I’m skipping ahead to start reviewing Season 47.
Cold Open
President Biden and his fellow Democrats address the president’s infrastructure bill.
• We have a brand new Joe Biden impersonator starting with this episode: new cast member James Austin Johnson. While he certainly looks the part, his voice needs a lot more work. It might also help if they actually made fun of him instead of lame “haha he’s old” jokes.
• Aidy Bryant debuts an impression of Senator Joe Manchin. She’s been doing a lot of drag roles lately, for some reason.
• Speaking of drag roles, I thought I’d mention that Kate McKinnon is absent from this episode, and will be until at least December. All I have to say about that is, YAAAAAAY!
Cast Notes:
• Beck Bennett and Lauren Holt are no longer in the cast. While I was expecting Holt to get the boot, since she never did anything of note, I was not expecting Bennett to leave. Even so, I’m happy that he did, because he was a terrible impressionist, and he just wasn’t funny.
• There are three new cast members: James Austin Johnson (who I already mentioned), Sarah Sherman, and Aristotle Athari. Bowen Yang has also been promoted to repertory status.
Monologue
Owen Wilson talks about hosting the show for his first time.
• I’m surprised that this is only the first time that Owen is hosting the show. His brother Luke did in one of the better episodes of the disastrous Season 30.
• Speaking of Luke, he makes a cameo in the audience, along with their other brother Andrew.
• I was hoping Owen would do something special for his first ever monologue, but it was just a long, boring speech. As much as I hate to say this, I would have preferred something like a questions or musical monologue for this one.
Sketch: The Talking
A doctor delivers COVID tests to the four hosts of a talk show.
• This sketch is a parody of an incident that happened on The View that week where two of the hosts tested positive for COVID during the show.
• This was where I first noticed Kate’s absence. Usually, they make sure to include her in sketches that involve most of the female cast, so her absence here was rather jarring to me.
• Unfortunately, the lack of McKinnon couldn’t save this sketch from being extremely formulaic. As soon as the main joke revealed itself, that was all we got.
Film: Star Trek: Ego Quest
Jeff Bezos and his brother get involved in some “hilarious” shenanigans in space.
• Nice of them to do a sketch with the Wilson brothers. Owen plays Jeff Bezos, while Luke plays his brother. Does Jeff even have a brother?
• There’s also some other billionaire impressions on the ship, including Elon Musk (*shudder* I’m getting bad memories of his hosting stint) and Richard Branson. Unsurprisingly, these impressions both suck. The Branson one has nothing on the one that Bill Hader used to do.
• Another really boring sketch about something I have no interest in.
Sketch: Cars 4
Owen Wilson records lines for the new Cars movie.
• Ugh, another pathetic example of sucking up to Disney.
• Even worse, it’s yet another sketch with lame juvenile sex jokes. Most of the lines Owen has to read are related to Lightning McQueen having sex with girl cars.
• James Austin Johnson shows up as Larry The Cable Guy, and good lord is the impression terrible! In his defense, though, it’s a really hard voice to do.
• The only thing I liked were the illustrations that accompanied each of their lines.
Sketch: School Board Meeting
Attendees at a school board meeting stray wildly off-topic.
• This sketch makes its first appearance since Season 41.
• I shudder to think what the first two installments of this were like, because this was terrible! While it was nice to see the whole cast (minus McKinnon, Che, and Jost) involved in this, it went on for way too long.
• I got a brief chuckle from Mikey’s character introducing himself. Something about his delivery made me smile.
• Continuing the theme of bad impressions, Pete Davidson shows up as Dog The Bounty Hunter. Not only does he not look like him, but he sounds awful.
• This was Asian Terry Sweeney’s first and only appearance in the whole episode. Awesome!
Musical Performance: “Justified”
• For some strange reason, Musgreaves performs this song in the nude, with her lady parts strategically hidden by a cleverly placed guitar.
Weekend Update (featuring A Black Woman Who’s Been Missing For Ten Years and Pete Davidson)
• Oh, geez, it’s these morons again. Despite being the longest lasting anchors this segment has ever had, they haven’t gotten any funnier.
