The next-to-the last episode of Season 51, the penultimate if you will, is in the can. Matt Damon was back to host for a third time, and red-hot musician Noah Kahan returned for his second time as guest on Saturday Night Live.
The episode had a few weak spots, notably near the top of the show, but it had enough great segments to come through as one of the best of the season.
Next week, former cast member Will Ferrell returns to host for his sixth time, and first since Season 45. His musical guest will be legend Paul McCartney, who will make his fifth appearance as a musical guest on a regular episode of the series. The former Beatle also performed on the special 50th anniversary special.
Cold Open
We get Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) away from a press conference for a change, this time enjoying D.C. nightlife at a bar. He soon bumps into a pair of Trump’s chosen “bro-coholics” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Damon), and FBI Director Kash Patel (Aziz Ansari).
The sketch highlights the hyper-masculine, bro culture of the Trump cult. We see Hegseth, Kavanaugh, and Patel slamming drinks, and dreaming of a third Trump term.
The premise works fine here. It’s not a particularly memorable cold open, but a serviceable one, which uses the host (a rarity). Luckily, Damon as Kavanaugh can wear a robe to hide the suit he needs for the monologue.
Kenan Thompson appears as the bartender, and Chloe Fineman briefly appears as a patron.
Monologue
A quick monologue, which is how we typically like it here at SNL Rankings. According to Saturday Night Network, this was the shortest monologue in more than 200 episodes, which would be roughly 9-10 seasons.
Damon sets up two basic jokes here: the cast member Mother’s Day mom parade will not be happening, which upsets an audience member (played by SNL writer Jack Bensinger) lovestruck by Marcello Hernández‘s mother, who later briefly appears in the monologue.
The other joke is Damon delivering a direct Mother’s Day greeting to all the mom’s out there, with some overt flirtation.
First Sketch: Godzilla Movie
The first sketch of the night was Godzilla Movie, a bit written almost certainly by Mikey Day. It opens on an intro for the Monster Channel, and we then see the exterior of an aircraft carrier, switching quickly to a command center for that ship.
Damon is the Navy Admiral, with Day, Sarah Sherman, Ben Marshall, Fineman, and Jane Wickline as sailors in the command center. Veronika Slowikowska is the assistant to the admiral, popping om and off stage.
It’s clear a creature of some sort is terrorizing ships in the ocean. Damon reacts with terrified anticipation as Day delivers a play-by-play of what the sonar and radar are revealing. When Damon gets the worst news, that this creature is crushing submarines and so on, he does a spit take of his coffee in Day’s face.
The entire sketch skids into basically one long spit take sequence. From coffee to a smoothie, from a smoothie to yogurt, and from yogurt to water, etc. Eventually the entire cast is soaking Day with spit takes, including one by the monster, who turns out to be Godzilla.
This sketch rests on a tired, one-note, easy spit take joke that probably made many 13-year old audience members laugh hysterically. But it was a dreadfully poorly written sketch. SNL should be much, much better than spit take humor.
Too often in Season 51, Day has misunderstood that he’s on SNL, and instead thinks he’s writing for Nickelodeon.
Thankfully, other writers rescued this episode and we were saved from the bad memory of Godzilla movie.
Mom Movie Trailer
In this pretape sketch, Ashley Padilla is featured in a trailer for the “Mom Movie,” a film that delivers “all of the things [mom’s] love in a movie, and none of the things she doesn’t.”
We learn the movie avoids conflict, suspense, and anything that would make mom uncomfortable. The movie even “shuts down” when mom predictably falls asleep about 20 minutes in.
This is a perfect vehicle for Padilla, who embodies “Mom” more than any SNL cast member since probably Amy Poehler. She’s excellent as the matriarch married to a hunk (the actual Matt Damon in this faux film).
Also appearing are Slowikowska, Jeremy Culhane, Tommy Brennan, Wickline, Sherman, and Fineman.
Tough Guys
In a slowly-developing sketch (by today’s viewing standards) we see Hernandez, Damon, and Thompson as three men at a block party. They soon begin complaining how “everyone thinks their a tough guy these days.”
It seems we’re going to get banter between three rough men, but instead we learn that each of them have actually been victims of violence. Each story gets darker, and more troubling and bizarre, until Hernandez’s character reveals that he was “captured” and groomed by his assailant.
This sketch felt reminiscent of late 1980s and mid 1990s sketches that could have featured Kevin Nealon, Phil Hartman, or Will Ferrell. It didn’t exactly land perfectly, but there was enough laughs to keep it from falling apart.
Tidy Care Crystals Cat Litter
In this pretape sketch, Damon and Ashley Padilla star in a commercial parody for cat litter that allows you to know what mood your pet is in, based on the color of the litter box after it pees.
But the cat is producing blue cat litter, which, the narrator (voice by James Austin Johnson) explains, is “not cat.”
The narrator causes the couple to question and accuse their 16-year old son (played by Andrew Dismukes) of peeing in the litter box. The paranoia soon leads to Damon and Padilla turning their accusations on each other. Eventually, there is a simple explanation. Or is there?
JAJ stands out as the ever-present narrator who worms his way into the household. The entire cast does a nice job with the top-notch writing here.
The pairing of Damon and Padilla is one of the strongest acting combos the show has achieved in many seasons. Both are committed here, and don’t go for zany over the top performances, but rather excellent comedic acting.
