Some of the less endearing Saturday Night Live hosts, sometimes even full-time main cast members, have an unfortunate case of Doing Comedy Face. That’s an expression that can’t stop itself from telegraphing the zaniness of everything around them, so that the performer in question comes across as a “sketch comedy character” in quotes and/or neon lights, rather than a character in a comedy sketch, if that makes sense. Sabrina Carpenter, host and musical guest for this week’s SNL, has something different. She has Variety Show Face. It’s not exactly the opposite of Doing Comedy Face (if there’s an opposite in the current cast, it’s probably Ashley Padilla, but more on her later). But it’s definitely a vastly different effect (and affect, for that matter). It’s a kind of perma-poise that says: At any given moment, I may be called upon to sing, dance, do comedy bits, or possibly some combination of the two, and I will do my best to make the transition seamlessly. It’s not mugging, it’s not deadpan; it’s more of a grin-and-bear-it showbiz shield.
So while Carpenter, in her first double-duty hosting-and-musical-guesting gig after getting chummy with the show during Season 50, wasn’t giving powerhouse Ariana Grande or Lady Gaga star turns, she was displaying remarkable dexterity in roles that often amounted to doll-like dress-up—or could have, if she didn’t make dress-up silliness look pretty graceful a lot of the time. That’s also part of the reason her musical performances were able to lift up more of the show than usual. The show has plenty of well-staged musical performances, but the live-music-video stage-show elements for “Manchild” and “Nobody’s Son” were particularly clever and, if you’ll excuse the diminutive connotations for one of pop’s most famously diminutive stars, cute. That she slipped in a couple of “fuck”s on live TV for the second song with seemingly no remorse only made it more endearing.
OK, so there’s not exactly a straight line between Carpenter jumping off a bed in her custom SNL underwear and dressing up as a washing machine with a bizarre array of wash-is-done jingles, but that’s part of the point: She treated those jobs with seemingly equal attention, seriousness, and playfulness. Granted, sometimes the sketch choreography failed to match her own. For example, the sketch where Carpenter plays the leader of a girlboss confidence seminar who suffers a head injury early in her motivational dance-speech and bravely soldiers ahead spouting concussed nonsense tripped over some actual technical difficulties (one ably handled by forever-pro Kenan Thompson) and even in conception probably threw too much of the comedy to dancers tossing a Carpenter-sized ragdoll around.
That was fresher, though, than a fourth “Domingo” sketch. The main novelties there were (a.) letting it serve as the cold open, supplanting the usual wan political sketch (b.) letting the concept of the sketch fully get away after several goodwill-coasting revivals. I can accept that the original “Domingo” became the SNL version of a hit single because of Carpenter’s song “Espresso,” and, as such, it’s hard to resist putting Carpenter into a revival of said sketch, singing someone else’s song in turn. I can even maybe set aside that this already happened on the 50th anniversary special. But much like the increasingly revue-style John Mulaney New York City sketches, only way less funny, this edition lazily grabbed at several different pop-song parodies rather than focusing on a single song that it might be clever to assign Carpenter to sing. Add in the swap-outs for Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim and the fact that Carpenter didn’t lock into a strong gimmick (Grande’s off-key warbling of a fellow pop star’s smash is at least forty percent of why “Domingo” hit) and all you’ve got is some espresso-flavored mush.
With that out of the way, though, Carpenter and the cast were able to quickly move on to (some) better material, and there’s something additionally charming about Carpenter clearly having fun without angling for write-ups talking about how she could have been a full-time cast member in an alternate career. (When you can see from their expression that a host has been told that a lot, that’s called Justin Timberlake Face.) Carpenter did something more delicate: She made SNL her fun little variety show without fully taking it over.
What was on
The sketch about Andrew Dismukes and Ashley Padilla shopping for washing machines was one of those deeply silly but satisfying sketches that makes you wonder why more of these can’t be that joke dense, with even the “straight” elements of the sketch doing goofy jokes (Padilla alluding to her infidelity; Dismukes brandishing a sack of money labeled with a giant dollar sign) in between the truly ridiculous spectacle of Sabrina Carpenter and Veronika Slowikowska skipping through music styles and trilling about clothes that may not be dry or even less dirty. If that didn’t work for you, I don’t know what to tell you.
