CREDIT: Will Heath/NBC

Jeffrey Malone watches every new episode of Saturday Night Live and then organizes the sketches into the following categories: “Love It” (potentially Best of the Season-worthy), “Keep It” (perfectly adequate), or “Leave It” (in need of a rewrite, to say the least). Then he concludes with assessments of the host and musical guest.

Love It

No “Love It” sketches this week, although there are some moments that I love.

Keep It

Air Traffic Control – “Difficult-to-understand air traffic controller” is a fruitful sketch comedy premise, and SNL pulled off perhaps the best example of it ever back in the nineties with the mumbling Suel Forrester, a.k.a. Chris Kattan’s best recurring character. This edition is pretty good, too, and a satisfying utilization of McAvoy’s natural accent. But it would have been even better if there were moments when we could actually understand the Scottish folks. The key to these types of scenes working is that the confused people are given just enough rope to think that they might be able to crack the code of the strange speakers. At least the random detail of the plane’s passengers being Kylie Jenner’s brand integration team (but not Kylie herself) is a nice touch.

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