Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update desk is a tremendous platform for big performers who are at their best when all eyes are on them and one-dimensional characters that would suffer if they were pushed out in a standard sketch, weighed down with sets, a story, and other characters.
Bill Hader’s Stefon is the example. He actually debuted in a forgettable sketch that stifled (but didn’t eliminate) the character’s true appeal — his utter unpredictability.
Despite Stefon’s near-retirement, Weekend Update’s profile as a breeding ground for some of the show’s best original characters and most talked about moments has yet to diminish. This is partially due to Leslie Jones’ occasional commentaries and appearances by Vanessa Bayer’s “Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy,” Taran Killam’s “Jebidiah Atkinson,” and Bobby Moynihan’s “Drunk Uncle.” While Cecily Strong comes close, no one on the current cast has consistently delivered for Weekend Update with a wide range of characters like Kate McKinnon has.
McKinnon is arguably SNL‘s biggest talent right now and she’s certainly its most decorated, taking home an American Comedy Award last year while also earning an Emmy nomination for her work on the show. But while her Justin Bieber impression, diverse assortment of in-sketch characters, and work in bits like Dyke and Fats has deservedly earned her a lot of attention and praise, McKinnon may be at her very best when it’s just her and the camera on Weekend Update.
With SNL returning tonight, let’s hope to see more of these characters in 2015.
Olya Povlatsky
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To me, McKinnon’s Olya Povlatsky isn’t quite on par with Stefon. Whereas Hader’s character was more able to create his own shot while releasing a stream of random references that somehow added up to a hilarious take on New York’s mysterious underground club scene, McKinnon’s character feels more tightly scripted and reliant on the anchor to provide her with a set-up before most jokes.
With that said, though, the more structured deployment of Olya’s absurd stories about Mother Russia works for McKinnon and it allows for a bit of contrast between whatever Russia-centric world event the anchor is asking about and the tortured Russian villager’s response.
Like Stefon, Olya’s appeal comes from her unpredictability. Though they don’t come in bunches like the ones that Stefon generates, Olya’s stories about Full House, glass-free windows, recreational line-waiting, and her dog-lawyer ex-boyfriend are always a pleasant surprise and more than able to generate the same kind of hard laughs that Stefon gets.
Ann Romney
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Kate McKinnon’s Anne Romney worked best when behind the Update desk, but she also shined in sketches as a second banana to Jason Sudeikis’ Mitt Romney impression during the 2012 election. In the above video, McKinnon plays the almost first lady with crazy eyed enthusiasm while showing off her freaking amazing hair and her unsinkable love for Beyonce.
Angela Merkel
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So many of SNL‘s most iconic political impressions have earned style points for the way that they were able to mimic a portion of their target’s personality. Think back to Dana Carvey’s impression of George Bush, Darrell Hammond’s Bill Clinton, and Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush. There’s a whole lot of embellishment but a little bit of truth.
McKinnon’s impression of German Chancellor Angela Merkel feels like an impression in name only. It’s an original character that is tied to an actual person with the slightest tether, and that’s why it’s so much fun to watch.
Merkel seems like a quiet and respectable world leader in public, so McKinnon doesn’t have a lot to work with personality wise. Because of this, she envisions the guarded Merkel as a shell that is hiding a wild and lusty woman who is married to her mobile phone, loves bratwurst, and wants to turn her back to Barack Obama in the fun way… perhaps for boob touches at Make-Out Point. It’s a 180 from everything that is known about Merkel, and in a way, that makes it similar to what Phil Hartman did back in the 80s with Ronald Reagan in the legendary Mastermind sketch.
Cecilia Gimenez
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Cecilia Gimenez is an 80-year-old amateur artist who innocently took a nearly 90-year-old painting of Jesus Christ and crudely “fixed it” by profoundly altering the initial image. Surprisingly, the re-done version of the painting became a sensation that garnered attention and money. Gimenez wanted her cut and so Weekend Update and McKinnon sought to play with that. The end-result was an uncommonly amusing and committed impression that sought to convince Update anchor Seth Meyers that the painting was actually an accurate depiction of Christ — cool shark eyes and all.
Pat Lynhart — GTA Mom
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Once again, McKinnon plays with stereotypes as she turns the kind of repressed suburban mom that would usually be opposed to Grand Theft Auto‘s violent content into a superfan that has broken from reality and surrendered her life to the game and the pursuit of running Los Santos.
The premise is great, but it’s McKinnon’s performance that really makes this one-off character stand-out and that’s true with the rest of these desk-bits as well.
McKinnon gets compared to Kristen Wiig often because their tenures on Saturday Night Live overlapped and because they are both women who have become stars on the show. But while both are adept at creating tremendous characters, I don’t think that their styles are all that similar.
When I see McKinnon bring gusto to a role, I can’t help but think back to Molly Shannon’s heyday on the show and the same thing goes for the physicality that McKinnon injects into her work. She’s not necessarily throwing herself around the room and high kicking like Shannon did — though the Halloween Party sketch beside Jim Carrey earlier this season showed that she can do that too — it’s that she’s adding movement and idiosyncrasies to vanilla characters in an effort to bring them to life and pump up the volume.
Look at her Ellen impression or the aforementioned Bieber impression. She doesn’t just sound like these characters, she’s absorbing and then amplifying their movements. Half of the humor in McKinnon’s portrayal of Angela Merkel comes from her animated movements, gestures, and facial contortions. She’s doing comedy with her whole body and that screams out confidence and fearlessness — two things that Saturday Night Live can never have enough of. Hopefully McKinnon will keep on doing what she’s been doing, and hopefully she’ll do even more of it from behind the Weekend Update desk in the new year because that no-frills delivery system suits her gargantuan talent and her unique style so well.
