Ryan Gosling is still cracking up on his fourth time through Saturday Night Live

Is it simplistic to suggest that your feelings on Ryan Gosling as a Saturday Night Live host will depend largely on how delighted you are by breaking, or, alternately, with how much religious fervor you loathe the sight of sketch performers laughing at their own silliness? (I know comedy nerds can be an unforgiving lot.) Hosts always get a little more leeway on the controversial issue of cracking up mid-sketch, because obviously not everyone can purge that instinct from their system over the course of six-day SNL boot camp. (On the other side of it, the idea of Horatio Sanz and Jimmy Fallon spending 17 hours a day together for years and still finding each other endlessly hilarious might feel to some like an extended sentence to eighth-grade study hall.) It’s a bit strange to reduce Gosling, one of the more recognizable Hollywood leading men under 50 and one of the more famous people who’s still an SNL fixture, to uncontrollable giggle fits. But that’s become his signature over four hosting gigs, collectively yielding a bizarre mix of instant classics, glorified blown takes, and several sketches that occupy an unusual middle ground most famously occupied by Debbie Downer. (That is: Kinda-funny sketch temporarily but cheaply elevated by its live disintegration.)

Gosling’s latest episode tried to lean into the curve with an inelegantly explained novelty: In a sketch involving the old saw of teachers confiscating passed notes, an on-screen chyron informed viewers that the contents of those notes had been changed since rehearsal, meaning the actors would be reading them for the first time on-air, like when Bill Hader’s lines as Stefon would change last-minute in an attempt to get him to break character as he read funny new variations. That latter technique became a part of the latter bit’s lore, but wasn’t ever explicitly stated; here, presumably lacking an elegant way to tell the audience what was going on within the context of the sketch, it became an unusually meta live-show game where you couldn’t exactly get mad at the highly breakable Gosling and the typically unflappable Ashley Padilla for barely stifling guffaws as they describe new-to-them embarrassments (or gaze upon a Ziplock full of spaghetti specifically called out as a second lunch)—even if they weren’t quite as precisely hilarious as a Stefon list of “everything” any given club has.

Hold on, though: Yes, that was fun and novel, even if it might have been funnier with a dawning realization worked into the sketch itself, rather than an awkwardly direct announcement. But the previous live sketch of the night—all told, Gosling only did four of those, in a pretape-heavy episode—featured just as much breaking, with far less convincing pretense. Playing a goddess coaxing a trio of dimwitted cyclops warriors through a simple riddle they steadfastly refuse to decipher, Padilla tried to shout down her uncharacteristic breaks with her own stern authority, and it only seemed to make things worse. This was the exact opposite of the note-reading chumminess, because the reasons for it were as hard to suss out as the idea behind the sketch. The cyclops characters provided an excuse for some classic overelaborate SNL make-up but… it’s not really as funny as seeing two guys inexplicably dressed as live-action Beavis and/or Butt-Head. And the sketch itself was mostly about how cyclops warriors are dumb; is that a known mythological stereotype? If so, shouldn’t the idea be to reverse or subvert it in some way? “Three dumb guys” doesn’t seem like quite enough for all the disruption to cross the line into Gosling-level charm.

Fortunately, most of the episode fell on the preferable side of the Gosling line. It started with Gosling becoming the rare host to break in the monologue, which is usually simply not funny enough to threaten anyone’s composure in a major way. I’m not sure it was this time, either, but Mikey Day was clearly baiting his frequent sketch partner by planting a kiss on his cheek to console Gosling over his Harry Styles-related insecurities. (Funny-enough bit, well-played by Gosling, but didn’t it feel like an extended advert for the next episode and, as such, sort of untoward?) On the other end of the night, Gosling’s live sketch work closed out with almost everyone regaining their footing for the bizarre “GooGoo Man” sketch, where Gosling straight-facedly (well, mostly) disputes hotel-room charges that don’t accurately reflect what he should have paid for his encounter with someone or something called the GooGoo Man. A little overreliant on the “what even IS that?!” joke, but by this point, seeing Gosling break only slightly in the face of such silliness had become impressive. Maybe that’s why the passed-notes sketch was fun but ultimately a little redundant: The whole episode felt like a challenge to pretend-embarrass Ryan Gosling and see if he could keep a straight face—knowing from the jump that he couldn’t.

What was on

As with the past classic “Papyrus,” the heavy lifting in a Gosling episode sometimes gets passed off to the pretapes, where the capacity for repeated takes can refocus on Gosling’s strengths as a comic actor. None of the night’s three pretaped segments reached those heights, but the fake ad for Otezla, which combats plaque psoriasis by any and entirely unknown means necessary, was a hilarious variation on the old Happy Fun Ball spot.