbie didn't win me over at first, but there's such a specificity of character to both the writing and McKinnon's performance, mixed with the fun-if-gentle take on girls' toys, that it was hard not to be smiling by the time she finished the bit. Similarly, Jon Rudnitsky has had some trouble finding his niche on the show (a fact he acknowledged early in his appearance), but the physicality of his pantomiming, and his twisted take on Dirty Dancing, was a recipe for success and his most memorable moment on the show so far. Finally, the surprise cameo of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as Derek Zoolander and Hansel to add their character's usual clueless take to the presidential race as filtered through fashion was a pleasant finale to the segment. True-to-their origin, the characters feel more like throwbacks to 90s-era SNL in their style, but it was a nice taste of the kind of comedy Stiller and his compatriots are known for in a live sketch comedy setting.

All-in-all, there was nary a dud in the bunch. Even the sketches that couldn't keep pace with the rest of the quality work had something to recommend them. And while they weren't really my cup of tea, The 1975 (whose lead singer looked like the second coming of Pete Burns and the Goth Kid from South Park), surely gave some young watchers those strange new feelings, so there's that. But this was,, without exaggeration, the best Saturday Night Live has been in years. Larry David was stellar while injecting his brand of comedy into the occasionally staid confines of modern SNL, the regular cast shined at nearly every opportunity, and the humor was on point throughout. This is one worth going out of your way for.