Noah can still do acidic takes on the news from his apartment, and Bee can do them from deep in the woods, even if there isn’t an audience there. All the taped bits and karaoke sessions are fine, but ultimately, they’re not central to what a late-night talk show needs to do. That’s not easy, but it is easier for them to do because, at their core, talk shows either thrive or don’t based on the personalities of their hosts and the one-on-one conversations they have with their guests. Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Conan O’Brien, and Samantha Bee have been successful at retooling their shows for the social-distancing moment by making them more personal and turning the low-budget, outside-the-studio situation into an asset. That spontaneity is what has made the at-home versions of other late-night shows work and also highlights what makes it harder for Saturday Night Live to do the same. It didn’t seem like he had read it before, either, and that made it the most organic, natural part of the segment, taken up a notch by Che’s kicker, in which he revealed that his grandmother was not really a fan of “Joke Swap.” “My grandmother has never seen this show,” he said.
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The best part of “Weekend Update” was the one-sided joke swap at the end, when Che, who lost his grandmother last week to COVID-19, asked Jost to read a joke he had not seen in advance because that was his grandmother’s favorite recurring bit on “Weekend Update.” Jost complied, reading a joke emailed to him by Pete Davidson that, in keeping with tradition, made him look racist. That was supposed to make “Weekend Update” feel more like it does under normal circumstances, but it had the opposite effect: It was a distraction that made the whole segment seem like a contrived exercise in trying too hard. Zoom audio of a handful of staffers cracking up at their jokes about Bernie Sanders and Rudy Giuliani. Colin Jost and Michael Che made the decision to include a laugh track, a.k.a. The SNL staple that seems easiest to replicate in a videoconferencing format is “Weekend Update,” but even that didn’t work quite as well as it could have. Given the limits of having to do everything individually and online, this kind of repetition was inevitable and understandable. Almost every sketch wound up being a riff on a digital form: Pete Davidson’s rap parodies, Mikey Day’s Twitch gamer show “Cam Playz Dat,” Heidi Gardner’s adaptation of her “Weekend Update” bit as the YouTube video “Bailey at the Movies,” Kate McKinnon’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression reimagined as workout video, Ego Nwodim’s funny makeup tutorial done with Crayola markers. Still, there was something fundamentally awkward about the Saturday Night Live at Home experience that couldn’t be avoided. But it still made me giggle in the midnight hour, which is a pleasant change from the mood most of us are in when we stay up too late these days. The animated short Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles worked as well in the “at home” format as it would have in a typical episode, which is to say that its concept was more clever than its execution. But so what? Her portrayals were spot-on, and it gave her an opportunity to fully shine on her own, something a typical episode of SNL doesn’t always afford her. I’m pretty sure Chloe Fineman constructed her entire “Masterclass” parody, in which she impersonated Timothée Chalamet, Jojo Siwa, and Carole Baskin, around the wigs she was able to yank most quickly out of her bedroom closet. The inevitable portrait of the absurdities of Zoom conference calls - featuring the technologically challenged receptionists Henriette and Nan, played by Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon, previously seen in this sketch from last year - was a tad predictable but still funny.
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The opening monologue wasn’t necessarily a laugh riot, but it was still comforting to see “host” Tom Hanks telling jokes from his kitchen, clearly in good health again after recovering, along with wife, Rita Wilson, from his bout with COVID-19. Saturday Night Live at Home was by no means a complete disaster. But it also demonstrated that, no matter how creative and resourceful everyone gets within the confines of their apartments and homes, there are limits to doing sketch comedy when the sketches cannot be done in person. Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live delivered a new episode that was not live, not recorded in Studio 8H, and, owing to social distancing, featured sketches in which none of the cast members occupied the same physical space.ĭubbed Saturday Night Live at Home, the nationally televised comedy experiment was a testament to the spirit that has defined the 45-year-old NBC institution from the beginning: that a show will be put on Saturday at 11:30 p.m.