‘SNL’ Is Becoming Nothing More Than a Cheap Rip-Off of Itself
We should have expected a nostalgia-heavy season in honor of Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary. But nostalgia comes in many packages. Sometimes it’s a sweet remembrance of the good times we’ve shared. Sometimes it’s revisiting the past in desperate attempts to recreate old glories. Last night, SNL served up its own version of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, inviting poor Michael Keaton to once again repeat earlier successes with diminishing results.
The ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ of Monologues
Keaton kicked off his fourth hosting appearance by promoting his not-nearly-as-good-as-the-original Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. He says his movie is “coming out now” even though it’s been in theaters since Labor Day. It’s all an excuse for Mikey Day and Andy Samberg (he got written out of the political cold open) to dress up like Beetlejuice and persuade Keaton to do their favorite character.
Cute, guys. But it’s a straight rehash of the monologue Keaton did in 2014, with Taran Killam and Bobby Moynihan trying to convince the host to play Beetlejuice (and Batman) with them. The main difference? It was funnier the first time.
Day-Old ‘Schweddy Balls’
Way back in 1998, SNL created an iconic sketch featuring a baker appearing on a talk show to promote his unintentionally lewd pastries. It’s a slow-burn, underplayed masterpiece, refusing to drop the inevitable Schweddy Balls punchline until the sketch’s hilarious climax.
Saturday Night Live dipped into the well again last night, replacing Alec Baldwin with Keaton as a baker appearing on a talk show to promote his unintentionally lewd pastries.
This time around, nothing is underplayed — the hosts fall over themselves to make sure we understand Keaton’s spooky cookies look like boobs. Boobs! Get it? To make matters worse, Day and Heidi Gardner’s home shopping hosts are direct rip-offs of Killam and Cecily Strong’s “Right Side of the Bed” characters. Except, of course, the earlier version once again did it better.
The Alec Baldwin Cameo
If Saturday Night Live had to rip off “Schweddy Balls,” at least it resisted the urge to invite Baldwin back for his 78th cameo. Oh wait, here he is again:
Why Baldwin to play Fox News’ Bret Baier when eleven men in the cast are looking for something to do? At this point, we have to conclude that he possesses compromising pictures of Lorne Michaels. But why fight it? If this 50th year is about celebrating the show’s past, shoehorning Baldwin into the show is practically obligatory.
Of course, SNL didn’t stop there. It did a game show parody — again. It invited a new cast member to reconstruct their stand-up routine as a Weekend Update desk piece — again. It aired a Please Don’t Destroy digital short… well, that kinda felt fresh since the boys haven’t been invited to the party since last March.
At least SNL tried to get current with a sketch parodying a TikTok scroll.
Oh wait, they did that three seasons ago as well.