You’re right, Matt Damon: It does seem like you’ve hosted Saturday Night Live more than just three times over the past 30 years. Of course, Damon memorably cameoed as impending Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanugh back at the peak of the show’s untrained all-star approach to the first Trump administration—peak both in the sense of volume and in the sense of Damon doing the best job this side of Melissa McCarthy at actually parodying the individual in question.
So it was probably inevitable, with the Supreme Court making ghastly news in recent weeks, that Damon would reprise his beer-crushing and occasionally teary Kavanaugh for the cold open, although it was never guaranteed that the opener would actually be written kind of like a sketch, rather than a presser or a direct address. The only iron-clad guarantee these days is that Colin Jost will show up as Pete Hegseth. But credit due: the Jost/Damon/Aziz Ansari force of repulsive frat-boy energy made for the show’s best cold open in a while. It may just be that I’m a sucker for dwelling on Kavanaugh’s friendship with a man allegedly named Squee, but I think some of it is really the way Damon himself talks about Squee that sells it.
Damon’s career has been all about his evolution from boyish bro to dad fave, so it makes sense to cast him as a someone swinging between defensive boy and self-righteous man. That persona gave some surprising shape to his third SNL, plugging a globally famous actor into the kinds of parts that Will Ferrell or Beck Bennett would typically play: a middle-aged doofus lamenting about “tough guys,” a substitute teacher determined to reward his well-behaved students with a dance party, a dad easily led into believing his son has been urinating in the cat’s litter box. If the show is going to feel a little heavy on white-dude hosts, as it has this season, making a bunch of Ferrell-style sketches is a good way to do it (and something they’ll presumably keep going next week).
At times, it felt as if Damon was taking a tour of past eras’ sketch styles. The sketch with three seemingly tough guys narrating the increasingly baroque ways they’ve been beaten up felt very Adam Sandler; it’s easy enough to picture Sandler, Chris Farley, and maybe Phil Hartman or Mike Myers handling it in 1993, while the auctioneer sketch was absolutely a first-five-years-style pitch you can imagine Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner nailing while the host sits it out. Good on Damon and Sarah Sherman—who is often hilarious, but not who I’d instantly place in the auctioneer role—for nailing it themselves. The fake not-quite-ad for Tidy Care Kitty Litter jumped to more recent eras of the show; Cecily Strong could have taken the tortured Ashley Padilla role. Yet the episode as a whole felt surprisingly unified.
And it’s times like these, where even the less successful sketches have a certain compatibility with each other, when it becomes more glaring just how much time Weekend Update is allowed to take up. This was an unusually long one even by the segment’s unwieldy standards, running a full 17 minutes, and while it had a strong variety of guests (a spot-on celebrity impression with Jeremy Culhane’s Tucker Carlson; a pure ridiculous-energy play with Mikey Day and Marcello Hernández as “kamikaze dolphins”; and an always-welcome song from Jane Wickline), the space between them (and with the dolphin bit, during them) felt ridiculously padded.
Those guest spots have become crucial show real estate in this larger-cast era, so it makes sense that sometimes there will be a three-spot edition. But what about all those cutesy indulgences from our long-tenured Update stewards? Sometimes Jost and Che’s touches of improv looseness can be refreshing, but is it really worth the precocious seconds to have Che call out “Rubio!” after Jost says “Marco”? Has Marco Rubio perhaps been in the news long enough for this to be instantly tired rather than a delightful running gag? Do we really need to make time for another WNBA crack from Che, or “this set-up is actually about me in a dark way!” gags from each of them? (This week’s versions: the “dad’s belt” joke from Jost and the Doordash photo from Che.)
This might seem like a minor issue, and I know there are viewers who consider Weekend Update an incontestable highlight. But is there no sense that maybe two or three or five or ten minutes could be cut from these 17-minute behemoths? This week, with two pre-tapes and multiple Update guests, we only actually got four live sketches. Obviously cutting a WNBA joke won’t make room for a whole other sketch. But it might make the damn thing move faster. As it is, this was a good episode that took an extended time-out in the middle.
What was on
That “tough guys” bit was unusually well-written; the immediately telegraphed punchline of “he kicked my ass” could fall flat so easily, but the increasing floridness of the stories combined with the plainspoken Italian-guy delivery kept it all going. Between this and the auctioneers, it was a big week for giving the performers a lot of words.
Mom: The Movie also brought some welcome bite back to the show’s Mother’s Day material, which in recent years has sometimes skewed a little sentimental. If I’m being honest, the concept of Mom: The Movie felt a little muddled between making fun of the kind of soft-focus “nice” movies that moms stereotypically enjoy and making fun of actual mom habits out in the real world, but fair enough to blur the line between the two, and the jokes on either side worked equally well.
What was off
I can’t say I wholly disliked the sketch built around a series of spit takes—really covering their bases on those eras of the show by recalling an old Julia Louis-Dreyfus bit, huh?—but if you announce a sketch that involves Godzilla and then it’s just everyone spitting on Mikey Day, I’m going to be a little disappointed. More nitpicking: the substitute teacher sketch was on its way toward, if nothing else, offering up a bravura flop-sweat monologue from Damon to a bunch of stone-faced cast members (save a quaking-with-laughter Chloe Fineman). Having student dialogue enter into it at the end was not the move.
Most valuable player
Damon himself brought a lot to this episode, but for the versatility of playing a movie-watching mom, a mile-a-minute auctioneer in crisis, and staying absolutely stone-faced at Damon’s dancing, I have to give it to Sarah Sherman.
Next time
Will Ferrell returns for his sixth time hosting, while Paul McCartney takes his fifth turn as musical guest (not counting the 40th and 50th anniversary specials). Ferrell has done this so regularly (and so consistently well) that he no longer seems to feel obligated to bring back old characters; McCartney, on the other hand, might well play an old hit, though we can probably rule out his previous episode’s revival of “Wonderful Christmas Time.”
Stray observations
• All I can really offer about Noah Kahan is that I was surprised to discover a few weeks ago that I had, in fact, seen him on Saturday Night Live before. Recently. Sure, if you say so!
• As absolutely the type of person who would be texting everyone to let them know if the theater doesn’t actually play trailers, Jane Wickline’s song felt very targeted at me, specifically. I am listening and learning.
• A blessedly short monologue, but I’m not sure if Damon’s video message and the bit about Marcello’s mom, as part of an explanation about why a thing the show sometimes does isn’t happening, ultimately fit together all that well.
• Ben Affleck has hosted SNL more times than Matt Damon but Matt Damon has hosted twice since the last time Ben Affleck did it, which was 13 years ago.
• Didn’t get those Olivia Rodrigo/Wolf Alice tickets this week, guys.
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