“Saturday Night Live” Proves Laughter Really Is the Best Medicine

BY: GRACE S.

As the CoronaVirus still has people across the world socially distancing from each other, sources of live entertainment have gotten creative to keep generating new content. The episode of “Saturday Night Live” that aired on Saturday April 25th, 2020 marks the second episode “SNL” has done “at home”. The first at-home episode seemed clunky and the acting was awkward. Everybody at “SNL” really stepped up their game this week. This most recent episode was fantastic. The show was funny, the acting had improved, and the overall product flowed cohesively.

Brad Pitt hosted this week, starting off the episode impersonating Dr. Anthony Fauci correcting all the mistruths President Trump has said about COVID-19. Along with him, there were many other celebrities who made cameos. Adam Sandler stars in a music video with Pete Davidson about quarantine. DJ Khalid, Charles Barkley, and Fred Armisen are all guest featured in a skit with Kenan Thompson called “What Up with That: At Home”. Miley Cyrus even performed a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”.

“Saturday Night Live” stars filmed skits from the safety of their homes. If a skit required two or more actors or actresses to be together, such as “Grocery Store Ad” and “SoulCycle at Home”, some editing magic took place. In “Grocery Store Ad”, Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant used green screens to make it seem like they were in the same place. In “SoulCycle at Home”, editors used individual videos from Bowen Yang, Cecily Strong, Heidi Garner, Ego Nwodim, Chris Redd, and Beck Bennett pieced them together to create the at-home workout skit.

The average length of each sketch was shorter than when the show was filmed “live from New York” at the Rockefeller Center. I didn’t mind the shortened sketches. There is only so much each cast member can do from their houses, and none of the sketches seemed to drag on unnecessarily like they sometimes can. The entire show had me giggling.

Pete Davidson and Adam Sandler rapped a song about how bored they are in quarantine in a sketch called “Stuck in the House”. This song was excellent. It is about something boring, but it isn’t boring at all. The lyrics are hilarious, the music is catchy, and Pete Davidson and Adam Sandler are singing. How could you not love it? If there was a way to download it on AppleMusic, I would have. Rob Schneider even made an appearance outside of Adam Sandler’s house. My favorite line in this song comes from Adam Sandler when he says, “ Only pet my dog with a baseball mitt// baking my own bread and it tastes like [bleep]//I broke my leg two weeks ago// but I’m too scared to go to the hospital.”

Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant excel in comedy in “Grocery Store Ad”. In this skit they play Kathy and Suzanna-Anne-Helen from Bartenson’s grocery store. They are going on the air to inform potential customers of items that are still fully stocked in their grocery store. Some of these items include “a little bag of dry, hard beans”, “fluoride bananas”, “Boy Scout cookies”, mint Pringles, and, my personal favorite, “reduced sodium Dasani water, now with 30% less salt”. Kate and Aidy obviously couldn’t be together due to current circumstances, but in this skit they were poorly edited together at times to look like they were shaking hands, high fiving, or putting an arm around each other. This added to the hilarity of an already obnoxious skit. This was my favorite skit from the night.

“Weekend Update” was excellent as usual. I must admit however, I have extreme bias because I am very much in love with Colin Jost. I almost started crying when I found out he had gotten engaged to Scarlet Johansen because it wasn’t me. But that is beside the point. Colin Jost and Michael Che hosted the segment as usual. They cracked jokes about COVID-19 and different governments’ responses to it. Weekend Update fan favorite Pete Davidson joined the hosts via Zoom to discuss his experiences with being quarantined. He did what he does best and made us all laugh with his spicily explicit humor that you do not want to listen to while sitting next to your mom. Jost and Che participated in another fan favorite segment where one of them reads a joke the other wrote before seeing it live on air.

The only skit I didn’t like from this episode was “Big Papi Cooking Show”. In this skit Kenan Thompson portrays former Red Sox player David Ortiz who is hosting a cooking show. This is a recurring role for Thomspon, and I don’t think I have laughed once. David Ortiz is showing the viewers at home how to cook up a Dominican lunch, but none of the “jokes” even seem like jokes. Not every skit on an episode of “SNL” is going to be funny, but there is a huge difference between being “I could see what they were going for and they just didn’t quite hit it” and “why would anybody ever approve this skit for comedic purposes?”. I love Kenan, but this skit was not it.

Kenan redeemed himself later in the episode by doing an impersonation of OJ Simpson in “OJ Address” that was equal parts funny and spot-on. In this skit, OJ posted a video to Twitter where he addresses “Lauren” (Lorne) Michaels and the “SNL” cast. He (unknowingly, but comedically) makes a lot of comparisons between the situation surrounding COVID-19 and the trouble he infamously got into in the past. This skit was delightful.

Pete signed off Weekend Update by saying what we are all thinking from home, “It’s weird without an audience!” Even with the challenges of not having a live studio audience, everyone involved in the making of this “SNL” really pulled off some magic. This episode was timely, hilarious, and much appreciated. In an era where doom and gloom seems to be the only thing in the news, it was nice to watch some television that could make me laugh about the current situation, instead of feeling sad about it. The second “Saturday Night Live” at home was a smashing success.