It would have been nice if Reese Witherspoon had shown triumphant comic chops on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, in the face of her terrible new movie comedy Hot Pursuit, but although she was a poised and enthusiastic host, it was just another uneven SNL.
Witherspoon was mostly an observer for the funniest bit of the night. It played with our expectations of SNL sketches by pretending to be just another game show parody, this one a variation on Pictionary called “Picture Perfect.” The sketch sprang its real gag halfway through, though–when the secret subject of the team’s drawing turned out to be the Prophet Muhammad, a prospect that caused Bobby Moynihan and then Kenan Thompson to hilariously panic. (Witherspoon was their unaware teammate.) The laugh was all the sharper for being so unexpected, one of the rare examples of SNL not just playing out whatever premise is established in the opening seconds of a sketch.
A failed example of the same kind of structure came late in the show, when a tedious sketch featuring southern women bewailing their strange problems (even Witherspoon’s tale of her demon-possessed husband wasn’t all that funny) turned out to be the set-up for the seemingly random punchline that the women were robbing the house where they were sitting around and drinking wine.
As tends to happen late in an SNL season, there were plenty of franchise pieces. The monologue was a reprise of the cute bit where actual mothers of the cast members (and Witherspoon) appeared with their children, this time to get apologies for purportedly real things the cast had done when young. It was topped with a montage of home movie footage of the cast as kids, the upshot of which was that Reese Witherspoon was such an accomplished performer even as a child that there was no really embarrassing clips to be found of her.
Also back: the sketch where a high school class performs black-out sketches showcasing their social consciousness, which had some strong beats (“Don’t “like”… love.”) but went on too long. Whiskers ‘R Us was back, too, with Witherspoon as Kate McKinnon’s partner in cat sales and love, and diminishing returns are definitely starting to set in with this one. All of Weekend Update was a series of franchise bits, some better than others: Leslie Jones is always welcome with her monologues on dating, especially since she brings out the best in Colin Jost (their interplay is as close as this version of Update comes to the classic Stefon/Seth Meyers days), but adding Witherspoon to Cecily Strong’s Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Gotten Into A Conversation With At A Party just watered down the piece’s rhythm, and it’s time to retire Thompson’s Willie. Jost and Che did well, though, with a continuation of the Mother’s Day theme, reading texts of apparently actual jokes their mothers had sent them.
Nothing else really clicked. The cold open, with Strong as a DJ introducing all the Republican presidential candidates for some dance moves, mostly served to introduce who in the cast will be playing whom as election season gets into gear. (If by some fluke Carly Fiorina gets the Republican nomination, Kate McKinnon will be awfully busy, since she’s playing both Fiorina and Hillary Clinton.) Be Scene In LA was a mess with Witherspoon and Strong as two cougars doing a vanity talk show, culminating in a fart joke. A sketch set around a water slide in an amusement park, with Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney as two staffers fawning over Witherspoon, seemed to be a set in search of a sketch.
The one pre-tape of the night was an odd piece about Hallmark employees trading imitations of their annoying boss (Moynihan) and gradually realizing that he’s been sexually abusing one of them (an insistently cheerful Bennett). The writers didn’t find a way to make this particularly funny (and one wonders what Hallmark thought of it, since the fact that it was set there was irrelevant to the actual story).
One more chance for SNL to end the season on a high note: next week’s season finale with Louis C.K. as host and Rihanna as musical guest.
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