SNL

It didn't have to be this way. The host, Jerrod Carmichael, a thoughtful and sardonic stand-up comic who recently released his third HBO special, Rothaniel, ...

By putting all its energy into an incident that felt edgy and shocking nearly a week ago, the show just felt stale. When not talking about the Slap, this episode’s sketches largely felt random and unconcerned with giving Carmichael an opportunity to insert his personality. “The nation don’t even know me,” Carmichael quipped in his monologue. I have to be the least-famous host in SNL [history].” Last night probably didn’t change that fact. In the unfocused sketch, Carmichael played an initially starstruck seat filler at the Academy Awards witnessing an erratic Smith (Chris Redd) unraveling. After a week in which every opinion has already circulated, SNL struggled to find anything fresh to say.

'Saturday Night Live' had the restraint to wait 40 minutes to say Will Smith's name, but the show still tackled the messy spectacle.

I don’t want to talk about it. “And you want me to do that? “I’m not going to talk about it.

"Saturday Night Live" made multiple references to the altercation between Will Smith and Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars during last night's episode.

Later in the segment, Kenan Thompson as O. J. Simpson appeared at the desk alongside Michael Che to discuss his thoughts on the incident and share his opinion on which side he was on. When Redd turns around to Mooney to introduce himself and asks him his name, Mooney nervously replies, “I don’t … they didn’t give me one.” Mooney quietly suggests, “Love makes you do crazy things,” another line from the actor’s speech from last Sunday night. However, that moment didn’t last long before he yelled the same line at the stage once again. Seconds later, the sound of a slap echoes in the studio while Carmichael’s face turns from amused to alarmed. Redd excuses himself and tells Carmichael that he’ll be right back before he goes off-screen.

SNL's newest game show Is My Brain Okay? asks contestants to try and remember simple information — not so easy in a post-lockdown world.

At one point during the sketch, McKinnon cannot remember the word for "jumpstart" and everyone gives her wrong suggestions of what she is trying to figure out, and while that could be something that we used to not relate to, I think we've all had that moment of forgetting what it was like to be out and about with other people. The game is simple: Our brains are not what they used to be in 2019 because of the last two years, and how we've barely been around people and whatnot. COVID hit us all hard and when host Jerrod Carmichael came to Saturday Night Live, the cast and Carmichael brought us a brand new game show that honestly, maybe we should play in real life.

"Saturday Night Live" heavily made fun of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars.

He was like ‘I think you need to talk about it.’ He said the nation needs to heal,” he said to laughter from the crowd. This is a modal window. This is a modal window. It’s truly like the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, but if Janet’s nipple slapped Timberlake,” Jost joked. “But Friday, I made a vow to myself that I would never ever talk about it again. “Oh my God, we’re right next to Will Smith. I got to tweet this.

Jost, married to Scarlett Johansson, personally added of The Slap, “I think [it] was a disgraceful act that sets a terrible precedent about having to defend ...

“It’s like Kanye saying, ‘Don’t act like y’all didn’t know I had cirrhosis.” “During his acceptance speech, Will Smith said, ‘Love will make you do crazy things,'” Michael Che said. “Which is kind of like Will Smith’s agent saying ‘You crushed it the Oscars.'”

After an eventful week for pop culture—and this episode's host—SNL fails to rise to the occasion, delivering a bland (and sometimes tasteless) show.

It was a cute concept (but not much more) elevated by the sight gag of Rex appearing as Jim Varney in every one of the Ernest movies. (Sure, not every game-show sketch can be “Black Jeopardy” or “Meet Your Second Wife,” but this didn’t even rise to the level of “Word Crunch” from last month.) In “Is My Brain OK?,” the host (Kate McKinnon) quizzes contestants on how they’re reacclimating to society after COVID. It was all very meh and felt like it could have aired six months ago or last year, and I wonder if the script was in fact resurrected from the slush pile. There were a couple of good lines—the winning contestant was offered a two-week trip to Hawaii or the chance to “go back to your apartment and stay there,” and of course he chose the latter—but I saw sharper stuff about COVID-era social anxiety on Instagram today. On this week’s “Weekend Update,” Colin Jost mostly sat back while Michael Che delivered blast after successful blast on the Will Smith incident. Will the host—so perceptive and inventive in his standup—push the show to go afield on gay themes (a direction that led to one of the most laugh-out-loud-funny sketches of season 45)? Are both of these questions setting up unrealistic expectations? It’s a fun sideways premise: Two seat fillers (Kyle Mooney and Carmichael) interact with Will Smith (Chris Redd) around the infamous moment. (Seriously: watch Rothaniel and his two other HBO specials, and give The Carmichael Show a whirl if you haven’t.) He acknowledged both big stories at hand (“I’m not gonna talk about it … do you want me to talk about it?”) and nailed how news coverage and incessant viral bloviating tends to expand time: the Oscars and The Slap occurred six days ago yet feel like they happened “somewhere between Jamiroquai and 9/11.” He got in some good digs at himself and Lorne Michaels’ insistence that he address the incident—”I have to be the least famous host in SNL history … I’ve been gay for 48 hours. Oh, but there’s more (yet less): Dismukes crawls down the cliff to retrieve an unrelated corpse, while Carmichael pulls out an urn which contains his soup lunch. Carmichael may be lesser-known to a nationwide audience, but the monologue established his bona fides as a sharp and exceptionally appealing comic voice. One piece, of course, was Will Smith clocking presenter Chris Rock (an SNL alum) at the Oscars, a true record-scratching, WTF cultural moment.

