After its COVID sheltering from home and a summer hiatus, Saturday Night Live tried to tackle the impossible in Saturday’s season premiere. Blessings and fruit baskets to the writer’s room for the number of jokes they must have scrapped and rewritten with each of the past 48 hours’ ground-shifting news development. Our president is at Walter Reade; Alec Baldwin is back in Studio 8H. Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.
Also live: Jim Carrey as our new Joe Biden, a goofier, toothier, more electric Uncle Joe than Woody Harrelson or Jason Sudeikis before him. The promos featuring Carrey and Maya Rudolph as the baller grounding the ticket, Kamala Harris, were kinetic. Alas, the week’s constantly breaking news wound up rendering this golden pairing almost irrelevant.
The cold open tipped a serious hat to Donald Trump’s hospitalization, and acknowledged that any sketch focused on events that transpired Tuesday may as well have been set a century ago. As such, it feels unfair to judge a sketch in which Carrey’s Biden snapped at Baldwin’s Trump to just shut up, man. Yes, Kamala, America needs a WAP, a woman as a president. Yes, citizens, perhaps the only way to get through that merciless debate was to triple-check our extended family’s voter plans while breathing along to Harry Styles meditation cleansing tapes. Ah, the beginning of this week—the halcyon days when we lamented the amount of time remaining before the election, as opposed to obsessing over the possibility that the election might not even proceed while awaiting reliable (ha!) news of the president’s condition.
Host Chris Rock is forever a welcome presence, in both tense situations and ridiculous ones. But the power of his SNL monologue was undercut by the magnitude of his task: how to get laughs out of an absurdly chaotic, ever-changing moment. “President Trump is in the hospital from COVID, and I just want to say my heart goes out to COVID,” Rock said in his strongest line. He riffed about there being more rules to being on a game show than apparently are to being President, and the bonkers truth that one gets a guaranteed four years to do the most important job in the world badly. But for the most part, his words lacked sting or gravitas. It was too brutal a weekend for a comedian to kill—though damn, one hopes the blessed first responders who made up the studio audience had the fucking night of their lives.
What worked during SNL’s premiere? I’ll remember Rock quoting James Baldwin at the end of his monologue: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced.” My heart skipped at the sight of Kate McKinnon in RBG’s robe sitting in the audience, looking up to the rafters. And the sight of the cast gathered together on stage, masked and resolute, during the goodbyes was healing. “Wear a mask, wear a mask, be safe out there,” implored Rock.
There was some quality silly along the way, too. Chloe Fineman continues to be a master at sending up celebrity personae without being cruel. Case in point: her spoof of Drew Barrymore’s new talk show. (I couldn’t for the life of me tell you when or what network it plays on, but through some Russian interference osmosis, I’ve seen clips of every one of its guests.) “Watch as she connects to her virtual audience,” ribbed the sketch, taking a shot at Ellen Degeneres’s alleged coldness before comparing it Drew’s emotional clinginess. Fineman did triple duty, nailing not just Barrymore’s groovy simpering, but also the faux intimacy of recent guests Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. It was a hard night made more bearable with Fineman’s glazed-eye wonder that “brushing your teeth is a game changer!”
On Weekend Update, Michael Che spoke for every hard-nosed Facebook friend who’s having a hard time greeting this moment in time with gravity or affection. “There’s a lot funny about this,” he said of the president, who’s long downplayed the risk of COVID or dismissed it as a passing irritant. “Maybe not from a moral standpoint. But mathematically, if you were constructing a joke, this has all the ingredients you need.” Colin Jost tweaked Trump’s sentimental Walter Reade tweet, the one that ended with an unexpected “LOVE!!!”: “So it sounds like they’re cutting his hydroxychloroquine with a little bit of Molly,” he said. Jost went on to point out that if this situation were reversed—and Biden were in the hospital—Trump would be making “Sleepy Joe on a ventilator” jokes all night long. Take it home, Che: “I don’t want the president to die, obviously. Actually, I wish him a very lengthy recovery.”
The other truly memorable moment of the night was Megan Thee Stallion’s first performance, of her hit “Savage.” Oof, the lip synching was brutal; Megan seemed almost bored or drowsy up there, whether due to nerves or the lack of a full studio audience. Which was such a shame, as her set was otherwise a marvel. She took it to the hoop, calling out Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who handled the Breonna Taylor case. It was an audacious act of protest, one that may hopefully serve as an example for more of the SNL episodes being made at this unprecedentedly strange time: Let us boldly go forth this season, better matching artistry with message.
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