• I am extremely tired of Michael Che laughing at his jokes. He does it twice here, including after a really tasteless joke about R. Kelly.
• Ego Nwodim has a commentary as a missing black woman. And, just like the one in the JJ Watt episode, I actually enjoyed it a lot! She brings up some good points about what it’s like to be a missing black woman, like how her missing person poster is actually a WANTED poster (great picture they used for it, btw), and the reward for finding her is a Chili’s Too coupon that only works at the airport. She also has a pretty good slam at Madea when bringing up movies about missing women. I can’t understand why they barely give her any commentaries, because she knocks them out of the park every time!
• As this was the first episode to air after the death of Norm MacDonald, Pete Davidson wears a shirt with his face on it during his commentary. The only laugh I got from it was showing a picture of a guy in a gimp mask that he claims is of Colin Jost.
• Speaking of Norm, they end Update with a nice tribute to him by showing some old clips from his time behind the desk, including one of his famous OJ jokes. Unfortunately, the clips they chose were some of his blandest, least likely to offend anybody jokes. But it was still nice of them to pay tribute to him.
Sketch: Funeral Song
A funeral ceremony goes awry when the deceased’s final wishes take a bizarre turn.
• The sketch begins with an extremely odd technical gaffe where we can hear the director’s voice, and Lorne is seen walking off the set. This error was surprisingly not edited out for the online upload.
• Now this was a nice surprise! For the first time in who knows how long, I was actually laughing a lot at an SNL sketch.
• The sketch starts off on a low-key note, then picks up when Kenan arrives as a man named “Levar B. Burton”, who makes sure to emphasize that he has a B in the middle, for legal reasons. He starts singing “I Believe I Can Fly”, which offends the other guests at the funeral because of all the terrible things its composer did. They eventually relent when they realize it was the deceased’s wish for the song to be played, and let Burton continue. So far, so good…
• Then, the sketch gets really good when the slideshow of pictures of the deceased woman start to reveal that she may not have been as nice as her family believed. She is then shown with such disgraced celebrities as Louis CK, Trump, and Kevin Spacey, before ending with the best one of all: a photo of her saluting Bill Cosby.
• I was feeling sick on the night this episode aired, and this sketch was the perfect thing I needed to cheer me up!
• The thing that surprised me the most about this sketch was that it was written by Michael Che. I find that hard to believe, because it had none of his usual anti-white jokes in it.
Musical Performance: “Camera Roll”
Sketch: NFL on FOX
Two FOX Sports announcers keep interrupting game coverage to plug a new show on FOX.
• Great, another sketch about something I have no interest in.
• Johnson debuts another impression, this time of Joe Buck. Wilson plays Troy Aikman. I have no idea how accurate the voices are, but Johnson certainly looks like Buck.
• The main joke of this sketch got old pretty fast, even if it is an accurate parody of those annoying “pop-up” ads that usually appear during football games on FOX and other networks. Not only that, but it’s a premise that was already done better in a sketch from the Will Ferrell episode from Season 34, in which Charles Barkley is more interested in the onscreen promos for a sitcom than basketball.
• Not even the random inclusion of Stacey Abrams in one of the promos made me laugh, because, instead of making it a funny background joke, they decided to point it out.
Sketch: Mail-In Testing Service
Two doctors have difficulty filming a promo for their…ugh…stool sample testing service.
• Newbie Sarah Sherman gets her first lead role.
• This sketch was unfortunately nothing but a bunch of lame jokes about playing with poop. Yuck!
• There was a glitch at my station when this first aired, so we joined this sketch right when the poop jokes began. Needless to say, that was a hell of an introduction.
Note: A dedication to a guy named Robert Schlosser is shown before the goodnights.
Final thoughts: Overall, I’m surprised at how much better this episode was than I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t perfect, but it was miles better than the entirety of Season 46. The lack of Kate McKinnon certainly helped it, as did the new cast members. Owen Wilson didn’t really stand out that much as a host, to be honest. I was expecting a lot more from him.
Best sketches: Ego’s commentary, Funeral Song
Worst sketches: Cars 4, Mail-In Testing Service
Next review: Dave Chappelle/Foo Fighters
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