The actual reasons for long gaps in between hosting gigs for seeming friends of Saturday Night Live are probably less firm, and less interesting, than we might expect. With only 20 episodes per season, sometimes less, and plenty of accumulated alumni to serve, it shouldn’t be surprising that sometimes people are a semiregular presence for a few years without becoming a Hanks-style mainstay. But it’s still pretty remarkable that Jack Black took nearly 20 years in between his third SNL episode and his fourth, as he noted in his elaborate musical monologue. His last episode, tied to the release of the Peter Jackson King Kong, is something of a classic, for reasons both having nothing to do with Black (the debut of “Lazy Sunday,” “Christmastime for the Jews,” and the “Two A-holes” sketch) and entirely dependent on him (a King Kong monologue song; a Will Forte spelling-bee sketch that segues into a Tenacious D performance). Hell, the episode he didn’t sing about that happened in the interim, where Tenacious D served as musical guest on a December 2006 installment hosted by Matthew Fox, is also surprisingly good, by which I mean it includes a really funny Will Forte sketch pitting a math whiz against his father, a history buff. And Black’s career since 2005-2006 has neither gone supernova nor flamed out in a way that would preclude him from hosting. The main difference is that he has more of a direct side line in kids’ movies now, while back in the mid-2000s, The School Of Rock was something of a novelty.
Yes, the last time Black hosted, Kung Fu Panda straight up did not exist. And now poor Po is dead. (Actually, Kung Fu Panda 4 was just really middling; surely DreamWorks will put together a not-really-live-action version by 2028.) On the SNL side, Black missed the entire tenure of the McKinnon/Aidy/Cecily-era cast members. Another difference two decades makes: He’s made himself a regular fixture of video-game-related movies, reassuring their young fans that the movie they’ve managed to get excited about, whether Minecraft or Mario or a rebooted Jumanji, will be suitably silly (but not so actually-good as to challenge them emotionally on any level). None of that particularly came through in this week’s SNL episode; no gaming sketches here, and plenty that wasn’t appropriate for his younger fans. And when the material wasn’t risqué, it sure wasn’t an obvious youth play, with multiple sketch concepts that were fully available to the cast and writers of The Carol Burnett Show 50-plus years ago: An audience confused by the first ever play put on in ancient Greece! A sketch about a famous photograph from the end of World War II!
These sketches, and pretty much all of the other sketches of the night, were extremely silly. In keeping with the old-timey theme, several cast members had to visibly restrain from cracking up, multiple times, presumably at the sheer ridiculous bravado with which Black and others delivered their lines, even as Black himself repeatedly mistimed cues or tripped over his delivery. Even when no one broke, something like the first-play sketch felt dangerously corny in concept and “actually, the Carol Burnett version would probably escalate further” in execution. Yet throughout the episode, the energy kept going off the charts, and Black’s kid-movie experience showed more and more, albeit indirectly. His persona has always been boisterous, of course, but the ability to have fun while, say, pretending to live inside Minecraft can really put a bunch of crazy make-em-ups over the top, especially when only one of them really attempts to scale heights any further than “funny premise.”
The odd exception was Black’s duet with Sarah Sherman, paying tribute to the fumbling world of, uh, lovemaking, which had the substantial escalation of adding a third/fourth person into the bedroom, in the form of Bowen Yang and musical co-guest Brandi Carlisle. This ultimately changed the tone and subject of the sketch, which began more predicated on silly costumes and floating actors than an actual spoof of sexual mores. (Did they just want to get Black up on wires again after the Sbarro sketch from his last hosting episode?) But whether the sketches were sticking to a premise or abandoning it, silliness (and brevity) usually won out. An episode like this one every week would probably be exhausting; as funny as Black can be, he’s not one of those recurring hosts who feels like a perfect fit for an alternate-universe version of the cast. But on the heels of the weird pall Morgan Wallen seemed to cast over last week’s installment (not rational to blame him, really, but let’s do it anyway!), Black’s presence felt particularly sunshine-y. It wasn’t exactly like he never left, but he did return ready to rock.
What was on
The regular sketch that came closest to greatness was probably, weirdly, the lead-off game-show thing with Black playing Gene, a man dressed as Indiana Jones in a Dating Game-type hidden-bachelor game. Another silly idea, for sure, but the way Gene’s insistence that he doesn’t know who Indiana Jones in absolutely infuriates the host played by Andrew Dismukes (especially in the face of Chloe Fineman’s single gal being completely open-minded about it) really makes it. The pre-tape music video for “Goth on Vacation” was also very funny, with just the right amount of straight-faced lead-up before the joke reveal.
