SNL Continues Its Tradition of Squandering Michael Keaton - LateNighter (2024)

SNL Continues Its Tradition of Squandering Michael Keaton - LateNighter (1)

And Your Host…

In her review of 1989’s Dream Team, Pauline Kael compared star Michael Keaton to James Cagney, citing his live-wire ability to “cauterize” an otherwise standard scene with his unique energy. So why doesn’t Keaton’s undeniable charisma and unpredictability really work on Saturday Night Live?

There was a time—and it wasn’t all that long ago—when Michael Keaton appeared to be over, at least as a big screen leading man. I remember people being surprised when he popped up in a 2010 Will Ferrell movie in a relatively minor role, and being further surprised that he could still steal a scene with his loose, improvisational comic style. There’s a reason why his turn as a washed-up former superhero actor making one last desperate bid for relevance and respect resonated in 2014’s Birdman, and his Oscar nomination that year served to remind everyone what the estimable Ms. Kael was talking about all those years ago: Michael Keaton is one of a kind.

Which makes his resolutely ordinary Saturday Night Live appearances (this is number four) feel more like the show’s failure than his. Granted, SNL has no room, time, or patience for improvisation in its stopwatch-lockstep rundown, and never has. So perhaps it’s just not a great match. But some performers can still imbue their scripted sketch roles with an enlivening glint, whereas Keaton feels penned in by the show’s requirements.

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Which is all to say that the 73-year-old Keaton, now happily revitalizing a pair of old blockbuster roles on the big screen made for a middling SNL host.

Keaton himself is impossible to dislike, no matter how studiously he’s reading his cue cards, but the episode itself never finds a way to let him zap his signature comic energy into what he’s given. Sometimes it’s easy to lay blame (you know, that fun reviewer’s pastime) when an episode doesn’t come to life, but here Michael Keaton on Saturday Night Live remains a passable waste of potential.

Keaton’s monologue provided the perfect visual metaphor for what I’m talking about. Out there to, as it turns out, plug Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and make way for Mikey Day and slumming alum Andy Samberg’s costumed Beeetlejuices, Keaton emerges onstage bobbing and weaving, his constant, impatient movement while the obligatory bit plays out suggesting there’s plenty more going on inside his head. Keaton is a versatile guy, his comic and dramatic chops now tied in the public consciousness. But at heart, it’s memories of the comic Keaton that still spark the most potent memories and admiration. It’s the way of true comic movie stars—going dramatic might make them respectable, but true fans know it’s their comic spark that makes them extraordinary. SNL consistently makes Michael Keaton the comic actor feel ordinary.

The Best and the Rest

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The Best: I had to Google the lyrics to remind myself that Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” was a real song. My brain may have protectively stroked out that part of itself. But thank goodness Andrew Dismukes remembered that gleefully tone-deaf earworm of a white boy anthem to interracial love, as the sketch about an interracial couple vying for white parents’ Michael Keaton and Heidi Gardner’s approval gave Dismukes an opportunity to stake out a claim right in the heart of the episode for another of his straight-faced tours-de-weirdness.

The onscreen legend “Detroit, 1955” and the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? milieu clang with the promise of SNL “doing race,” which is rarely a cause for enthusiasm. (With rare exceptions, the term “tone-deaf” is going to come up in such instances.) But the sketch comes at its fertile premise from an unexpected (and, this being Dismukes, weird) angle, which is a much more ambitiously goofy strategy. When earnest son Dismukes promises that his new love song to his equally smitten intended (Ego Nwodim) will sway his protective, moderately racist parents (Kenan’s dad and Devon Walker’s brother are initially on board with the romance), we wait for the twist. I guessed in advance that he’d whip out something like “Ebony and Ivory,” and was right on the “tone-deaf” part at least, but “Hey, Soul Sister” is such an out-there cultural pull that it ramped the sketch up to loopy heights.

Plus, give it up to Dismukes—not only can he sing a creditable cover version of Train’s catchy ode to ethnic objectification as true love, he impressively maintains both the vocal and the oblivious sincerity to an exponentially profitable degree. Yes, this is the song where a white guy proves his interracial cred by crooning, “Watching you’s the only drug I need/So gangster, I’m so thug” and Dismukes winning over his reticent parents with it says a lot more than any more straightforward SNL race sketch has any right to. Kenan and Walker are immediately out, and so is Nwodim as Dismukes’ song goes on, leaving the white people to jam in solidarity over a white band’s fetishizing vision of loving Black people. Sly, sophisticated, and silly all at once is an impressive comedy hat trick.

