Saturday Night Live: “Bill Hader/Hozier”

“I’m not an actor, I’m a [returning SNL/burgeoning movie] star!”
Longtime SNL fans, like longtime fans of other generations-spanning organizations like the Justice League or the X Men, make all-time all-star teams. (I know I’m not the only one—let the comments show…) My own rules are pretty strict—seven members only, no featured players, members judged only from the time they were on the show—and subject to constant changes of mind, but Bill Hader has been a consistent (Not Ready For Prime Time) player since his second year on the show. Every all-star SNL team needs someone like Hader—go-to impressionist, versatile everyman, just inherently funny. (In an interview this week, no lesser authority on comedy and SNL than Bill Murray called Hader the best cast member ever.)
But what makes Hader such a lock for the SNL Avengers is an invaluable sketch comedy quality—the ability to imbue each new character with an immediate, specific inner life. SNL’s had any number of hilarious performers over its 40 years, but only a few have been possessed of this quality—Phil Hartman was one, the young Dan Aykroyd another. (Currently Jordan Peele is as good at this as anyone’s ever been on Key & Peele.) And Hader. That’s why he was always so good at the innumerable emcee/game show host roles he got handed over his tenure on SNL—in the compressed, concentrated arena of sketch comedy, his characters spark with life, no matter how seemingly mundane the role. It elevated small parts and made his big swingers (Stefon, Herb Welch, Vincent Price) immune to going stale and rote with repetition. Hader’s growing success on the big screen is most welcome (as is that of recent co-star and monologue partner tonight, Kristen Wiig), but on SNL, the guy’s simply a star.
“What do you call that act?” “The Californians!”—Recurring sketch report.
The evidence comes in the form of how damned funny all of his returning characters were tonight. We got Herb Welch, the crazy puppet aficionado, and, yes, Stefon, and, unlike other returning alums’ greatest hits nights, none of them were remotely annoying. (That sounds like faint praise, but I remember gritting my teeth through much of Wiig’s hosting gig last year.) And it’s not that anyone found anything new to do with the characters this time out—it’s just that they never stopped being funny the first time, and Hader made them stay that way.
I’ve always been a sucker for Welch, the defiantly old-school local news reporter with a penchant for Archie Bunker-esque racist asides, wanton abuse of prettyboy anchormen, and biffing interviewees in the face with his microphone. Tonight was the same old Herb, covering a high school’s abstinence controversy this time, and I was laughing uncontrollably throughout. There’s a cathartic mix of heroic and horrifying about Herb, his decades of experience brooking no slick anchor nonsense (“I don’t take orders from mannequins. I know you’re smooth down there”), and his horrible old man bigotry erupting in hilariously arcane insults (“Don’t scat at me, beatnik”). There’s a commitment to the bit, and to the character, that Hader turns into a guaranteed giggle-fit.
The puppet sketch (one of the few saving graces of the otherwise woeful Seth MacFarlane episode of a few years ago) is the sort of premise that should never be returned to, relying as it did the first time on novelty. But it also had Hader who, as a PTSD-afflicted veteran relaying his horrifying Grenada experiences through his lookalike puppet to the horror of his learning annex classmates, turned the bit into a classic. Tonight, improbably, he did it again—everyone knew what was coming, and it worked anyway. From his one-upping Cecily Strong’s emoji joke (his Grenada emoji— “palm tree, flamethrower, baby, flamethrower, mosquito, mosquito, mosquito…”), to his completion of Bobby Moynihan’s Sesame Street lyric, (“Can you tell me how to get…” “How to get the nightmares to stop”), to the abrupt genius of “Here’s a joke—God!,” Hader performed the miracle of resurrecting a one-joke sketch and making it hilarious.
And then there was Stefon. Look, I was pretty vocal on Twitter about not wanting Stefon to come back—his final exit on Hader’s last show as cast member was as satisfying a recurring character retirement as any in SNL history and, just this once, I was hoping the show would leave such low-hanging fruit on the tree. But once Michael Che made reference to tourists visiting New York and the crowd went wild at the sight of Stefon, all my reservations were forgotten. Bringing writer (and newly-minted sitcom star) John Mulaney back to crack him up with theretofore-unseen cue card gags, Hader slipped back into the swoopy hair and Ed Hardy shirt with his signature blend of comic command and barely-concealed breaking, and it was delightful. He sold the club names (Whimsy, Jan’s New Backpack), and the random features of each (cravats, congas, asbestos, lupus, a doorman who always high-fives children of divorce, and, in the running gag that got him every time, the ubiquitous Dan Cortese) with customary aplomb, and somehow he and husband Seth Meyers are expecting. Perfect.
The other returning sketch* was “Hollywood Game Night,” with Kate McKinnon leading a mostly-successful panel of quick-hit impressions through an adequately funny takedown of the successful game show. (Lynch’s repeated asides about the silliness of the games—“Again, real game played by real adults”—helped things along nicely.) It turns out Beck Bennett does a creditable Nick Offerman, Taran Killam’s grinningly odd Christoph Waltz is always fun, and Hader got to bring back his befuddled Pacino to good effect. On the debit side, Jay Pharoah doesn’t have a perfect Morgan Freeman in his pocket, Cecily Strong’s Sofia Vergara’s pretty generic, and, tagging along after her funny bit assisting Hader’s monologue, Wiig’s Kathy Lee is as tiresome as ever. McKinnon’s Lynch speaks for me when she responds to Gifford’s signature self-involved “What am I saying?” with an enraged, Lynch-ian, “You’re saying NOTHING!” Indeed.