Lizzo brought her all to SNL; unfortunately, the writers didn't show up to meet her

Lizzo works overtime to please. That’s her thing. Fifteen minutes before the writing and production staff of Saturday Night Live embarrassed her almost completely, the late news on NBC’s NYC affiliate gushed about Lizzo visiting people who were camping on the standby-ticket line outside 30 Rock, while her backup dancers served pizza. The network’s PR department was clearly on the job. Unfortunately, SNL’s writing staff didn’t bother to show up for her episode this week. What’s worse: Wherever the writers were, they apparently took the technical staff along, as this episode of SNL committed the cardinal sin of making a talented musical guest look distinctly ungreat in performance.

What worked more often than not

Normally, this rubric is “What killed.” The Easter wishes cold open didn’t kill, but it’s better than much of what followed. Before the show, I was thinking about SNL’s approach to political humor this season, and how it offers little in the way of sharpness or sting and definitely nothing approaching inspired madness (for some reason, I’m thinking of Dan Aykroyd’s Bob Dole threatening to stick a pen in the neck of a presidential debate opponent). Today, SNL likes its political humor fuzzy and soft, very olde-tyme variety show, oriented toward comfortable laughs.

You can’t get much fuzzier or softer than this sketch’s premise—the Easter bunny himself (Bowen Yang) welcomes various celebrities to offer Easter wishes on air (huh?). It’s an excuse to trot out the show’s impressionists to do short bits of their shtick, including Chloe Fineman as Britney Spears and Cecily Strong as Marjorie Taylor Greene, because that’s easier than pulling off a sketch with a beginning, middle and end. Coming off best: Mikey Day as Twitter vulture Elon Musk, Kyle Mooney as Jesus (just kidding, Jared Leto) and James Austin Johnson as Donald Trump, who spirals into his usual digressive pop-cultural arias that frankly aren’t that funny when you think about everything that’s at stake. (Same goes for the portrayals of Greene and Musk.)

I’ve been open about not being a fan of Please Don’t Destroy’s previous digital shorts. In fact, this is the first one that’s really worked for me. But work it did, even considered outside the dreck surrounding it. The premise was solid: Lizzo came to host but didn’t bring any new songs, so the spindly trio of writers have 10 minutes to cough up two great tunes, or spindly cast member Andrew Dismukes will kill her. Their failed pitches (including the Sopranos theme song) are inspired, as is the winner: “Horny Zookeeper.” Good setups, good payoffs, and Lizzo seemed comfortable.

“Orchestra” really says something about how misguided tonight’s show was: A sketch was tailored to the host’s unique musical and comic talents, and the producers ran it in second-to-last position, post-12:40 on the East Coast. Lizzo is a skilled flutist with a knack for physical comedy (see her new video, which I’ll get to in a minute). Here, she plays a musician auditioning for a symphony orchestra who confesses that the only way she can play the flute is if she twerks. She demonstrates this, to solid comic effect. The best moment: Aidy Bryant’s starchy violinist rises from her chair and, in maximum TV-movie hauteur, declares that if the full “DeVry Institute Orchestra” must also twerk to make the newcomer feel welcome, that is what they shall do. Good premise, good payoff, and for the first time, both show and host didn’t feel like they had just met 15 minutes earlier.

What bombed

So much bombed, I could be here all night. But I basically am anyway. So to paraphrase Letterkenny (a show that knows how to make the crudest humor clever, even enlightening, and could offer SNL a workshop), if we’re going in, we’re going in, and we’re not stopping ‘til the job is done.

As mentioned, SNL’s cardinal sin is to make the host look bad. Tonight, the show managed to do it in both sketch and musical form. (I’ve been watching SNL live for more than three decades and can’t remember the last time that happened.) In this sketch, the first after the monologue, Lizzo and Aidy Bryant play music producers who are in the studio with the Black-Eyed Peas and are trying to breathe more inspiration into their limited lyrics. It’s cute (yes, surely there are more evocative touchpoints than “the people” or “the place”). But there are fundamental questions of urgency (this sketch might have killed in 2008, but why is it airing tonight?) and frankly punching down: Is it not conventional wisdom that the Black-Eyed Peas absolutely suck? Beyond that, it doesn’t serve the host well. Lizzo’s entire ethos is positivity—she doesn’t beef with other musicians—so although you expect her to appear in satirical sketches, immediately showing her neg on a washed-up musical act seems gratuitous.

This was the worst “Weekend Update” of the season, and maybe longer—the writing was anemic to lazy to occasionally depressing. Anemic: A cheap dig at Kamala Harris being the “invisible woman” (maybe if the show feels that way, it’s worth tackling in a sketch? But it would require the writers to define and polish a single four-minute topical premise). Lazy: Yet another tired gag about Biden’s alleged senility (this week, apparently he can’t find a face mask hanging on his ear), and Che on the subway shooter: He was found in a McDonald’s wearing a purple shirt because he was auditioning to be Grimace (seriously, that’s your entire take)? Depressing: Let’s top things off with a bit on children working in an iPhone factory. That never gets old.