Noah Kahan
Based on how well he performed in Studio 8H during this show, I should remember when Noah Kahan appeared as musical guest for the Emma Stone episode in Season 49. He was outstanding in both of his numbers: “The Great Divide,” and “Doors.”
You’ll get a strong Mumford & Sons vibe from Kahan’s musical style. Which is a very good thing. His music elevated this episode, which could have been an average SNL turn.
Weekend Update
We saw three guests at the Update desk tonight. First we got fairly typical jokes from Michael Che and Colin Jost. Nothing as scathing as last week’s roast of Trump. But the video archivist did drag out a clip of Trump dismissing the COVID virus early in 2020, as a way to illustrate why we shouldn’t trust this administration when it says the Hana Virus is nothing to be concerned about.
Worst things first. Day and Hernandez were in costume as bomb-carrying kamikaze dolphins that the U.S. Navy is (allegedly) using in the Strait of Hormuz. What we got was a few jokes that even the corniest Dad wouldn’t tell.
It’s difficult for me to understand how SNL allowed such a crappy segment to appear on the live show. There are something like 40 producers on this program, and one of them (at least?) must have the comedic sophistication to understand why something as bad as this shouldn’t be on the air. Just because some idiot audience members with an average IQ of 41 may have laughed at this during dress rehearsal, doesn’t mean you put such an insignificant piece on broadcast television. You should at times attempt to lift people’s taste, right? Not trot out a bit that you’d expect from 7th graders at a camp play.
We also got to see Jeremy Culhane return for his second time as ultra-conservative blowhard Tucker Carlson, this time to discuss liberal politics on display at recent fashion shows. Culhane embodies and encapsulates the hooks of Carlson in a way that maybe we haven’t seen since Dana Carvey did impressions on SNL. We’ll definitely be seeing this character again. I wouldn’t be surprised if Culhane’s Carlson appears in a future cold open in Season 52.
Lastly, Jane Wickline was back with her keyboard at the Update desk. This time she shared a song about being late. Ostensibly she was supposed to be apologizing for being that friend who’s always late, but instead, Jane went off on how she didn’t care. These Jane bits work very well for me, for some reason. I think it’s the raw, unplugged nature of the song performances. It draws me in, and delights me to no end. If this is the last solo piece we see from Jane in Season 51, she still will have accomplished a remarkable turnaround from when some were calling for her to be chopped from the show a year ago.
This Weekend Update was the second-longest of Season 51, coming in at just over 17 minutes.
Substitute Teacher
A classroom sketch starring Damon as a substitute teacher who delivers a farewell message to the class after a few days of filling in. Obviously awkward but wanting to be “cool,” Damon’s character plays some music and invites his students to join in for a last chance dance session.
This wasn’t a hilarious sketch, but it was a clever setup because of its structure. Typically, the host or a cast member is the foil who reacts to whatever nonsense is happening ins a silly sketch like this. But here, Damon’ is d’s dancing is often unseen by the home audience because the camera is zoomed on the faces of the cast, which are all cast members, with no extras. The humor here is reliant on the facial reactions of the cast, which is pulled off well.
Special note on Sherman, Dismukes, Wickline, Marshall, and Kam Patterson for their work in this sketch.
A sketch like this, which is subtle, and doesn’t try to go too far with zaniness, benefitted from Damon being the host. He’s a pro actor who doesn’t step on the material. I can imagine if Ryan Gosling had done this sketch, he would have been trying to make the cast members laugh and break character. It works better when the performance serves the writing.
Two Auctioneers
The 10-to-1 sketch is Damon as a cowboy-hat wearing auctioneer who wanders home late to find his auctioneer wife (Sherman) waiting for him. What ensues is a rapid-fire, fast-speaking, ultra-alliterative speed dialogue battle between Damon and Sherman.
Credit has to be given to Sherman, who nails this difficult assignment. It’s not easy to deliver fast-paced dialogue off cue cards like this. The predictabke thing to do would be to asusme Padilla would have handled this part better, but Sherman is excellent here, doing some of her best work on SNL.
The sketch wasn’t outlandishly hilarious, but it should be remembered for the writing of the auctioneer dialogue and the great performances by Damon and Sherman as a married auctioneers who realize they still belong together.
Brennan, Culhane, Hernandez, and Dismukes appear as the couple’s children in this sketch.
Episode Grade: B-
The music was top-notch, which is one of the reasons I lifted my grade from a C+ to a B-. The other reason is the likable Damon, who commits hard to every sketch he’s performing. Few actors in SNL are so serious about doing the work to support the writing. Maybe only Alec Baldwin, Dennis Hopper (who hosted two excellent episodes), and Adam Driver can compare to how Damon goes all in on any premise.
Through 19 episodes, Season 51’s average episode score is 76.9, or roughly a C+. That’s the same episode score that SNL Rankings gave Season 50. It’s an improvement from the lows of Seasons 46-48, when the average was 74.9, but down from Season 49 (which was scored at 79.3).
A score of 76.9 would place SNL Season 51 in the middle of all seasons for the late night program: there are 25 seasons that SNL Rankings rate sbelow that mark, and 25 above it.
Next week, Ferrell/McCartney has an opportunity to boost the score a bit as that famous duo wraps up the season.
