[4.3/10] Oof. SNL is 1-for-4 on episodes this season, and some of the misses have been absolute dogs. I don’t know what the issue is precisely, but this is another week where the material was feeble and the performances weren’t great either.
Let’s start out talking about the few good sketches, and two out of the three were a bit edgier that SNL normally is. The best of them was 1980s PSA retrospective. The gag about how efforts to be progressive or encouraging in the past feel retrograde and even offensive today is a solid one, and the show captures the look and feel of those after school special vids perfectly. And screw me, I actually enjoyed Larry David’s monologue for the cringe-fest it was. Like Larry, I’m Jewish, and I don’t mind him getting a little transgressive by mining our cultural past and applying his brand of humor to it.
The only other decent sketch in the night was the Celebrity Price Is Right skit. It is, like most of these celebrity gameshow sketches, a mildly-pleasing excuse to trot out a bunch of impressions, but most of them were amiable enough and a couple, including Larry’s Bernie Sanders and Cecily Strong’s Sofia Vergara, were quite entertaining.
The rest of the sketches were mild-to-weak. We get the usual Baldwin-Trump cold open, which can’t really make hay of the Manafort indictments. They really need to find a new direction to go with these, because they’re getting pretty uninspired and MadLibs about them at this point. Similarly, I love Aidy Bryant as a performer, but her Sarah Huckabee Sanders music video didn’t get any laughs out of me. Maybe if I was more up on Demi Lovato’s music, the joke would land, but there wasn’t much of a take here.
“Fresh Takes” was a one-joke sketch, and while Larry David as a creepy teacher who knows too much about his students’ romantic lives isn’t the worst premise, there’s not much to it here. The “Baby Step” music video is another bit that, like the Sarah Huckabee Sanders sketch, might be funnier to me if I was more in tune with that genre, but even the meta humor they tried to do with it via Larry didn’t really click. The “New Wife” sketch with Cecily Strong as a club performer was DOA. And the Kyle Mooney sketch was as terrible as his shtick always is, going for that Adult Swim-esque anti-humor and coming up with something that just isn’t funny.
Even Weekend Update was pretty tepid this week. Jost & Che didn’t have much incisive commentary on the Manafort stuff and only a few corny one-liners besides. The correspondent segments were solid, as Dey & Moffat’s Trump boys routine is durably funny, and newcomer Heidi Gardner eventually won me over on her repetitive but sufficiently silly turn as “Every Girlfriend From Every Movie About Boxing Ever.” But Leslie Jones falters with a toothless bit about finding baseball players attractive that culminates in, don’t ya know it, the Houston Astros players doing a walk on.
Overall, I was really excited for this episode, since David’s last hosting gig turned into one of SNL’s best episodes in ages, but this had one of the poorest batting averages of sketches in a while, and it’s part of a worrying trend for the show this year.
Shout by Alekhya DasBlockedParent2017-11-09T14:46:42Z
The episode was bad. Larry David's monologue was terrible. Even the sketches were hardly funny. The boxer's girlfriend part was pretty good.
Miley Cyrus's performances and The Weekend Update were the only saving grace.