Quinta Brunson does her best as Saturday Night Live keeps giggling to itself

As we enter the home stretch of SNL 50, Quinta Brunson seems like one of the least inside, least event-mongering, most business-as-usual hosts possible. She’s not a treasured alumni, not a starry semi-regular on the show, and not a long-absent host making a triumphant return. She’s just a famous, funny lady who has hosted once before and likely will pop up again in the next few years because she seems to have a relaxed try-whatever approach to the show. And a lot of the actual sketches on her newest episode were even more straight down the middle than last time, with easy-to-play games at their center. (Often too easy, but I’ll get to that.) But some business on the margins of this episode offer a case study in the way that Saturday Night Live has allowed itself to occasionally edge into a kind of strange self-consciousness in the past year or two—something that all this attention for the 50th season probably helped to exacerbate.

The core of this is comes from Weekend Update, which is a segment I haven’t talked about much in some of these recaps, mainly because it hasn’t been all that interesting compared to other elements of the show. Colin Jost and Michael Che went through the usual Update development of “not so sure about this” to “hey, these guys are getting better” to “good ol’ Jost and Che” to “OK, I feel like I’ve seen all the moves”… and then hosted the segment for another three or four years past that point, setting a record for the two longest-running Update anchors ever in the process. What they’ve undeniably brought to the desk (and refused to take with them out the door, though Che seems to enjoy pretending he’ll leave) is a sense of genuine looseness that other pairs hinted at, but largely kept contained. Though the jokes themselves are obviously still scripted, little ad-libs are no longer restricted to the occasional half-mumbled asides of the past, or even the Norm Macdonald style accentuation (whether through an extra sentence, repetition, or a pointed deadpan silence). Now the fake anchors routine comment on their own jokes, each other’s jokes, and the audience’s response to all of it, building toward (or, lately, off of) the Joke Swap segments that almost everyone seems to love and remember best from their ongoing tenure. There’s a sense that the Update jokes aren’t truly finished until they’ve figured out whether the audience laughs, cheers, or sounds briefly taken aback. For a show that recruits improvisers and then discourages them from improvising, this is a pretty major shift, and mostly a welcome one. No one needs “funny” improvised asides in the actual sketches, but Jost and Che have helped Update revel a bit more in the show’s live-ness, which is exciting.

But it also means that it’s possible to have an Update like this episode’s, where it starts to feel like half the segment is just Jost and Che self-amusedly keeping tabs on audience reactions, and maybe even shifting those audience reactions by doing so, taking gleeful or faux-embarrassed note of the audience taking note of their edgiest material. Somehow it comes across as half calculation, half crapshoot. That quality can be electric with another performer in the mix, as with Ego Nwodim’s stand-up parody a few episodes ago. But here, even with two perfectly decent desk pieces from Michael Longfellow as himself and Sarah Sherman and Bowen Yang as a sloshed chain restaurant-loving couple, it was less a satirical commentary on current events than a commentary track on Weekend Update. It started to feel, as it sometimes has in weeks past, like half the lines are playing straight to the room, and not much further than that. Take Jost’s extended bit about the Trump comment regarding kids getting fewer dolls for Christmas: Rather than really go after Trump or use the remark as some kind of launchpad for something genuinely silly or absurd, he did a whole riff where the quasi-ironic joke is how outrageous it is that Jost himself would lean into stereotypes about himself and say such things. Then, for good measure, he brought it up again a few minutes later. Others have taken this team to task for their centrism, but in their worst moments, they’re less politically centrist than simply self-centered. It’s not that Jost needed to go in for the kill on that doll remark so much as he didn’t really bother to find a genuine angle, just a kind of show-offy exaggeration.

Be thankful for small favors; this particular edition of Update contained no “it’s the ’90s, Colin” or cute jokes about Scarlett (or even any Jost-bashing from the Update guests), or running gags about the supposedly well-known fact that Jost bought a ferry with Pete Davidson. No, the latter actually made it into a sketch! And a sketch—the one about two irate drivers miming reproachments and insults at each other—that was reprised with a kind of corny knowingness because Brunson did it last time, even though it’s since been reprised without her. Ah, yes, the famous Quinta Brunson driver miming sketch! Melissa McCarthy made a game attempt to top it, which makes the topper of “remember Jost and the ferry? Again?” even more deflating.