With movie runtimes feeling longer, this SNL sketch praises the movies that manage to keep the runtimes down to under two hours.

Towards the end, Davidson makes an argument that calls into question why Sex and The City 2 was longer than Jurassic Park taking into consideration what each film is about. For Davidson, the perfect film is “at most 1 hour 40”, and to illustrate his point, he gives a couple of famous examples like the 1989 comedy-drama Driving Miss Daisy. The skit titled “Short-Ass Movies” is the perfect song to annoy that one pretentious cinema-obsessed friend who always takes things too seriously.

"Saturday Night Live" tackled Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars by dedicating most of the "Weekend Update" segment Colin Jost and Michael ...

When Che implied that meant Thompson was on Rock’s side, the “SNL” star replied, “I mean, Chris ain’t exactly innocent neither — nobody likes to be made fun of. “Not to mention Chris Rock has been very public about his nonverbal learning disorder, which means it’s hard for him to understand nonverbal signals,” the comedian said. “Even people at the Oscars were googling ‘Did Will Smith just slap Chris Rock?’” he said, cutting to a photo of Andrew Garfield on his phone during the ceremony. “I also really loved that the reason they let Will Smith stay in the audience was that they asked Chris Rock and he said it was okay,” Jost said. The “Grown Ups” star has also been open about how he’s avoided confrontation for years after a violent childhood incident. “If Will Smith had been expelled, he would have joined a small group of people kicked out of the academy, including: Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein. Or as they’re also known, Bad Boys For Life.”

Comedian Michael Che defended former “Saturday Night Live” comic Chris Rock on Saturday's show. · “Can we stop pretending everybody knew Jada (Pinkett Smith) had ...

Unsurprisingly, the show also had a lot to say about the slap between Will Smith and comedian Chris Rock and one sketch in particular tackled it from the point ...

So a sketch like this is funny because it is sort of where we are in the cultural zeitgeist currently. The problem is that all of this is happening in the midst of Rock's jokes before announcing his category. Is it too soon to be making light of the situation given that this entire week has been people sharing their thoughts on the slap and what they think should happen?

The standup and actor can't help but cover the Will Smith and Chris Rock incident with mixed results.

Saturday Night Live, of course, had to include Will Smith's slapping incident at last week's Oscars in their jokes this weekend. · The cold open featured a skit ...

“I don’t want to say you’ve got rage issues, but hey - if the glove fits.” He then went on to discuss Smith’s film “Hitch.” He then went on to discuss Smith’s film “Hitch.” “I was very impressed with my Hitch,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it? “I’m not gonna talk about it ... I kept talking about it, you can’t make me talk about it,” he said.

Jerrod Carmichael is the sort of host who suggests that SNL is going for quality, Q rating be damned.

And, just to anger the right people, a political climate where the GOP is actively peddling hateful nonsense about LGBTQI-accepting parents being pedophiles and “groomers” really isn’t the place to end a show with such an unfocused, lazy sketch. Not to hold this half-written sketch to the highest standard when it comes to corpse-defilement humor, but if you’re going to do something comically outrageous with a dead body, you really have to commit. (The actual final pre-tape was just meh.) Here, Andrew Dismukes and Carmichael show flashes of what this darkly outrage-courting sketch could have been, as their officiously polite undertakers—solemnly awaiting a family’s ash-scattering speech to end—instead hurl the decidedly un-cremated deceased bodily over the waiting cliff. As for the people who were actually in the building, Aristotle and Melissa were shunted to goodnights-only waving. Redd and Pete are so good at these, and the film nerd in me responded to the litany of under 100-minute watches like Evil Dead, Punch-Drunk Love, and Good Time like the sketch was written just for me. Jost and Che took a typically scattershot approach to the irresistible Rock-Smith story, with the pair hitting and missing in equal measure. Written by Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day, the ill-fated shopping network sales pitch of doll maker Carmichael is in the long and storied tradition of SNL going for the cheapest, loudest belly-laughs, and it sort of works. McKinnon pegs just the tone of hazy, fatalistic bemusement that a game show about the accumulated mental and physical effects of this never-ending pandemic is on the air. Nobody’s going to top Bill Hader at making something out of the thankless game show host roles, but Kate was very funny as the brain-fogged Lisa Something, riding herd over a trio of similarly lockdown-addled contestants in Carmichael, Sarah Sherman, and Bowen Yang. Apart from being a very good stand-up, and the creator of an intriguing (if divisive) documentary series about his family, Carmichael is the sort of host who suggests that SNL is going for quality, Q rating be damned. Shame, then, that when it came time for SNL to wheel out its own take on the Oscars kerfuffle, he was reduced to playing straight man to a big heap of nothing. “If you’re gay in New York, you get to host Saturday Night Live,” Carmichael joked in response to the Studio 8H crowd’s warm embrace, an echo of the conflicted emotions that have greeted his coming out between his New York friends and his loving but disappointingly judgmental North Carolina family.

Jerrod Carmichael starred as a doll-maker in a sketch opposite Cecily Strong and Mikey Day on last night's 'SNL.'

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