Cold Open: Vice Presidential Debate
“Wacky” shenanigans occur at the Vice Presidential Debate.
• I won’t beat around the bush here...this is one of the WORST cold openings in SNL history. Everything that could have gone wrong here did.
• The first 30 seconds of this were plagued by random video dropouts (at least on my affiliate). At one point a brief shot of Kenan and some other assholes flashed on screen from what I assume was dress rehearsal footage. I’m sure this was fixed for reruns but I haven’t bothered to check because I never want to watch this sketch again.
• Have I told you how much I DESPISE Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris?!? While the random social media jokes she used to do have been thankfully phased out, she still finds the time to be smug and annoying. I really hate the way she emphasizes Biden’s name, and the part where she does a Philadelphian accent (don’t ask) was super painful to listen to.
• Beck Bennett continues to prove how much of a terrible impressionist he is by trotting out his awful Mike Pence impression for the first time in forever. I didn’t miss him. At least they didn’t do any jokes about how much he hates gays for once.
• I forgot to mention her earlier, but Kate McKinnon’s Susan Page impression is just as smug and annoying as Harris. She outright says to Pence at one point that she wasn’t asking if Trump was recovering well out of sympathy, but because she’s full of rage towards his incompetence. Can they make their politics any less transparent on this show?
• Really? They’re doing spit-takes now? This is turning into a bad variety show sketch.
• Jim Carrey shows up as Biden again, watching the debate on television. Any hope that I had of his impression improving from the last episode is quickly extinguished once he starts going into the Fire Marshal Bill routine again with the goofy faces.
• Then, as if this awful sketch couldn’t get any worse, it randomly turns into a parody of “The Fly”. Biden decides to teleport himself to the debate, for some reason, and we get a shot from the movie where Carrey’s head is crudely pasted onto Jeff Goldblum’s body as he gets inside the teleporter. But, surprise surprise, there’s also a fly in there. So you can probably see where this is going. Of course, they merge together and end up on Pence’s head (JUST LIKE IN THE REAL DEBATE HERP-A-DERP!), followed by the worst Jeff Goldblum impression ever. Considering how much they love their celebrity cameos these days, I’m surprised they didn't get the real deal for this. Luckily, he was in England filming a movie at the time, so he couldn't.
• Kenan brings out his Herman Cain impression, proving that not even death will stop SNL from digging up old, tired routines. They also show a shocking lack of respect for Cain by having him say that Trump was the reason he died for not having him wear a mask.
• Just thinking about this shit anymore makes me sick, so, let me cut this short; overall, this is the worst cold open ever, end of story.
-2,000/5
Monologue
Bill Burr does stand-up about COVID, cancel culture, and white women.
• Color me shocked, this monologue wasn’t that bad! I had no knowledge of Bill Burr before this episode, so I didn’t know what to expect from him. He totally won me over with this monologue, though!
• We start out kind of slow with bland COVID jokes, then he turns to the main subject: he’s tired of cancel culture. And this is where my interest is piqued.
• He has some great insults towards those people who tried to cancel John Wayne earlier this year.
• GREAT point about how most of the members of Black Lives Matter are white women!
• And he ends on a ballsy note by making fun of Pride Month! I wish all of the stand-up comedians they get to host the show were like this!
4/5
Sketch: New Normal
A couple (Burr and McKinnon) gets nervous while meeting with their friends for the first time since quarantine started.
• After the good feeling the monologue left me with, I wait through 45 seconds of this sketch for the jokes to start, then McKinnon says “unpresidented” instead of “unprecedented”. Then the rest of the sketch is McKinnon talking in a drunk voice while she and Burr keep coming up with unfunny mispronounciations. I’ve got nothing else to say about this one.
1/5
Sketch: The Blitz
Unfunny shit happens while Kevin (Kenan Thompson) is trying to editorialize to the audience about police brutality.
• I thought the humor in this one was going to come from Burr’s character wearing a bear hat, but then Kenan started talking about some black man getting killed by police, and it hit me; this show is clearly more interested in politics than it is in actually entertaining us.
• While he tries to keep talking, Burr keeps pulling unfunny pranks on him, and we get another damn joke about Snapchat filters! Will you guys please stop with the Snapchat jokes?!?