But as with Black’s last episode, the biggest thrill of the night didn’t actually come from him. No, that honor belonged to Ego Nwodim’s featured spot on Weekend Update, which was unusual for her; usually, she arrives playing a precise character. But in a way, she did that here, too, claiming she had an idea for how to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as a comedian without playing into the “divisive” politics that got Amber Ruffin pre-emptively booted from the annual event. Nwodim then launched into a stand-up routine supposedly designed to only make jokes about the food served at the event, but clearly inhabiting a persona removed from her own, not least because of her jokes about what sex is like for the over-50 set. Pacing back and forth in front of the Update desk rather than sitting behind it, Nwodim built an expert stand-up parody that was also hilarious in its own right, enhanced by the live performance, especially when she prompted the audience to vocally fill in the blanks on a routine they’d never heard—which they did the first time, clearly surprising Nwodim, and then surprising her more when everyone finished “ain’t worth” with an enthusiastic “shit!” rather than Nwodim’s “a damn.” Unleashing this kind of meta-comedy on Update recalled Fred Armisen, only performed with about three hundred percent more energy. (Armisen is brilliant, but he’ll let jokes sit there all night if he has to.) Nwodim has been one of the show’s funniest cast members for years at this point; this was a particularly virtuosic reminder of what an original she is.
What was off
The back-to-basics of just doing a Trump speech with a little Mike Myers-as-Elon walk-on felt very ’90s, which was fine, and the show seems to have a little more of a handle on genuinely making fun of Trump again, rather than making him the goofy but straight-talking master of ceremonies. But, yeesh, couldn’t someone come up with a real sketch about this stuff, rather than having the fake politicians stand around and address the camera?
Also, the sketch about one-upping was confusing, almost moreso for regular viewers of the show, who are practically begged to wonder why this sketch is doing a new version of Kristen Wiig’s Penelope updated with characters concerned with virtue-signaling, and then crossing it with the sound-effects cues of Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer at a volume that’s much harder to keep in sync with the on-screen action. The smugness of the characters’ self-important goodness was funny enough, but maybe because the rest of the sketch could have come from a desk drawer locked since ’05.
Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)
It could have been Dismukes or Heidi Gardner, but then Nwodim went and sunk that three-pointer. Sports analogies!
Next time
Four-timers’ month (?!) continues with Jon Hamm’s first episode since 2010 (when he hosted twice in a calendar year). He’s made an insane 14 cameos since then, though, so he’s been hanging around more than Black. (In fact, the one time I saw the show live, 11 years ago, Hamm was there.) Black’s Mandalorian queen Lizzo will be performing songs, and presumably will also be more up for a music video bar than Morgan Wallen.
Stray observations
- • Yes, that was Bill Burr glimpsed in the rarely-seen higher-up audience when Black headed up there for his song—and Kieran Culkin, presumably taking in the show shortly after this evening’s performance of Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. (I caught it last week for work, and it makes sense that they’d be able to get to Rockefeller Center in time; they blew through the whole thing in about 85 minutes.)
- • She may not have won MVP for this week, but Heidi can undeniably boast the best bass moves, and with the added degree of difficulty of performing with some, ah, prominent prosthetics.
- • Speaking of the bass-off (which felt like a spiritual sequel to a sketch Black did with Will Ferrell), I don’t mean to backseat write—literally nobody is less qualified to make sketch-writing suggestions than TV reviewers—but doesn’t it feel like the Seinfeld theme should have been in there alongside The Simpsons?
- • I wish I had more to say about Elton John and Brandi Carlisle. They were fine. I also think it would be fine if Elton John just for-real retired; he’s one of those musicians who seems particularly susceptible to being lured out via sycophantry.
- • Che and Jost had their best Update in a while, offering several jokes with actual bite, only to have the whole thing decisively stolen by Ego. Maybe they deserved it, though, for letting through that Hooters joke, presumably hoping its corniness would in and of itself be funny. (I know Norm Macdonald’s roast of Bob Saget, “it was a bust,” and you are no Norm Macdonald’s roast of Bob Saget.) Also, it’s impossible for me not to notice that the Trump fuck-up that seemed to really rile Jost is, naturally, the stock market tanking.
- • Two Morgan Wallen references, one in the Trump opening and one on Update, seem like an implication that maybe Wallen’s reps protestations that everything was great and he wasn’t in fact speeding the hell out of 8H as quickly as possible was not 100% true; if he truly felt like he goofed up, I doubt the show would press it further (or would have him on again to make light of it).
- • That one-upping sketch wasn’t very good, but, on the other hand, randomly sampling the wah-ah-ah sound from “Down With The Sickness” by Disturbed for one of the camera-takes was one of the biggest laughs of the night.
