Bill Hader Sad Face really says it all. After two relatively strong episodes to start the season, SNL was due for a stinker. This, my friends, smelled worse than a dead cat in a duffel bag. No one could have expected Daniel Craig, an actor best known for shooting people and selling cocaine, to be uproarious, but did anyone think we’d be treated to a nearly laugh-free episode? The highlights were few and far between, and none involved Muse: the “Construction Worker” sketch elicited a few cheap chuckles, Weekend Update was decent, and Hippopotopussy is a funny word to say. But that’s about it. Even Chris Parnell felt wasted. That’s tough to do.
Like Craig and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, let’s pretend this episode never happened.
One of two sketches in the episode about Denver’s altitude. Yup.
The laughs were easy and the post-monologue placement proves how terrible the rest of the show was, but I dunno, Daniel Craig’s construction worker, who sounded like Christopher Walken impersonating Lucky Luciano, got to me. Or maybe I just like the word “pooperize.”
Otherwise, Craig was NOT a good host. He was jittery, clearly read from the cards, stepped on his own punchlines, and had trouble bantering with other cast members. He was the opposite of James Bond: there was nothing calm, cool, or collected about him. Awesome guy, bad SNL host.
The other altitude sketch. Jason Sudeikis’ Chris Matthews might be better than Darrell Hammond’s.
As much as I like Kate McKinnon (who was everywhere in the episode) and enjoy seeing Nasim Pedrad impersonate Lea Michele, the absence of Kristen Wiig is most felt during celebrity impression sketches. This wasn’t a particularly funny concept, anyways, but Wiig could have salvaged it a smidge. God, am I already pining for last season? Christina Applegate better bring the funny next week.
Again, Kate McKinnon is all kinds of awesome, even if the sketch itself was as unstimulating as a woman wearing Ugg boots on the Drunk Train.
“Fuzz Aldrin” was the best joke here. Make of that what you will.
OK, I’m not so much of a monster that I hated seeing Big Bird on SNL (though I was always more of an Oscar the Grouch fan myself), but it would have been nice if he had come with, y’know, jokes. I get that a character from a kids show can’t do anything too risqué, like this, but his appearance was a missed opportunity for an eight-foot-tall bird to slam Mitt Romney for his anti-PBS comments, not tell flat fish puns.
Goddammit SNL, now you’ve got me hating on Big Bird.
A decent idea that didn’t go nearly far enough. There was nothing satirical nor mean to the parody of a British working-class sitcom (alternate title: Womp-Womp)…both thing that were also missing from the entire episode. I don’t know, guys. Thanks for making it this far. Here’s a GIF of a hedgehog wearing a hat.
Fred Armisen has never been and will never be funny while wearing a dress, so I have no idea what he has on the writers that they keep writing drag sketches for him. Did one of them murder a kitten in cold blood, and only he saw it? In 20 years, when Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller write another tell-all book, I’m going to go straight to the chapters about Armisen. Hopefully the word “regretful” comes up at some point.