0/5
Short Film: Enough is Enough
An up-and-coming actor named Benji (Beck Bennett) sings an anti-Trump rap on Instagram in hopes that his friends will see it and like it, but they don’t want anything to do with him.
• I was expecting the worst from this one. I thought the entire sketch was just going to be about him singing the rap (which is extremely cringeworthy) and that would be it, but I was in for a surprise.
• Instead, the real joke was that his rap was so pathetic that all of his friends want him to take it down. They accurately sum up all those nobodies who take shots at Trump when someone tells Benji that he’s not famous enough and is jeopardizing his career. It’s a surprising move for SNL to mock this type of behavior, when they’d normally be encouraging it.
• Best of all is the ending, when Jason Momoa calls him up and asks to be untagged from the video, all while insulting him and asking why he hasn’t died yet.
4/5
Musical Performance: Jack White Medley
I normally don’t comment on the performances, but this one was so great that it may rank among the greatest in SNL history.
Weekend Update (featuring Wayne Wenowdis and Pete Davidson)
• Once again, our first joke is one where they say that Trump is mentally ill. They then call him a “bioweapon” and make a random Terminator II reference.
• One bit I don’t understand is when Jost says that it looks like Trump greenscreened himself in front of the White House. The video he is referring to is obviously not greenscreened.
• Michael Che then expresses his disappointment that Trump survived by comparing it to a drunk driving accident where only the drunk driver survived. It’s pretty pathetic.
• What follows is one of the most disturbing and unfunny things I have ever seen; we get a guest commentary from “Dr. Wayne Wenowdis”, played by Kate McKinnon in her 1,000,000th drag role. All this character does is talk in a goofy voice and say “we know this” every three seconds. It was so bad that I actually had to skip through the rest of this commentary. Apparently, I missed a part where McKinnon suddenly breaks out laughing for no reason and Jost asks if she’s okay. Uh-oh, that probably means that they’re going to bring this character back at some point in the future. (EDIT: Whaddya know, they did!)
• Absolutely ghastly “joke” about baseball legend Whitey Ford being “from a simpler time where you could just name your kid Whitey”. Even when somebody dies, Michael Che can’t keep his anti-white jokes to himself.
• We end with a commentary where Pete Davidson talks about J.K. Rowling’s transphobia. I couldn’t skip to the next sketch fast enough once I heard that.
0/5
Sketch: Don Pauly
Some shit about the Mafia, or something.
• You know, in a sketch about how we shouldn’t racially profile people, it’s kind of ironic how they’re going with one of the oldest stereotypes in the book: “Italians are in the Mafia”. As an Italian, I’m normally not offended by these types of jokes, but when you’re doing them in a sketch about how we shouldn’t racially profile people, there’s kind of an odd double standard there.
• Oh, and they’re doing a Mafia sketch in 2020? Didn’t we exhaust all those jokes already while The Sopranos was still airing?
1/5
Fake Commercial: Samuel Adams Jack-O-Pumpkin Ale
• I totally didn’t understand the joke in this one. All I could see was lame Boston accents that were already overused on those Boston Teens sketches.
• And there’s a spit-take for the second time in this episode. Why?!? This is the type of shit that Lorne would have called “too Carol Burnett” back in the 70’s.
• Why did this have to be an ad for a real product instead of a creative original one? Years from now, people are still going to remember fake ads like “Mel’s Char Palace”, “Happy Fun Ball”, “Colon Blow”, and “The Clucky Chicken”, while shit like this will be forgotten in a few years. Maybe they were hoping to get free stuff from Samuel Adams.
0/5
Musical Performance: “Lazaretto”
Side Note: After Jack White’s second number, they showed a brief clip of Eddie Van Halen’s performance on the show, as this was the first episode after his death. It was nice to see the clip, as it gave me a brief glimpse of a much more pleasant experience. Also, the guitar Jack is using during “Lazaretto” is one that Eddie made especially for him.
Final thoughts: A slight step up from the last episode. Still not very funny, but I did get a few laughs from Burr’s monologue, and the Jason Momoa cameo appearance. But you know things are getting bad when one of my highlights is a gratuitous cameo.
Best sketches: Monologue, Enough is Enough, Jack White’s performances, Eddie Van Halen tribute
Worst sketches: Cold Open, The Blitz, Weekend Update (especially the Whitey Ford “joke”), Samuel Adams
Next review: Issa Rae/Justin Bieber
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