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The Worst: Nothing truly wretched happened tonight, but the Uber game show sketch just sort of limped along. Ego Nwodim has some juice as the talkative, conspiracy-minded ride share driver who traps unsuspecting passengers Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman as captive participants in her Cash Cab-style quiz game. Putting a game show sketch on wheels doesn’t absolve SNL of going to that particular sketch template well once again though, and despite an energetic turn from Ego (her driver literally keeps turning all the way around, much to Yang’s horror), the joke about all hired drivers being babbling conspiracy kooks with no boundaries (“Lucky for me I don’t pick up on social clues,” Ego’s driver brushes off Yang’s objections) never really justifies all the effort.

Keaton turns up as Ego’s favorite guest expert, vaping in a long wig and agreeing that “they” have already picked “Kamala Cabello” over her man Trump for president, and that drivers licenses (like the media and the pope) are fake. (“You think Jesus had a driver’s license?,” Ego asks, fully facing the back seat.) It’s a caricature driven sketch without enough energy or imagination behind it.

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The Rest: Please Don’t Destroy refuted suspicions that the three-man performing team had been put out to pasture with their first video of Season 50. Sadly, Ben, Martin and John left their office. And they weren’t playing themselves. Neither has been a great sign for the trio in the past and that holds true in this so-so filmed sketch wherein novice skydivers Martin and John get increasingly freaked out by the accumulating ominous signs coming from their tandem jump instructors Ben and Keaton (and pilot Emil Wakim). PDD jumped into welcome SNL rotation on the back of the writer-performers’ self-lacerating conception of themselves as themselves—neophyte Saturday Night Live writers whose perennial bottom-rung backstage status was marked by manic absurdity as much as continual disrespect from hosts and fellow cast alike.

When they’ve tried to venture outside that comfort zone, however, things get ordinary awfully quickly. Here, the thrumming plane proves another dead end, as Martin and John’s straight man anxiety comes off as expected, with only the oddball warning signs coming from the flight crew offering snatches of fizzy inspiration. Keaton’s jump instructor just lost custody of his kids, Ben’s chipper instructor can’t stop musing that luck just isn’t on his side any more, and Wakim’s pilot is watching how-to YouTube videos on flying a plane. That sort of thing. The only jolt comes when the students’ reluctant pre-jump selfie reveals the ghostly visage of Ben’s dead grandfather lurking behind them (“He’s been dead for like 10 years,” Ben muses, unconcerned), with the final shock cut of a bloody mishap serving as punchline.

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I’m not an expert on licensing a property for a comedy sketch, but it’s odd that the Halloween sketch could name the horror franchise and have Mikey Day gad about in a replica Michael Myers mask but not spring for John Carpenter’s actual theme song. C’mon, Lorne, at least send Carpenter a check. Regardless, this is another sketch where Keaton’s energy just wasn’t there, or wasn’t channeled correctly. The gag got me to smile at first, as the big buildup to Myers’ murder scene on the set of the (as yet) fictitious Halloween Rising sees Day’s jump-suited Myers enter with all the menace of what director Andrew Dismukes calls “a Jojo Siwa backup dancer,” complete with hip-thrusts and sinuous body rolls aplenty.

The reveal that it’s movement coach Keaton’s doing doesn’t add much, and Keaton just doesn’t get a handle on what makes his Broadway chorus style teachings fail to translate to the slasher genre. Keaton’s big moment, when he demonstrates just how he wants this Michael Myers to bump and grind his way into dropping his trademark knife because “girl’s not worth it,” is especially listless. Where Day’s masked moves were precise and funnier for it, Keaton is hesitant and uncommitted, which lets all the air out of an already flabby enterprise.

Weekend Update Update

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With the election just 16 days and one episode away (we’re off next week), Jost and Che may be feeling a little welcome urgency. Enough at least to craft an extended riff contrasting the closing messaging styles of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris that belatedly pushes the stark differences voters face. Jost at one point promises that what he’s about to show are “100 percent real clips,” but viewers hardly need the assurance any more, as Donald Trump’s obvious mental decline as he makes a sweaty last push for those uncommitted racists has become so stark that even the frog-in-a-pot mainstream media is starting to finally call it out. (About six years late, but way to go, gang!)

