Oh my god, Saturday Night Live Season 46 is already complete?! It’s already late May 2021?! Okay then, I guess it’s time to let you know what I liked the most about the past year of Studio 8H’s offerings in various categories. If you want to know my absolute favorite hosts, musical guests, episodes, etc., then get with it and keep reading! The number of entrants varies by category, because that’s just what I felt like doing, lol.
(My favorite ketches get their own post, which can be found here.)
Most Valuable Cast Member
I don’t think I’ve ever picked Pete Davidson as the MVCM of a season, so I’m going to go ahead and do that now. Why not! After all, he appeared in several of my favorite sketches this year. Can you believe he just finished his seventh season?
Pete Davidson
Runners-Up:
Kenan Thompson
Kate McKinnon
What makes a good comedy sketch? Oh jeez, there are so many ways to answer that, but one thing’s for sure: we’d better be laughing! So with that in mind, I decided to discuss my favorite sketches of SNL Season 46 by describing how they made me LAUGH.
(As per usual, both sketches that aired live and cut-for-time sketches that were posted online were deemed eligible.)
15. New Choreographers: I laughed WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THAT I WAS IN THE PRESENCE OF GREATNESS because legends were talking to each other.
SNL: Lil Nas X, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Redd (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
You are now currently reading a review of the Saturday Night Live Season 46 finale – can you believe it? 7 months ago, could anyone have predicted that this episode would be hosted by Anya Taylor-Joy with musical guest Lil Nas X? Probably. Whether you predicted it or not, it happened.
The cold opening had an honest-to-goodness title displayed on the screen: “What I remember about this year” (Grade: 3.5/5 Remembrances of Things Past). As it opened with the longest-serving veteran cast members on the stage, I had to wonder if this would be their last episode (and I doubt I was the only one who thought that). That matter was never directly addressed, though. Instead, everyone just mentioned unusual things that happened during the past several months … and they also stretched the truth a little bit. SNL Life sometimes truly is stranger than SNL Fiction!
SNL: Olivia Rodrigo, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate McKinnon (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
The penultimate episode of Saturday Night Live Season 46 has been hosted by Keegan-Michael Key! Fun fact about Keegan: he used to be one of the two stars of his own eponymous sketch show. But that show ended its run nearly six years ago. What do you think about that! The musical guest is Olivia Rodrigo, a teenager who writes songs.
For sustenance, I had a typical Sunday breakfast: two fried eggs, toast with strawberry jelly, and orange peach mango juice. Was the fruit-based-products-to-eggs ratio too high? #BreakfastThoughts
I didn’t forget to review the sketches! (Not that you thought I did, lol.) We start off with a Message from Dr. Fauci (Grade: 3/5 Faucis) and a bunch of other folks who are supposedly doctors, but they’re REALLY wacky by doctor standards. Supposedly they were acting out scenarios to help people figure out if and when they should still wear face coverings, but instead it was all just an excuse to act out shenanigans.
SNL: Miley Cyrus, Elon Musk, Cecily Strong (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
Happy Mother’s Day! How come Richard Roundtree has never hosted SNL? Instead, this Mother’s Day Weekend, the host is Business Man Elon Musk, whose booking reminds me of that of Steve Forbes (i.e., Teve Torbes) in 1996. Musk is famously Not-A-Comedian, but can he successfully appear in funny comedy sketches? I have decided to find out. Miley Cyrus is the musical guest. She likes to appear on this show frequently!
I received my second COVID vaccination dose approximately 16 hours before I began watching this episode. I think the shot made me especially hungry, so it helped that I had a hearty breakfast that included some combination of eggs, strawberries, crumbs, and other nutrient-packed selections.
Now onto the part of the review where I talk about the sketches! The Cold Opening (Grade: 3.5/5 Mothers) features Miley Cyrus singing a song and the cast members bantering with their moms. It all culminates with a quite-possibly-record-breaking 36 people declaring, “LFNY,ISN!” at the same time.
