Coming off one of its biggest seasons, SNL is pretty much 0-for-3 this year with a mostly exhausting episode that wasn’t offensively bad – it was pretty inoffensively bad, but bad nonetheless. The problems for the show this year are easy to identify. With election season over people are sick to death of hearing about current events, cause it’s mostly so goddamn depressing. There’s only one good woman in the cast and she’s beginning to seem seriously overextended. And the guest hosts so far have tried their best, but none of them really screamed “star.” Or “funny.”
Drew Barrymore, give her credit, is a total pro. She noted in her monologue this was her sixth time hosting, the most for any woman, and the first time she hosted, she was seven. And she did fine with the meager stuff they gave her, but a lot of her characters blended into the background pretty quickly. She even took a backseat in the monologue, which was filled with clips of famous Barrymores in the past performing classical theatre in valley-girl accents. I’m all for SNL breaking out its Ibsen humor, but the gag felt like a stretch – it’s hardly the most identifiable thing about Barrymore, is it?
While Barrymore was maybe a slight improvement over the previous two hosts, the cold open – second Obama cold open in a row, and quite rightly with the Nobel Prize news – made last week’s tepid Obama-skewering seem the height of political commentary. Fred Armisen didn’t even bother to affect an accent as he pointed out he “won it for not being George Bush.” That punchline was fine, but the 3 a.m. call gag and the lottery joke? Super-lame. I know they only had a night to throw the sketch together, but come on, they’re professionals. They can do better than this!
Next up was Gilly, at which point I probably would have changed the channel were I not reviewing the damn show. Look, I’m an SNL fan, I dig the history and I flip for any half-decent recurring character they can cook up, but Gilly needs to go. The spin this time was that Barrymore was an Italian doppelganger called Gigli who says, in Gilly-voice, “scusi!” and, echoing Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds, “bonjourno.” But like most of this week’s sketches, it went on for what seemed like twenty minutes, spending acres of time setting up the same weak punchline. I know that Kristen Wiig is a major asset for SNL but they have to stop giving her carte blanche with some of her recurring characters. Cause a lot of them suck. Especially Gilly.
The next batch were a little more diverting. A spoof “celebrity ghost stories” show allowed everyone a shot at whatever weird impression they were working on, with Andy Samberg’s Billy Bob Thornton hitting – “My kangol hats and leather vests were going missing!” and Drew’s boytoy Justin Long nailing Matthew McConaughey’s infuriating diction. An ad for an online university that produced diplomas with an intentionally unreadable name was short and sweet.
And then there was the first Vinny Vedecci sketch of the year. Bill Hader, to me, is the absolute standout of SNL and Vinny is him at his most charmingly weird, even if it does hit the same notes every time. The Drew Barrymore jokes they dragged out – drinking and drugs, flashing Letterman – would have been tired ten years ago. Vinny subsequently apologizing to all of the staffers he’s slept with over the years, via a fast-scrolling list – that made me laugh, one of the few Letterman jokes that’s done it for me since the whole scandalissimo.