Not for nothing did Josh Brolin once play a young Tommy Lee Jones in the Men in Black sequel involving time travel. Brolin has played a menagerie of hard-asses throughout a body of work so long and varied you could easily forget he is both Thanos and a Goonie. He has a face of carved granite and projects chromium-grade steeliness, so casting him as the straight foil in an outrageous situation is just a no-brainer. However, the poorly kept secret to Brolin’s success is that just beneath the stony exterior beats the heart of a strange bird; a total goofball. This is the Brolin who showed up to host Saturday Night Live this week. And, boy, did the show ever need it.
Tapping into Brolin’s comedic capacity isn’t always easy. Oliver Stone once tried to fuse his disparate elements in W., where the actor played President George W. Bush as a buffoon pretending (badly) to be a tough guy. Paul Thomas Anderson had the opposite and more incisive approach, though. With his Inherent Vice, he Frankenstein’d Brolin into the world’s squarest detective who also occasionally behaves like a Will Ferrell character. The squarer Brolin appears, the funnier it gets when he lapses suddenly into madness. It’s an idea Anderson might have cribbed from Brolin’s previous appearance on SNL back in 2012. That episode closed with one of the greatest ten-to-one sketches of all time, Will Forte’s immortal “Fart Face.” A besuited, silver-haired Brolin certainly looks like the sketch’s straight foil but quickly rises to the same level of silliness at which his scene partners Forte and Bill Hader are playing. It works like gangbusters. (A word which happens to be the definitional way to describe Brolin’s typecast character in the forgotten flop Gangster Squad.)
Like a whole airplane made from the same material as the crash-proof black box, last night’s SNL imbued pretty much every sketch with “Fart Face” energy. It was as unexpected and delightful a turn away from last week’s season-low episode as the ripshit non-sequitur segue in Brolin’s monologue, “You know, I’ve been doing cold plunges for 20 years,” which led, somehow, to the actor disrobing and dunking into a tub of ice water. (Talk about a cold open!) Here are the highlights:
State of the Union Cold Open
It’s been a while since the typically topical opener was among any episode’s best sketches, but rarely has any politician so perfectly gift-wrapped themselves for SNL as Senator Katie Britt did in her State of the Union rebuttal. After days of rabid speculation over who would play Britt’s grownup theater kid, the role fell to Scarlett Johansson. And she came to play. The sketch wisely spends little time on Biden’s hyper-energized State of the Union speech before getting to the main event. Johansson’s dramatic gesticulation and overall performance-y performance mesh with stellar writing to find fun beats in every nook and cranny of Britt’s much-derided kitchen. Not since Melissa McCarthy showed up as Sean Spicer in 2017 has a star been so dialed in as a political side character du jour.
People Pleaser Support Group
Like the “Why are U.S. systems of measurement so weird?” sketch from earlier this season, this one seems like something one of the writers had been sitting on for a while. It has the feel of a signature hit single, an idea that feels found, not formed, from material so true it would inevitably have to be stumbled upon one day. Of course a group of people so terrified of conflict they agree with whatever anyone says would be terrible at giving or receiving tough love! This paradox is explored in so many ways throughout this sketch. It’s wild there is even room for a hedged twist on the serenity prayer at the end — a wonderful comedic digestif.
Wine and Cheese Night
After featuring two live dogs on set last week, SNL opts for a mechanical cat in this sketch. The fake-tabby makes for a decent sight gag when it first appears on Brolin’s lap at a party, a situation the host (Andrew Dismukes) attributes to his “good energy.” Brolin uses his sincere aura as a comic weapon here, treasuring his having been “chosen” so thoroughly that it hits extra hard when he flips out after the cat abandons him. The number of amazing lines he gets once he starts taking the party to task, not to mention Brolin’s delivery, is truly something to behold.
Shrimp Tower
In a night filled with extremes, this Monty Python–esque detour might be the most out-there of all. Brolin’s snooty Viennese upper-cruster telegraphs the ending in advance when he describes just how devoted he is to his shrimp tower. Yet, he leaves viewers unprepared for the turn this sketch takes once Sarah Sherman’s archduchess arrives. I will say no more, lest anyone read this without having watched yet, except: holy shit.
Moulin Rouge
Brolin graciously takes a backseat to give musical guest Ariana Grande a spotlight moment to be hilarious. Here, she reunites with her Wicked co-star and scene partner from the support-group sketch, Bowen Yang, to perform the “extended cut” of Moulin Rouge’s “Elephant Love Medley.” This version features even more copyright-defiant songs awkwardly mashed up into it, most often “Happy Birthday.” (My personal favorite: “Y’it’s been … one-der waaaaall.”) Incredibly, Grande may be better at keeping a straight face here than Yang, who seems like he can barely believe he is singing Shania Twain directly into Ariana Grande’s face on live television. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen two people have more fun together in a sketch.
Cut for Time
• In case Brolin’s monologue left it ambiguous at all, his poem for Timothée Chalamet from the set of Dune 2 really did happen.
• Heidi Gardner continued her streak of incredible physical comedy in this week’s robbery sketch as a woman who is aching at her core to be nudged into cinema vérité-style amateur porn.
• Never knew until last night’s airplane sketch how much I needed to hear people arguing, in song form, over whether Brad Pitt’s character in Ad Astra is named “Ad Astra.”
• Ariana Grande’s current relationship has been among the most persistently disected in celebrity gossip the past year, often with snickering confusion or disbelief. I have to say, though, the video of her and Ethan Slater making snow angels that played at the end of her “we can’t be friends” performance is very adorable.
• Colin Jost calling Lindsey Graham “Trump’s house elf” on “Weekend Update” is clever and dead on, but resorting to another lazy swipe at the golden bachelor’s unclear sexual orientation is beneath the show at this point. Or at least it should be.
• Poor Sarah Sherman had to freeze with an open mouth filled with blue-flecked sandwich mush as the sketch ended, but it got an extra laugh out of me, so perhaps it was worth it.
• It’s probably a coincidence that Brolin has Will Forte’s “Fart Face” hair in the Shonda talk-show sketch, but perhaps not!
• Keen-eared listeners may have noticed that it’s Grande singing “What Was I Made For” throughout the sandwich sketch, not Billie Eilish.
• Something about the gyrating table in a “Lisa from Temecula” always destabilizes the cast’s composure. This time out, though, they keep it together less than ever. Punkie Johnson nearly scream-laughs at one point, and Yang’s reaction to Lisa calling him “negrodivergent” looks as though he just walked into a fully nude surprise party thrown by all his friends.