There’s Trump calling his own voters “fat pigs” as a motivational voting pitch. Trump saying that serial rapist Harvey Weinstein got “schlonged.” (I’m with Jost in that I never want to hear that word again, in any context.) There was Trump telling his hand-picked, nodding-along interviewers that Abraham Lincoln was to blame for the Civil War for not “making a deal” about slavery instead of, you know, wiping that evil sh*t off America’s moral ledger. And there are the inevitable clips from that rally this week where Trump ditched the Q&A to call for the sound guy to play a 39-minute medley of his favorite songs while Trump, with vacant smile on his face, did that dance that looks like slow motion jazz hands in front of his confused minions. It’s unavoidable comedy bait for those with a nose for blood—and Colin Jost and Michael Che know a wounded whale when they spot one.

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As I’ve said, sometimes the best we get from Jost and Che is a smirky round of public service. Jokes about Elon Musk’s lawsuit-baiting conspiracy rants about the voting machine company that sued right-wing news hacks at Fox and Newsmax into at least temporary panics and abject, expensive apologies aren’t especially clever or pointed, but they exist… which is something?

It’s not fair, I suppose, to compare Jost and Che’s Update to, say, John Oliver or Stephen Colbert’s more impassioned takedowns of the current political nightmare—after all, Colbert and Oliver seem to actually care about the things they’re saying rather than trying to seem hip. Oh, wait, I just compared them. Oh well.

Jost and Che are more at home doing the non-political stuff in their amusing double’s act because they’re not required to seem like they give a crap. Jost can joke about peanut M&Ms being the most healthy Halloween candy (“with the tiny exception of the kids that die from touching them”) and Che can take shots at the Catholic church’s latest(?) molestation scandal (“Worth it,” is Che’s impression of priests responding to the Los Angeles diocese paying $880 million to victims of sex abuse by clergy) with the confident air of a couple of comics freed from navigating SNL‘s perennially inoffensive political comedy philosophy.

I like Jost and Che most in that jokey loose vein, largely because they’re not actively annoying me with their glib approach to thorny political issues they clearly aren’t as interested in. Che has taken to excusing hacky jokes with “It’s the 90’s, Colin,” which is about as good an exit from a dead punchline as it gets. And Jost weathers every in-joke about him being a smug, entitled secret bigot like a guy who knows a lucrative schtick when he’s presented with one. (A recent story about a candle company’s weirdly KKK-looking label sees Che unveil their new, masks-off design, which is just a collage of Jost’s smiling face.)

Maybe it’s because I write about political comedians literally every day, or perhaps it’s due to me having a working sense of impending peril, but as the big national IQ and morality test steamrolls ever closer, I find my patience with Saturday Night Live‘s business-as-usual “good enough” satire wearing thinner. If there were ever a time for Jost, Che, and the show in general to throw over its veneer of not caring too much in favor of some scorched earth punk bottle-tossing, it’s now. As it stands, it’s unlikely anybody’s going to make a worshipful movie about this era of SNL as a revolutionary force in American comedy 50 years from now.

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Sarah Sherman did her thing, mocking the recent, more “inclusive” Victoria’s Secret fashion show while saying as much stuff as possible to gross favorite target Colin Jost the hell out. Cue the happy Sherman extolling the absent lingerie stylings of back-acne, infected navel rings, “Pangea nipples,” and “a happy trail that wraps all the way around their back like a gorilla.” Watching the erstwhile Sarah Squirm shoehorn her provocatively gross pre-SNL comic persona into SNL‘s only moderately gross comic standards makes for odd viewing.

Sherman’s clearly having a ball—making Jost, well, squirm with graphic descriptions of bodily functions is a rewarding schtick for both of them. (“I’ll make new holes!,” Sherman shouts, beseeching the lingerie line’s decision makers for a shot.) More and more it seems like Sherman is contentedly slotting into the show’s insatiable need for wife and girlfriend roles, so here’s to her continuing to be more like herself on Update.

Recurring Sketch Report

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When the first sketch out of the gate is a repeater, it’s generally a warning sign. The home shopping sketch is all embroidery on a premise, and the premise’s surprise was played out the first time, so, yeah, not auspicious.

Here, Keaton, a cookie mogul hawking his Halloween zombie eyeball treat on Mikey Day and Heidi Gardner’s show, unveils a cookie that looks like a boob. Now, pushing Standards and Practices buttons is an SNL tradition as old as time (Saturday Night Live being as old as time and all), and there’s still a cheeky buzz to that. Even if 50 years worth of broadening permissiveness have made the sight of Michael Keaton visibly tweaking a cookie’s obvious and anatomically accurate nipple a lot less transgressive. (If you didn’t anticipate that Keaton would eventually whip out a second cookie to hold in front of his chest, you’re living in a wonderful, more innocent world.)

