A sport Jake Gyllenhaal confirmed as much as host the finale of SNL’s forty ninth season final evening, and his monologue inadvertently spotlighted all the pieces that was so mid about this yr’s slate of reveals. He joked about all the different stars who have been first requested to host the finale — Pedro Pascal, Zendaya, even Ryan Gosling from earlier this month — and unhappy to say, he’s proper. Gyllenhaal has been an ready host previously however not the knock-it-out-of-park alternative the others may need been.
Gyllenhaal confirmed off a surprisingly soulful singing voice, nevertheless, with this parody of Boyz II Males’s “Finish of the Street,” giving Kenan Thompson an opportunity to sing the quiet half out loud:
Lady, we did a number of sketches this yr
And most of them have been high quality (wink)
It is one of many prime 48 seasons
Season 49
Yep, that’s it precisely. Most of this yr’s sketches have been simply okay. May have been worse. As SNL seasons go, Season 49 undoubtedly ranked up there as certainly one of them. Like Gyllenhaal’s monologue, by which the actor lamented not being related to the golden celebration, the present appeared to be biding its time in anticipation of the year-long Fiftieth-anniversary bash coming in only a few months.
Within the meantime, the present has merely treaded water. Final evening’s episode was a superb instance, trotting out sketch retreads as a substitute of dazzling with new concepts or breakout characters. For instance, we acquired…
A Recycled Kieran Culkin Sketch
Everybody can relate to the frustration of coping with customer support reps educated to make life depressing. It was an excellent idea for a sketch when Kieran Culkin did it two years in the past.
Gyllenhall’s model substituted Southwest Airways for Spectrum Cable, nevertheless it in any other case recreated Culkin’s beat for beat. There was Mikey Day’s lisping operator, Andrew Dismukes answering the telephone from an unrelated enterprise, Jamaican Kenan attempting to resolve the fallacious downside and Bowen Yang as the magical supply behind all of it.
It was paint-by-number sketch writing, lazy and inevitably much less humorous the second time round.
Recycled Scooby Doo
Almost everybody grew up with Scooby Doo as a result of some model of the terrified pooch has been on TV because the Sixties. Sarah Sherman put her bloody thumbprint on this one with a thriller that believes gore is inherently humorous. (Is it?) Goofing on the Scooby Doo gang might be enjoyable, I suppose…
However we did this in 2016 with Margot Robbie…
…and in 2000 with Rob Lowe.
Are Scooby Doo sketches simply comedy cicadas, doomed by nature to reappear in multiyear cycles? Talking of which, final evening’s present had a comedy cicada sketch as properly.
Recycled Michael Che and Colin Jost Joke Swap
This bit has run its course. As first conceived, the concept of Jost and Che swapping jokes designed to humiliate one another was fairly ingenious, and who doesn’t like seeing Colin Jost being mortified on nationwide TV?
However the gag has grown stale. We all know what’s coming — Jost is secretly a racist! Che is a pedophile! — and the component of shock is gone. Even worse, the blokes are pulling their punches. Che brings out a rabbi to bear witness to Jost’s presumably anti-Semitic jokes, one other recycled bit from final yr when Che employed an actress to play a civil-rights icon. However as a substitute of offending the rabbi with a joke about Palestine, the punchline turns right into a lame Harvey Weinstein bit. Not precisely edgy.
Regardless of its meh yr, SNL will probably be again, after all. Prepare for months of self-celebration, a lot of it deserved. Any comedy present that may hold for 50 years and keep even considerably related has earned its flowers. But when the present can’t discover a funnier, edgier groove after the social gathering, can it survive into Season 51 and past?