If the Snack Homiez podcast didn’t work for you, I’m more sympathetic. Let me say that as a parent of an almost-10-year-old, I am unfortunately deeply aware of the accuracy of the performances Carpenter, Slowikoska, Chloe Fineman, and Jane Wickline gave as mostly-12-year-old boys speaking almost entirely in repetitive and easily confusable slang. They captured the constant oscillation between aw-shucks goofing around and bottomless, yammering need to talk despite saying almost nothing that kids raised on the idea of internet broadcasting as a career seem especially prone to. As intentionally annoying as it is, I could have listened to the quartet tie themselves in linguistic knots without bringing James Austin Johnson’s Trump into it at all, though it’s an admittedly funny idea, and I’m all for moving political pieces around the show to eliminate the tedium of that cold-open routine. The sketch didn’t move quite fast enough before or during Trump to really pull off that midway pivot, but I’m a sucker for the cast getting to act like dumb kids. No surprise, then, that “Grind,” a brash music-video tribute to awkward middle-school dances, also worked well.
What was off
Look, should they have revived the Shop TV sketch just to get Carpenter, a clear fan of winking innuendo, to hawk an extremely vaginal-looking neck pillow to the consternation of Mikey Day? No, probably not, and I don’t think I laughed once during that one. But I can see why that happened. I’m less clear than ever about what Marcello Hernández is doing as the Weekend Update “movie guy” who doesn’t watch the movies but sometimes makes puns in a Spanish accent. What’s the character here? What’s the joke? Is this a type of guy who exists? If so, is it notable in some way that he exists? Maybe it’s a psy-op to convince the audience to hotly anticipate the next batch of regular Weekend Update jokes, which increasingly use current events as fodder for the anchors joking about themselves or each other.
Most valuable player
It probably should have been Veronika Slowikowska’s to lose, and then Ashley Padilla had to do that sketch where her office worker spends her birthday farting and getting demoted. Not a great segment by any means; a sketch featuring loud farting noises is always going to be a steep climb for me. But what nearly sells the whole damn thing is how genuinely pained Padilla looks after a birthday surprise causes her to loudly flatulate. Her skewed posture and stricken closed-eye grimace, held for an epic pause in the action, are just weirdly good acting.
Next time
Wait, Miles Teller and Glen Powell are both hosting? In the same month?! At least the forgotten Top Gun: Maverick costar gets to dip in first, after an oddly short one-week break.
Stray observations
- • Let. The boy. Make his own video! Yes, the real-life Herlihy Boy got his own five-to-one pretape, which feels like an odd calculation considering the size of the cast. On the other hand, this was funnier than fully half of the Please Don’t Destroy segments, with Herlihy affecting a stance beyond writing-room panic.
- • Where the hell was? This is the part of the recap where I ask where the hell one or more cast members were. In this case, where the hell was Bowen Yang? Literally not at 8H tonight; he said so via Instagram, though he did take the lead in the “Grind” pretape. Actually, it’s kind of nice when heavily used main-cast stars randomly sit out a week here or there. Maybe one cast member with at least five seasons under their belt should volunteer to be benched every week.
- • Tommy Brennan had his first real introduction via his Weekend Update modified-stand-up piece, as himself. And this isn’t the first time in the past few years that the main takeaway from an Update desk piece has been: Well, that probably plays better as part of a full stand-up set. You know who was pretty good at converting stand-up-style bits into Update pieces? Michael Longfellow. It’s not Tommy Brennan’s fault Longfellow was bounced, but I can’t say that decision is making a lot of sense.
- • “Plans” wasn’t exactly a precision strike as far as horror style parodies, but its mishmash of tropes in service of a weekend ruined by out-of-town guests got the job done. I particularly appreciated the blown-out Saw-flashback textures of Sabrina’s character remembering the barbecue where she made plans with her cousin.