Still, the sketch got the audience squeals of laughter it was going for, while Gardner and Day (fulfilling his signature role on the show) blurt out objections to how outrageous everything is and Keaton’s baker elaborates on the gag by assuring everyone that he only uses natural ingredients (“People think they’re fake but they’re not”) while demonstrating how squeezable his confections are. The escalation where Keaton squirts white frosting over his boob-cookies while Day calls for some pixilation is at least this bit taken to a very specific extreme. And I did appreciate the call-ins from prospective buyers Kenan and Michael Longfellow, with the former assuming the treat is “a white woman’s t—” before being cut off and the latter asking earnestly if they come in other ethnicities.

Some may imagine that this genre of sketch getting its own heading indicates that I’m anti-recurring sketch, which isn’t true. I’d watch Stefon until he was handing out wheelchair-accessible Manhattan night spots, and since Samberg is in the house this season, I’m actively lobbying for another “Get in the Cage.” But it’s been a long while since a would-be recurring favorite truly earned its place in the pantheon. Sketches like this feel like the show demanding viewers agree that a sketch is much more hilarious and enduring than it is.

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Look, I’m not an SNL psychic. I don’t claim that power. But when the TikTok filmed piece first surfaced a few years ago, I (vainly, as it turns out) tried to pump the brakes on what I assumed would be SNL‘s recurring pitch to the youth of today. It’s not that I objected to the sketch’s quick-hit gags purportedly pulled from the never-ending stream of TikTok content as such. It’s more that I could see where this would become a thing, and couching a repository for hit-or-miss jokes nobody has managed to expand as an actual sketch was less energizing than enervating.

The gags are—wait for it—hit-or-miss this time around. A gamer blows up his basement with fireworks, only to later show up interviewing Donald Trump on his inevitable podcast. A content creator films himself annoying political candidates (James Austin Johnson’s Trump and Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris, deployed to little effect). A militant Black man rails against dating white women, only to get caught later in his white girlfriend’s fitness video. Dana Carvey’s Joe Biden acts old and out of touch—and also gets in on the fitness video craze. Mikey Day’s dancing weatherman can’t pause his gimmick even when issuing a shelter in place order. You get the drift.

There are some flashes. A lady played by Ego Nwodim complains about a restaurant chain while citing their “placebo cheese sticks,” a line so inexplicable as to provoke wonder. Heidi Gardner’s “tradwife” eventually shows similarly subservient mothers-of-10 how to mash their law degrees into drawing paper for their brood. And the wraparound shows that the scrolling phone user has missed the birth of his child, which counts as the sketch’s nod to cultural satire. Whenever Saturday Night Live tries to tap into “the youth,” the results can be awfully square coming from a 50-year-old show headed by an 80-year-old arbiter of what’s funny. This sketch at least suggests there are writers under 30, but that doesn’t make me long for more. (That said, I am over 50.)

Political Comedy Report

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Well at least it wasn’t a game show.

The politics cold open brought back Alec Baldwin—although not as Donald Trump, so you can let out that breath. Donning nearly as much makeup as he wore in his Trump time, Baldwin was Fox News’ Bret Baier as SNL reenacted Kamala Harris’ appearance in the “lion’s den” that is the TV propaganda arm of a right-wing Australian megalomaniac’s scheme to make your parents into pale, fearful shadows of the people you once admired.

On the ringer front, I’ve thrown up my hands at this point in Season 50. Sure, bring back Baldwin, why not. I imagine the shuffling feet and resigned sighs every time Lorne Michaels announces which one of his famous pals will steal a plum role from the show’s actual cast, the unspoken phrase, “Just be grateful I let you on the air at all” hanging in the air of the Monday pitch meeting. Big stars mean more morning-after clicks, so deal with it, overpopulated cast already straining to get on the show. In the monologue, Keaton asked why Andy Samberg wasn’t playing Doug Emhoff, with Samberg replying, “The writers couldn’t jam him in this week, so here we find ourselves,” which just about sums things up.

