Finally, Meryl Streep joins Saturday Night Live in celebrity stacked special

Like every episode of Saturday Night Live since 1975, Sunday’s (Monday AEDT) three-hour anniversary special was a confusing, celebrity-packed, occasionally funny grab bag. And we have some thoughts.

1. Does SNL owe Sabrina Carpenter money?

Sure, the pop singer took over the summer with her smash hit Espresso, but she isn’t a fixture of Saturday Night Live like, say, Paul Simon. Simon hosted the second episode of SNL and is close friends with show creator Lorne Michaels. Carpenter is a newly famous pop singer. Yet, there she was alongside Simon, kicking the night off with a wistful duet of Homeward Bound.

Then Carpenter was a punch line in a Weekend Update joke and appeared in a Domingo sketch, trying to sing off-key.

The Washington Post’s pop music critic Chris Richards recently wrote: “For the show’s first 30-odd seasons, landing a guest spot confirmed a star musician’s status in the popular imagination. But more recently, the cred balance seems to be seesawing, with pop acts now giving the show necessary injections of cultural legitimacy.”

Perhaps that’s exactly what was happening on Sunday.

2. It was a musical affair

There were, of course, performances of the expected kind: the aforementioned Homeward Bound; Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard singing Sinéad O’Connor’s biggest hit, Nothing Compares 2 U; Lil’ Wayne with the Roots reprising some of his biggest hits; and a Paul McCartney medley to close out the night.

The sketches were loaded with music, too. The genre-hopping Domingo, which riffed on Taylor Swift and Wicked. The prerecorded Andy Samberg and Bowen Yang song about the anxiety of working at SNL. Adam Sandler and his acoustic guitar. Another John Mulaney Broadway musical medley with Paul Rudd, Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver (in a hot dog costume) and Kate McKinnon as Rudy Giuliani doing Hamilton (yes, with the cast of Hamilton).

3. Look, a celebrity! Look, another!

SNL50 was so loaded with famous people, it brought to mind a visit to Madame Tussauds.

In one sketch, friends and former Weekend Update hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler took questions from the crowd for a few minutes – an excuse to load in as many celebrities as possible, including Quinta Brunson, Tim Meadows, Nate Bargatze, Jon Lovitz, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Cher, Keith Richards, Zach Galifianakis, Jon Hamm, Bad Bunny, Ryan Reynolds, Ray Romano, Peyton Manning, Al Sharpton and Seth Meyers – who called out the show for its blatant celebrity-packing.

As The Washington Post’s TV critic, Lili Loofbourow, wrote: “You can practically taste the strenuous effort that’s gone into trying to squeeze everyone into every sketch so far.”

4. The special provided a break from politics

Saturday Night Live spent 50 years earning a reputation for political satire. But the SNL50 show seemed to pull its political punches. There was no overt commentary about what’s happening in Washington – apart from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement joke about carting away Canadian Martin Short – and there was no President Donald Trump impersonation. Colin Jost made a joke about Trump wanting SNL to be cancelled and, as mentioned, McKinnon reprised her Giuliani impression – but the show was nostalgic callbacks and goofy jokes.

5. Meryl Streep!

Somehow, Meryl Streep, who has proven her comedy chops over and over again, has never appeared on SNL – until now.

She appeared in the Close Encounter sketch, which featured McKinnon as a semi-vulgar, super-laid-back victim of an alien abduction. Streep portrayed the victim’s equally vulgar mother.

Her timing, the live camera-switching, the reading of the handwritten cue cards: it was its own kind of performance. And she held her own against McKinnon’s now-iconic abductee.

6. Where was Bill Hader?

If you know, please drop us a line.

7. Most of the recurring sketches were more recent creations

You might think on the occasion of its 50th anniversary celebration, SNL might take the moment to celebrate some of its more foundational sketches.

But most of the major recurring sketches of the night came from the past decade or so, such as Close Encounters, Black Jeopardy! (in which Eddie Murphy played Tracy Morgan alongside the actual Tracy Morgan) and Domingo, the latest sketch that SNL seems determined to grind into the ground until there’s not a funny bone left in it.

8. Fake In Memoriam segments are better than real In Memoriam segments

In a genuinely funny fake-out, Tom Hanks sombrely introduced an In Memoriam segment for “SNL characters and sketches that have aged horribly”.

“You all laughed at them,” Hanks said. “So, if anyone should be cancelled, shouldn’t it be you, the audience?” Clips included Dan Aykroyd’s Weekend Update catchphrase “Jane, you ignorant slut”, a bunch of homophobia, racism and sexism, and Word Association, the famous sketch starring Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor.

Washington Post

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