As the saying goes, it’s better to remain silent and be considered a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt — even if the job of sketch comic is essentially “professional fool.”
The first six episodes of Saturday Night Live this season took an aggressively impartial stance on the topic of the Israel-Hamas War … by not really mentioning it at all. The subject seemed taboo, either because it was too difficult to find humor in or because it was too easy to outrage a critical mass of viewers by doing so. Saturday Night Live’s creators have always seemed to pride themselves on being equal-opportunity offenders — especially as of late, after the Trump years found the show occasionally feeling like a Democratic pep rally — but at this moment, they seemed unwilling to risk offending anyone. Even after last night’s episode opened with the season’s first actual sketch touching on the Israel-Hamas war, it still seems that way.
The play-by-play restaging of Tuesday’s congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses took digs at GOP representative Elise Stefanik (a puzzlingly over-the-top Chloe Troast), whose offense at antisemitism overlooks a lot of what’s happening on her side of the street. It also took swipes at the liberal-leaning presidents of elite U.S. universities, whose overly equivocating answers led to a jaw-dropping viral moment that cost at least one of them their job (so far). Neither side came out of the hearings looking particularly good, which on paper seems like the perfect political moment to test the waters on this subject matter with a low-effort sketch that risks offending no one. The tepid live-audience response might indicate that it’s a simple miscalculation of timing — perhaps another restaging of a political absurdity only tangentially about the Israel-Hamas war would be better received later in the season? — but if its satirical bite is going to be this toothless, perhaps the show should go back to not saying anything at all.
While it makes sense to put the antisemitism-hearing sketch (those words do not exactly flow together, huh?) at the top of the episode, where most topical sketches tend to go, it created a real whiplash effect when two seconds later, viewers were expected to overcome the awkwardness by fourth-time host Adam Driver’s jokes about his “close, personal relationship with Santa” and playing piano in the opening monologue.
After the ick of this transition gave way to Driver’s charm, the monologue proved to be a solid indicator of where he would be taking the episode. Driver is a host who is always doing the most. He entered several sketches like the Kool-Aid Man doing accentwork — sometimes with success, and sometimes not. After a bumpy start to the episode, though, it was a relief to feel like we viewers were in good hands, even if those hands were sometimes trying too hard.
Here are the highlights:
We’re Trying
By some strange cultural bylaw, it’s considered socially acceptable for straight couples to tell friends when they are “trying,” a.k.a. “rawdogging.” This quiet storm of a sketch explodes that idea by viewing it through the prism of a gay couple too dumb to know they can’t get pregnant. Driver and Bowen Yang play the cozy couple whose oversharing heightens at a perfectly gradual pace. What takes the sketch to the next level, though, is the conviction Driver and Yang have in their ability to conceive a child, scolding their agog friends for not being open-minded enough to take a leap of faith. (“Imagine going back to the pilgrims and trying to explain Andy Milonakis,” Yang says with mic-drop confidence.) Their enthusiasm is contagious, if not the certainty fueling it. By the end of the sketch, you can’t help rooting for the pair to defy science and somehow deliver a baby out of Yang’s butt.
Old Friends
It’s the most nostalgic time of the year, a moment for reconnecting with the past and reconciling it with the present. For Mikey Day’s character, that means experiencing a swell of emotion at a photo of a childhood friend while visiting his mom’s house. When he decides to text that old friend after decades of distance, it’s obvious that Adam Driver will play the grown-up version and that he will have some enormous flaw. The twist? He has every enormous flaw, namely a scandal gross enough to inspire a Netflix documentary, and a buddy named Big Filthy who has a moneymaking scheme involving latex. That this digital short is finally revealed to be a resigned ad for Facebook is just the cherry on top.
Beep Beep
The only thing more obnoxious than saying “knock knock” when entering a room is saying “beep beep” when someone is in your way. For some gloriously hard-to-imagine reason, an entire sketch about this truth now exists. It takes an awkward minute and a half before the premise becomes clear — when two mustachio’d car-horn verbalizers arrive at an impasse, each unable to beep the other out of depositing a casserole dish on the last remaining bit of open table at a midwestern-coded holiday gathering. The sketch is already agreeably absurd, even before the tense standoff devolves into a contest of whose beeping car is tiniest. It’s a shining moment for reliable utility player Andrew Dismukes, who goes toe-to-toe with Driver in the acting department here and acquits himself admirably.
Weekend Update: Chloe Fineman’s Holiday Gift
Though it’s presented as a potential sexy holiday gift for folks at home to give to each other, when Chloe Fineman brings the internet’s lingering fascination with the climactic street ballet from Save the Last Dance to Saturday Night Live — with that film’s star Julia Stiles in tow — it’s a gift to viewers.
Tiny Ass Bag
Finally, the unofficial sequel to last year’s Big Dumb Hat sketch that we never knew we needed. Ego Nwodim and Marcello Hernández hawk the titular tiny-ass bags with the assistance of Driver and musical guest Olivia Rodrigo, each listing another little bag’s potential contents. The sketch leans a little too hard on trying to make “and dassit” a catchphrase, but makes up for that with increasingly funny cargo, excessive sass, and ridiculous bag designs.
Cut for Time
• About a month prior to SNL’s sketch about campus reactions to the Israel-Hamas war, Israel’s version of Saturday Night Live, Eretz Nehederet, beat it to the punch. It aired a sketch that went viral for the worst reason a sketch can go viral: being staggeringly unfunny. In it, a pair of pastel-haired, keffiyeh-clad students from Columbia Untisemity — show me a more tortured pun, I dare you — declared their sympathy for Hamas, their animosity toward Jews, and their belief that both of these views are endemic to queer identity. You know, classic spoofs and goofs. SNL’s sketch is more nuanced … but barely.
• The way Driver tosses off the word “girl” in the pregnancy sketch? I’m obsessed.
• It’s pretty clever that blurring out the “Santa”-shaped chocolate in the ShopTV sketch only makes it look more penislike.
• Hernández breaks the fourth wall at the end of his Weekend Update desk piece on why men are depressed, admitting that the reason everything he’s just said has very little to do with the topic at hand is because “I don’t have stand-up on that.”
• The baby body with Adam Driver’s head poking through the seat in the Airplane Baby sketch is as inventive as it is visually disturbing.
• Speaking of inventive, the tea-party set design for Olivia Rodrigo’s performance of “all-american bitch” is rad as hell and something I’ve never seen before on this show. Bravo.
• I worry that some of the old-people pranks in the Elder PSA are so good they’re going to give TikTokers fresh ideas.
• For the first time in recent memory, no Please Don’t Destroy video.
• Of the two cut-for-time sketches this week available to watch on YouTube, the actor’s talkback series is the one that’s most worth a look.
• When Driver is thanking people during the good-byes, “most important of all” is Santa, a nice, little bookend to the monologue.
• The brief tribute to Norman Lear near the end of the episode was sweet and classy. RIP to one of the most essential creators to ever work in televised comedy.