Back to the cold open, the interview itself provided more than enough surface themes to build a sketch upon. Baier wouldn’t let Harris finish a sentence all night. Baier—Fox’s “real news guy”—tried to bait Harris into her own “basket of deplorables” sound bite, which Harris cannily avoided. Baier played an out-of-context clip to make it look like Fox’s favorite candidate didn’t call for a military crackdown on Harris voters. (Baier has since tried to claim that playing the wrong clip was just a mistake, which is so transparent a lie that he should work at Fox News. Oh, wait.)

Within that framework of plucking the easiest-to-reach fruit, there were a few glimmers of effort. Calling Baier’s immobile visage “a businessman in Minecraft” is easy, but amusing. Amidst all the dissatisfaction with his Trump, Baldwin still proves his TV comedy chops, here delivering Baier’s rat-a-tat would-be “gotcha” questions in pleasing rhythm with the always nimble Maya. (“May I please finish?” “I’m asking you to.” “Well then you have to listen.” “Well I can’t because I’m talking.”) The cutaways to James Austin Johnson’s Trump give JAJ his moments, with his Trump promising, “I would never threaten anything except perhaps violence” when not going off on one of his totally-not-sundowning-with-alarming-speed rants. Threats of fascism to Al Pacino to Covid being a hoax to kids coming home from school a different gender to his pitch for America as broken hellscape only he can fix is, in Johnson’s delivery, chillingly funny. (It’s be unfair for Johnson’s Trump to babble that kids are “going to Zoltars and they’re coming back Big” if the GOP candidate for president weren’t incessantly claiming that Democrats want to ban windows and marveling publicly about the size of his pro golfer friend’s dicks, but here we are.)

No room for Jim Gaffigan’s Tim Walz this week (Gaffigan having Thursday mocked the actual Trump to his scowling kisser at a New York Catholic event), but Dana Carvey’s going to get his, as his Joe Biden was selectively edited by Baier to make it look like he was referring to Harris as the dangerous menace about to destroy Florida with hurricane-force winds. I was going to give the sketch credit for not just settling for “Joe Biden sure is old” as a premise before Carvey ranted about the new Joker movie with signature self-indulgent gibberish.

I get that Saturday Night Live is in a pickle with these cold opens. Nobody there really seems to enjoy writing them, the public has been conditioned by [checks calendar] a million years of Donald Trump jokes to expect them, and the results are inevitably a mushy dish of regurgitated topicality with the occasional dash of boldness. Baldwin’s Baier recoiling like Dracula whenever Maya’s Harris mentions anything related to women’s anatomy or abortion is a potently funny stab at the heart of Republicans’ growingly public “Eww, lady stuff” misogyny. And sometimes just having a master impressionist like Johnson play back Trump’s jaw-dropping idiocy in full makeup is enough—Trump claiming “no one died except the few that did” is merely a reworking of something even more egregious that the actual Trump said at his doomed-from-the-jump Univision town hall, but it still gets the job done.

Not Ready for Prime Time Power Rankings

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In the featured player only-one-at-a-time steeplechase, it was Emil Wakim’s turn, as his new guy got a role in the Please Don’t Destroy film and took his place at the Update desk, doing a few minutes of his stand-up act. It’s a time-honored tradition to give featured comics a mini-showcase as audience barometer, and Wakim did fine. As usual, the Jost-announced proposed topic (young voters) bears little resemblance to Wakim’s stand-up bit about being a Christian Arab and his immigrant father’s growing assimilationist conservatism now that he’s in America.

Wakim is engaging enough, and his lived-in observations about his unsettled position in white America’s threat level hierarchy has some bite to it. Taking to task lecturing critics of America’s indeed questionable military support of Israel’s attacks on Gaza for pretending that they care about women and gay people leads to some canny material about how nobody has time to think much about sexuality when bombs are falling on your head is a nifty little piece of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Wakim even gets in on the ever-reliable trope of making fun of Jost, seemingly improvising his “Colin wrote that joke for me” after a dead spot where he imitates stereotypical Arab ululations.

Ashley Padilla had her moment, too, appearing opposite Keaton as the wife increasingly unimpressed by her husband’s ruminations about a long-lost girlfriend while vibing with the young woman making their restaurant table-side guac. Padilla didn’t get all that much to do but glower and act confused, but it’s the sort of front-and-center character role that bodes well for someone looking to make the main cast move. (Jane Wickline had a blink-and-miss-her bit in the TikTok sketch, her own recent Update showcase seeing her moved all the way to the back of the line.)

