[7.5/10] Donald Glover could power SNL on charm and weirdness alone, and at times, he did. Let’s go a little nuts and cover the sketches in order of best to worst.
I loved the “Barbie’s Instagram” sketch. It had the right blend of weirdness and little character moments, between Glover’s vaguely existential Mattel captioner, to the other two candidates being dolts, to Kenan’s huffy exhaustion at the whole deal. I was also a big fan of the (now-recurring) bit where Melissa Villasenor doesn't get pillow talk, and takes it increasingly absurd directions. It has the rapid-fire goofiness that I like in a sketch.
That sense of goofiness and specificity of performance really carried the day in this episode. Glover paid homage to cheesy/creepy 80s/90s music videos with his “Raz P. Berry” sketch, that just found more and more weird but amusing left turns to take, each funnier than the last. By comparison, the Jurassic Park Lawsuit sketch was pretty conventional, but got a lot of juice from all the little character touches Glover imbued into the lawyer badly defending the case, from his grand proclamations of a mistrial to even the way he could pour a glass of water.
The “Friendos” pre-taped video felt like a reference to something I didn’t really get in my general lameness, but I did get a kick out of melding the flash of rap videos with the mundanity and playing-against-type qualities of therapy, particularly with the hype man getting his chance to lament his position in the group.
Weekend Update had a solid outing. The one-liners were pretty good, and once again, Che in particular had some cutting and unique takes on the news of the week, particularly his darkly comic commentary on whether there’s a different FBI for black people. Pete Davidson had a nice outing riffing on Jost & Che hosting the emmys and his jealousy over it, though Leslie Jones’s corresponding bit on her prior bad boyfriends was DOA.
The sketch about the dearth of black people in the Star Wars universe was a good observation to build a sketch around, but turning it into a poorly-attended convention did little to really fuel the sketch, and it ended up feeling like an excuse to trot out Glover-as-Lando. Similarly, Glover’s monologue was fine when he was just doing one-liners and projecting that charm, but when it turned into a riff on his multi-talentedness, the joke ran out of gas quickly.
The rest of the sketches were mild-to-meh. The “A Kanye Place” pre-taped bit melded two popular things in the public consciousness, but didn’t turn it into much of a take. The “Prison Help Desk” bit was like the Star Wars sketch in that it had a solid joke as a premise but just ran it into the ground. And the cold open had juice from the onslaught of cameos, but had to coast on that rather than any actual solid jabs or insights, and had to contend with Stormy Daniels being not quite ready for prime time.
Overall, it’s nice to see Glover back in the sketch comedy world after his Derrick Comedy days, with a lot of the sketches having Glover’s unique flavor of humor in them.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2018-05-08T18:30:10Z
[7.5/10] Donald Glover could power SNL on charm and weirdness alone, and at times, he did. Let’s go a little nuts and cover the sketches in order of best to worst.
I loved the “Barbie’s Instagram” sketch. It had the right blend of weirdness and little character moments, between Glover’s vaguely existential Mattel captioner, to the other two candidates being dolts, to Kenan’s huffy exhaustion at the whole deal. I was also a big fan of the (now-recurring) bit where Melissa Villasenor doesn't get pillow talk, and takes it increasingly absurd directions. It has the rapid-fire goofiness that I like in a sketch.
That sense of goofiness and specificity of performance really carried the day in this episode. Glover paid homage to cheesy/creepy 80s/90s music videos with his “Raz P. Berry” sketch, that just found more and more weird but amusing left turns to take, each funnier than the last. By comparison, the Jurassic Park Lawsuit sketch was pretty conventional, but got a lot of juice from all the little character touches Glover imbued into the lawyer badly defending the case, from his grand proclamations of a mistrial to even the way he could pour a glass of water.
The “Friendos” pre-taped video felt like a reference to something I didn’t really get in my general lameness, but I did get a kick out of melding the flash of rap videos with the mundanity and playing-against-type qualities of therapy, particularly with the hype man getting his chance to lament his position in the group.
Weekend Update had a solid outing. The one-liners were pretty good, and once again, Che in particular had some cutting and unique takes on the news of the week, particularly his darkly comic commentary on whether there’s a different FBI for black people. Pete Davidson had a nice outing riffing on Jost & Che hosting the emmys and his jealousy over it, though Leslie Jones’s corresponding bit on her prior bad boyfriends was DOA.
The sketch about the dearth of black people in the Star Wars universe was a good observation to build a sketch around, but turning it into a poorly-attended convention did little to really fuel the sketch, and it ended up feeling like an excuse to trot out Glover-as-Lando. Similarly, Glover’s monologue was fine when he was just doing one-liners and projecting that charm, but when it turned into a riff on his multi-talentedness, the joke ran out of gas quickly.
The rest of the sketches were mild-to-meh. The “A Kanye Place” pre-taped bit melded two popular things in the public consciousness, but didn’t turn it into much of a take. The “Prison Help Desk” bit was like the Star Wars sketch in that it had a solid joke as a premise but just ran it into the ground. And the cold open had juice from the onslaught of cameos, but had to coast on that rather than any actual solid jabs or insights, and had to contend with Stormy Daniels being not quite ready for prime time.
Overall, it’s nice to see Glover back in the sketch comedy world after his Derrick Comedy days, with a lot of the sketches having Glover’s unique flavor of humor in them.