Bowen Yang As Fran Lebowitz Is As New York As Machetes on the Subway

Last night’s Saturday Night Live was a return from hiatus and a return to glorious form, namely in that Bowen Yang once again nailed the zeitgeist and Kyle Mooney got to be a perfectly doofy goof. On Weekend Update, the two appeared as Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese, respectively, doing a funhouse-mirror version of the real duo’s Netflix documentary series, Pretend It’s a City. Yang talks a mile a minute in Lebowitz’s pointed nasal voice, making absurdist observations about how the city has changed, like, “Kids are so short nowadays. You know why? You can’t smoke in bars anymore.” Mooney laughs so hard he falls out of his chair. The bit perfectly captures just how tickled Scorsese is by Lebowitz’s bitter witticisms on the actual series, even when they’re not that far off from Yang advising young admirers to “be something useful. Be a piece of melon wrapped in prosciutto.” Or as Michael Che observes, “It’s the two of you just sitting and talking and Marty losing his mind.”