There’s an art to cracking up through a comedy bit. Harvey Korman, on The Carol Burnett Show, was the master of it. In the SNL sketch about UFO abductees from a few years ago, Ryan Gosling couldn’t keep it together in front of Kate McKinnon. It should be unprofessional, but on SNL busting up can be the thing that makes a sketch special.
On the latest Weekend Update, there was, alas and alack, no return of Stefon, despite the presence during the episode of both Bill Hader and host John Mulaney, with whom Hader used to write the monologues. Instead, we got a random thing about meat farmers. Their names were Vaneta and Wylene Starkie, they hailed from the Deep South, and they were played by Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant.
The sketch was okay. It had a promising hook: The Starkies were responding to a market that was decreasingly meat positive by only selling meat by “animals that are individually stupid and bad.” For instance, some meat was from a cow “who bit a kid in the weiner.”
McKinnon and Bryant are talented enough performers to transcend the slightly-above-average writing. But the thing that proved truly funny stemmed from a total accident: The meat basket prop apparently smelled really, really funky. Even McKinnon — who can keep a straight face through anything — lost it early and often.
It was a thing of beauty, and eventually they roped co-anchor Colin Jost into their shenanigans, pushing the rancid basket of meat in his face, knowing that a sketch that could never atone for the lack of Stefon still put a smile on everyone’s faces, including those on-screen.
