Whenever I hear that a standup comedian like John Mulaney or Dave Chappelle or an 8H veteran like Kristen Wiig or Maya Rudolph are hosting Saturday Night Live, I have high expectations that we're probably due for a really good episode of sketch comedy. Those kinds of hosts who are already simpatico with the SNL house style account for, say, one-third of a typical season; for the rest, we get a mishmash of dramatic actors who want to show another side of themselves, random sports icons, overly-ambitious pop stars, and the occasional nightmare reality TV star. For all of them, I lower my expectations appropriately—not every charming young star is cut out for the SNL meat grinder.
So it was a real pleasure that, for the second week in a row, a host I was not particularly excited about turned in a pretty good episode. Last week, Bridgerton star Regé-Jean Page was the charming center of one of the highlights of season 46, and this week, Nick Jonas pulled double duty as host and musical guest. Sure, he isn't a particularly great comedic actor, but he was really good at inhabiting a parodic version of his Disney-hunk persona. And it was a great episode for musical theater fans—Jonas seemed very comfortable falling back on his singing for some of the best sketches of the night.
My favorite sketch of the night was Mirror Workout, in which Jonas played one of the straight men and let Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson, as Shannon Delgado and Azuzal, steal the show in a piece which fell decidedly in the David S. Pumpkins lineage.
Then there were two excellent musical comedy highlights that felt like twin pieces showing off different parts of the large cast: in Murder Show, castmembers including Kate McKinnon, Melissa Villaseñor, Ego Nwodim, and Chloe Fineman sang an ode to their favorite pastime of watching series about serial killers and true crime cases (Jonas popped up as a cult show enthusiast dressed as NXIVM founder Keith Raniere). And Bachelor Party featured a bunch of the male castmembers—including Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day, Bowen Yang, Alex Moffat and Jonas—singing an ode to bachelor party boners.
Nick Jonas fit like a mouse's foot in a very tiny glass slipper as Prince Charming in the over-the-top Cinderella's Slipper, but the highlight was Aidy Bryant as the aforementioned mouse who went all the way, and is prepared to eat a couple babies, no problemo.
Weekend Update has been one of the most consistent highlights of this season (it's also occasionally been an unfortunate lightning rod of controversy), with two or three really great guests almost every week. This week we got Kenan Thompson as outspoken NBA dad LaVar Ball, who wanted to discuss his son LaMelo Ball's basketball career with the Charlotte Hornets ("The most storied franchise in all of basketball!"). The best part though was Cecily Strong as bigoted Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and her belief in science: "I love science. I'm always talking science, unless that science is about climate change, coronavirus, space lasers, evolution, the metric system, the rhythm method, breastfeeding, living on Mars, Jesus' skin color or Santa's skin color, by the way, which is white."
Post-COVID Dating was a really well-written, fun 10-to-1 sketch that was a perfect showcase for Kate McKinnon, à la the last call sketches from a few years back. Unfortunately, this was one of the sketches where Jonas' limited acting abilities really were a disservice to the sketch.
Since the election, SNL has mostly ditched the painful, obligatory political cold opens which became ubiquitous during the Trump era. With fewer celebrity guest stars appearing as the various Trump cronies every week, there have been more opportunities for the actual cast to appear in the opening sketches. This has been a relief—the cold opens were among the worst material in the show in recent years—and while not a great sketch, Vaccine Game Show Cold Open showed the upside of those changes. Kate McKinnon is always great as a gravelly-voiced Dr. Anthony Fauci, Pete Davidson got to show why he's still in the cast as a bullying Governor Andrew Cuomo, and best of all, Aidy Bryant is delightful as a grotesque, clueless Ted Cruz.
After a few seasons of getting bit parts, Ego Nwodim has had a breakout season filled with great character work and a few very good impressions, the best of which is her Dionne Warwick. She brought her back with another installment of the Dionne Warwick Talk Show, this time featuring The Weeknd (Kenan Thompson), Nick Jonas, Dua Lipa (Melissa Villaseñor) and Machine Gun Kelly (Pete Davidson).
Amusement Park was about a group of teens going on an amusement park ride, with one played by Kyle Mooney ending up being paired with a stuffed prize of "the guy from Soul." It was one of those sketches where it seemed like they had a lot of fun playing around with the prop while writing it, but it didn't gel as a finished piece.
Nick Jonas was joined by part of the cast for a short musical ode to drinking during the pandemic for the Monologue, which wasn't funny, but worked as a sincere musical theater moment.
Home Makeover was the only cut-for-time sketch of the night, and wouldn't you know it, it was an HGTV parody starring the king of cut-for-time sketches, Kyle Mooney (though it was a lot less confrontationally weird than Mooney's usual material).
Jonas also performed his new single "Spaceman" and "This Is Heaven."
After another five week stretch of episodes, SNL is taking a break until March 27th, when it'll return with host Maya Rudolph and musical guest Jack Harlow.