Fun fact: I enjoy watching Carey Mulligan acting in the movies1 Does that mean I’ll also enjoy watching her host Saturday Night Live for the first time? If you read this review, you just might find out! The musical guest is Kid Cudi, who I mostly know from his one-season stint as bandleader on Comedy Bang! Bang!, though I did also know him before that, and now I’ll know him even more after this.
I got my first COVID vaccine dose approximately 10 hours before this episode started airing. I’ve had some soreness around the injection site, but that didn’t really affect my viewing experience in any significant way.
The cold opening goes the local news route by putting an Eye on Minnesota (Grade: 4/5 Eyes) and the Derek Chauvin trial, and quite frankly, everyone involved does a fine job being goofy in the midst of such a distressing topic.
SNL: St. Vincent, Daniel Kaluuya, Aidy Bryant (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
Holy moly, this is a review of an SNL episode hosted by Daniel Kaluuya with musical guest St. Vincent! Kaluuya was great in Get Out, and he’s great in everything else I’ve seen him in as well, and while most of those credits aren’t terribly similar to sketch comedy, I had a feeling he had it in him to deliver the funny in front of a live audience. And as for Ms. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, she always brings it without fail.
So this is an episode airing on Easter Weekend, I ran 8 miles on Saturday morning, the spring sun’s blazing in the mid-Atlantic, and I’m still freaking out over that Final Four buzzer-beater. This is all to say, a bunch of dopamine is swirling around my system, which is a perfect formula for me to laugh aplenty. Did the sketches also give me reasons to laugh? Let’s find out!
First off, we’ll check in with Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman’s impression version) with another edition of Oops, You Did It Again (Grade: 3/5 Easter Bunnies). A few guests stop by, including Pete Davidson as Congressman Matt Gaetz, who looks just like his Andrew Cuomo impression except for a more colorful tie.
SNL: Jack Harlow, Maya Rudolph, Chris Redd (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
When Maya Rudolph was announced as the host of the March 27, 2021 episode of Saturday Night Live, I mentioned to my dad that this was only her second time returning to host. Then I guessed that in addition to all that, she’s also probably made approximately another dozen guest appearances. But it turned out the actual total is about double that! Musical guest Jack Harlow, meanwhile, is here for the first time. As for me and the number of times I’ve watched this show, that’s gotta be in the thousands.
If someone told you that an SNL episode would start with a pretend game show, would you believe it? Well, you’d better believe it, because that’s exactly what happened in this episode! It’s called Snatched, Vaxed, or Waxed (Grade: 2.5/5 Marches), and I laughed at the name “Cece Vuvuzela.”
SNL: Bowen Yang, Nick Jonas, Ego Nwodim (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
Hellooooooooooooooooooooooo to my readers! I am about to review the February 27, 2021 episode of Saturday Night Live, which featured Nick Jonas as host and musical guest. He’s previously appeared before as musical guest once on his own and twice with his brothers, but this time, it’s something different, and my review should reflect that.
I had eggs and some side dishes for breakfast Sunday morning.
The opening sketch is A Message From Dr. Fauci (Grade: Pfizer Visor Consolation Prize), which promptly turns into a game show entitled “So You Think You Can Get the Vaccine,” with a trio of current American governors serving as the judges. I was most amused by Pete’s Andrew Cuomo inexplicably mentioning Five Guys.
SNL: Bad Bunny, Regé-Jean Page, Melissa Villaseñor (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)
Here’s something I’ve never done before: written a review of an SNL episode hosted by Regé-Jean Page with musical guest Bad Bunny. (How Bad is he?!) Here’s to new experiences!
I got up early on Sunday morning, enjoyed some heart-shaped Honey Nut Cheerios, visited the bathroom a few times, and got to watching the comedy.
If the real Britney Spears were to host a talk show, do you think it would go a little something like Oops, You Did It Again (Grade: “Oops”? Or Maybe It Was on Purpose?). For the purposes of the people who wrote this week’s cold opening, the answer is “Yes.” Much of this sketch was more stuck in the muckety-muck than it was ha-ha, but Pete Davidson as Andrew Cuomo was just plain-old counterintuitively inspired.
