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For the first time in several weeks, Saturday Night Live doesn’t kick off with a political press conference sketch. Instead, we open on a middle-class family on their way to see their grandmother. Stopping at a filling station, they’re forced to leave one of their kids behind due to exorbitant gas prices. The reason costs are soaring? Simple: “The Epstein Files.”
Enter Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) to break things down: “It’s called butterfly effect, right? Epstein was first domino … bing bing bong … WAR.” As to the stock market, he puts it in terms the Harry Styles fans in attendance can understand: “It’s going one direction: down!”
After riffing on the cast frozen in place behind him (“How about Ashley Padilla? Last name sounds Spanish, but take a look at her, folks: that’s the whitest white that ever whited. Haircut! We love haircut!”), he turns things over to secretary of war Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost), who emerges in a drunken stupor from the back of the family’s care and waddles over in the several sizes too large Florsheim shoes Trump gifted him. Hegseth claims America’s war against Iran is going great, blaming the media for distorting things by “using what I do and say to make me look like a fool”.
It remains surprising that Jost of all people managed to produce the best political caricature of the Trump era – outside of Austin’s Trump, that is – but here we are.
Harry Styles pulls double duty as host and musical guest. The British heartthrob riffs about his music (“songs about fruit that people think are about sex”), his fashion sense (“people accused me of something called queerbaiting, but did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t know everything about me, dad!”), and how nice it is to live a boring life in the public eye, as opposed to the alternative (cue the notorious photo of disgraced former Prince Andrew post-arrest). Before signing off, he gets in some legit queer baiting by kissing Ben Marshall smackdab on the lips. Style’s natural drollness and slow speaking style don’t quite make for deadpan comedy, but he’s adept at delivering his punchlines.
In the first sketch, Styles plays a prosecuting attorney squaring off against a surprise public defender: Sebastian Maniscalco (Marcello Hernández). The world-famous stand up defends his client from a shoplifting charge not through evidence or testimony, but his nostalgia-based comedy and zany physical antics. As previously demonstrated, Hernández’s impersonation is dead-on, but it’s Styles who surprises with his own go-for-broke and none-too-shabby impression of Maniscalco.
MAHAspital is a rightwing version of hit medical drama The Pitt. Set in “the high-stakes medical crucible of Orange county, California”, the doctors on staff forego “liberal science” in favor of steaks, bull semen, crystals and a “triple dose of Alpha Brain and a cold plunge in blue jeans”. The show is produced by secretary of health and human services RFK Jr (Johnson), who makes a special (shirtless) appearance, dead bear in tow. Johnson’s impersonation of RFK Jr is OK, although not one of his best.
Sparkle of the Sea is a German ocean cruise line. Sporting over-the-top German accents and sparkly getups, Styles and Chloe Fineman introduce the various entertainment acts aboard the ship, a lineup that includes a couple of Eurotrash rock bands (including one that does a phonetic cover of Styles’s Watermelon Sugar), a magician that edges his audience, and a French Def Jam comedian (Kenan Thompson). That latter character is the only one worth a laugh in this way too long sketch.
During a Best Buy store team meeting, overly flirty employee Mr Pooty (Thompson) worries that he’s in trouble for his aggressive sexual behavior, specifically the times he’s “manipulated the nipples of some of the mens”. He passes the blame to Styles’s fellow employee for his “very strong bisexual magnetism”. Like the dreadful Mr Fonzi sketch from a couple weeks back, everything here is built around a silly accent (which Styles eventually mimics). The funny voices and queerbaiting material is wearing thin, fast.
Returning the favor from last week’s episode, previous host Ryan Gosling pops in to introduce Styles for his first musical performance of the night. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost covers tomorrow night’s Oscar’s ceremony by inviting on rightwing pundit Tucker Carlson (Jeremy Culhane) to discuss the nominees Carlson chides the films for their liberal politics (“Sorry kids, we don’t go to church anymore, we go to Sinners”) while smugly asking “What are we doing? What’s going on?”
Culhane’s vocal impression is on point (he especially nails Carlson’s nails-on-chalkboard laugh), but the characterization is clearly based on the morally hysterical version of Carlson when he was still on Fox News. Modern day Carlson has become one of the major actors behind the fracturing of the right, vociferously criticizing Israel and its proxies (like Ben Shapiro), challenging the neocons in Congress (such as Ted Cruz), and constantly pushing back against Trump’s imperialist agenda. None of this is to say SNL shouldn’t mock him, only that this attempt comes off as outdated. They might as well have given him his old bow tie.
With news that Apple is releasing several new emojis, Jost then welcomes on the company’s least and most used emojis: Aerial Tramway (Mikey Day) and Red Heart (Hernández). There’s some good digs at their apps’ bizarre emoji options, such as orange square, division sign, snorkel equipment, building with a horn on it, and “the word on with two arrows above it”. This is Day’s show from top to bottom, his loud and clueless braggadocio breaking Hernández while getting howls from the audience.
Next, Styles plays a high school quarterback working at a White Castle drive-thru. Two dweeby girls from his class (Jane Wickline, Veronika Slowikowska) make several desperate attempts to ask him to the upcoming dance, only to blurt out something insane: “The burgers are good, but what about the boy, they say? I would like to scrunch you up like a bag of chips.” “If we went all the way and it came down to it, I’d want you to know I wouldn’t keep it.” Wickline and Slowikowski’s characters are endearingly dorky, but like the loops they keep making around the White Castle, this sketch just goes in circles.
As if Gosling weren’t a big enough get, it’s none other than Paul Simon who shows up to intro Styles for his second musical performance. This is followed by a music video tribute to St Paddy’s Day, with Styles and his crew getting hit up at the b=club by a group of Irish step dancing babes. At first, they’re weirded out by it, but eventually they join in. A trifle, but the ditty is catchy.
Harry for Him is a new fashion collaboration from Styles and Target aimed to “recreate some of my extraordinary looks for the ordinary man, at prices he can afford”. The problem is that the bold, gender-fluid digs that work on Styles do no work everyday dudes: “When Harry wore this [blouse], my wife said he looked like the embodiment of elegant masculinity; when I wore this, she said, ‘you look like a serial killer wearing the clothes of the woman you killed.’” Styles seems looser here than in any of the other sketches.
Thus concludes a thoroughly fine episode of Saturday Night Live, with Styles acquitting himself well as both host and musical guest. Alongside last week’s episode, Saturday Night Live seems to be on the upswing after some dire episodes. Hopefully it can keep the momentum going when it comes back in three weeks.