The big winner this week was Dismukes, mainly on the back of that “Hey, Soul Sister” sketch. It takes a special kind of confidence to sing that well a song that terrible for such an extended period, and Dismukes has the invaluable quality of committing to the bit. I don’t know if he wrote the sketch, but launching a seemingly straightforward bit confidently at an unexpected and sustained flight path is a Dismukes staple, so I’m assuming he at least had a hand in it.

Sarah Sherman got her own Update piece, along with sizable roles in a couple of other sketches, while Ego managed to squeeze into the celebrity-packed cold open and made a big play for a franchise character with the Uber sketch. I don’t imagine a franchise is forthcoming, but that’s still a win as far as airtime goes.

The mostly-missing: Marcello donned a wig and tattoos to ask a question in the cold open; Michael Longfellow was an offscreen voice and a series of TikTok photos. (They did have a solid cut for time Update piece, so… consolation prize?)

Dispatches From 10-To-Oneland

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The restaurant sketch was pretty much the model of a 10-to-one sketch: light on belly laughs and centered on a singular, writerly idea. Here, Keaton’s husband takes a shine to the young woman making guacamole at the table he’s sharing with wife Ashley Padilla and others, mainly because of an ineffable resemblance to a young lover named Beth he knew when he was a long-ago actor in summer stock.

It’s here, buried in the rundown, that Keaton feels finally comfortable to act, his hubby—comically oblivious to his long-married spouse’s increasing disapproval—musing over how server Heidi Gardner’s manner as she mushes those avocados recalls the one who got away. “Best damn laugh in the world, final answer,” in Keaton’s delivery, suggests a lived-in confidence his other performances tonight lacked.

Padilla matches Keaton with the little she has here to do as her formerly complacent wife lets slip some of the resentments stemming from Keaton’s obviously deep-seated dissatisfaction. After Gardner, as taken with Keaton’s self-obsessed dreaminess as he is with hers, tells Keaton he should write, his dismissive “She confines me” is met with Padilla’s irritated, “No, I say you need income.” A sketch is fleeting, and the ability to pack in a character’s entire self into just a few lines is a trick not many actors can pull off, no matter how detailed the writing. Keaton’s tale of how Beth once bought all the unsold tickets to his Cyrano and gave them to the homeless concludes with Keaton’s offhand revelation that it was the most beautiful gesture anyone ever made—at least until that old lady got stabbed after the show. In that one anecdote, Keaton spins the sketch as written around his finger like one of the Globetrotters, and it’s about as entertaining.

Stray Observations

So we can all come together on the idea that there’s no better palate cleaner for comedy sketches than intermittent political ads where racist white people screech about immigrants, right?

No RIP title card tonight! Nobody died!

The Wikipedia summary of “Hey, Soul Sister”‘s negative reviews at the time are even funnier than tonight’s sketch.

That’s the same song where singer Pat Monahan slips in a passing reference to his “untrimmed chest.” Yup, my brain definitely memory-holed this one for my own safety.

In the goodnights, host Keaton and musical guest Billie Eilish showed of their “Vote” t-shirts, which is about as bold a political statement as SNL is up to these days. (Although with the GOP’s full-on voter suppression policy, the gesture is as close to a partisan call to battle as anything.)

“I brought down the Sinaloa cartel. I brought down the Guadalajara cartel. If I was in Breaking Bad it would have ended in three episodes.”

Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph)

“‘We’re a failing country, America’s a terrible place full of jerks and idiots but we love it, it’s really bad.'”

Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson)

“At my rallies, there’s Beyoncé and joy and bathrooms. At his rallies, he won’t pay for the buses, and hundreds of elderly people gotta walk back to their cars six miles through the desert like it’s an Old Testament Fyre Festival.”

kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph)

“Well it was settled until you showed up.”

colin jost on TruMP’S complaint that Lincoln didn’t “settle” the civil war

“Kamala Harris responded to Trump calling January 6 “a day of love,” saying that he is gaslighting us. But Kamala, you’re just imagining things, baby.”

michael che

“Tom Brady has offcially become a part owner of the Los Angeles Raiders, although Brady himself is still fully owned by the Giants.”

colin jost

“Christian Arabs, we’re kind of like Black dudes with anime backpacks. Racist guys are like, ‘I don’t love it but I’m not gonna cross the street any more.'”

emil Wakim

Episode Grade: C-Plus.

Next week: Rest up people, and get ready for the pre-election John Mulaney and Chappell Roan show on November 2.

SNL Continues Its Tradition of Squandering Michael Keaton - LateNighter (2024)
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