[9.6/10] That Will Ferrell fellow is really good. He should consider being on SNL full time or something.
All joking aside, this was a real treat. Seeing Ferrell return to his old stomping grounds, reviving a few of his old favorites, but mostly just bringing his random, oddball energy back to the program paid off early and often. I don’t know if Ferrell brought his writers back with him or if the current staff just rose to the challenge of having a pro like him at their disposal, but this is far and away the highlight of the season so far.
The episode was fairly strong in its political material. The cold open with Ferrell as Bush had teeth to it. Not content to fall back on the “he’s just not bright” gags, the sketch had a point of view on the historical revisionism and rose-colored glasses of his administration in the midst of Trump’s. In the same way, the last sketch of the night where polite friends try to talk about the wave of sexual harassment scandals through unrelenting difficulty and awkwardness was such a well-observed skit that, like much of the night’s material, went sideways into lunacy and creativity, but never lost the plot.
The only semi-political sketch I didn’t really care for was the “Next for Men” sexual harassment deodorant ad. Unlike the other two political sketches, it didn’t have much of a point beyond “this thing is happening” and “what if we just threw it into an anti-persiperant ad. Still, the political material was generally good, even if Weekend Update was a bit shaky this week in terms of Che and Jost.
But the correspondent bits were great. Heidi Gardner as a teenage youtube star was a nicely weird, specific, and well-realized character who has distinctive characteristics and enough places to go to make the quick segments work. At the same time, I was thrilled to see Ferrell bring back his “Voice Immodulation Syndrome” guy. His description of making “sex noices” or “leaving his wife of 20 years” and awkward interactions with Jost and Che were pitch perfect.
That fit a lot of Ferrell’s sketches in the evening, which had silly premises but soared on the strength of Ferrell’s performances. In the “call sign” sketch, he turns a one-joke bit like a call sign referring to a clown’s genetalia into a consistently hilarious performance with how he underplays it. He and Kate McKinnon as a pair of old people physically incapable of reading copy for a pot pie commercial is a nice excuse for them to speak hilarious gibberish. And his monologue was tops, with Ferrell and co. riffing on the usual self-congratulatory SNL host songs with the zany left turn of Ferrell just having suffered a head injury.
It wasn’t a perfect evening, though. The Mooney/Bennett Big Brother-style reality show parody pre-taped sketch came back and continued its diminishing results. And the other reality show sketch, which saw Ferrell and Strong as a pair of regular folk who’d been changed by Hollywood relied a little too much on weirdness and in-your-face behavior as a substitute for good writing, but even there, the performances and reactions saved it by the end.
That just leaves another pair of loony sketches that featured Ferrell being Ferrell. One is him as an afterlife-denying flight attendant who ruins his co-workers’ well-rehearsed safety rap in an amusing fashion (bolstered by Leslie Jones buying it and Luke Null’s faux-reluctant beatboxing). The other felt like a classic 90s SNL sketch, where Ferrell’s character misunderstands the difference between Cracker Barrel and Crate & Barrel and has an over-the-top reaction to it, taking things comically too far with his co-workers.
The final sketch was a doozy, verging into some trangressive territory when a seemingly simple ad for a 1950s rock compilation gets cringey as the presenters slowly realize that the singer’s songs are all about inappropriately young women. That could be a lazy premise on its own, but instead, the sketch keeps finding new places to go and make the bit funny, from McKinnon’s increasingly disbelieving reaction to the songs, to Bennett’s reveal that the singer is his grandpa, to the twist that these were all actually recorded in the 1980s. It’s a great example of how having a dark premise doesn’t have to be an excuse for laziness and that more jokes and writing are needed to make it work.
Overall, this was a homerun, and a sign that with the right ringer, this cast and this era of the show is capable of doing outstanding work.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2018-01-29T21:13:17Z
[9.6/10] That Will Ferrell fellow is really good. He should consider being on SNL full time or something.
All joking aside, this was a real treat. Seeing Ferrell return to his old stomping grounds, reviving a few of his old favorites, but mostly just bringing his random, oddball energy back to the program paid off early and often. I don’t know if Ferrell brought his writers back with him or if the current staff just rose to the challenge of having a pro like him at their disposal, but this is far and away the highlight of the season so far.
The episode was fairly strong in its political material. The cold open with Ferrell as Bush had teeth to it. Not content to fall back on the “he’s just not bright” gags, the sketch had a point of view on the historical revisionism and rose-colored glasses of his administration in the midst of Trump’s. In the same way, the last sketch of the night where polite friends try to talk about the wave of sexual harassment scandals through unrelenting difficulty and awkwardness was such a well-observed skit that, like much of the night’s material, went sideways into lunacy and creativity, but never lost the plot.
The only semi-political sketch I didn’t really care for was the “Next for Men” sexual harassment deodorant ad. Unlike the other two political sketches, it didn’t have much of a point beyond “this thing is happening” and “what if we just threw it into an anti-persiperant ad. Still, the political material was generally good, even if Weekend Update was a bit shaky this week in terms of Che and Jost.
But the correspondent bits were great. Heidi Gardner as a teenage youtube star was a nicely weird, specific, and well-realized character who has distinctive characteristics and enough places to go to make the quick segments work. At the same time, I was thrilled to see Ferrell bring back his “Voice Immodulation Syndrome” guy. His description of making “sex noices” or “leaving his wife of 20 years” and awkward interactions with Jost and Che were pitch perfect.
That fit a lot of Ferrell’s sketches in the evening, which had silly premises but soared on the strength of Ferrell’s performances. In the “call sign” sketch, he turns a one-joke bit like a call sign referring to a clown’s genetalia into a consistently hilarious performance with how he underplays it. He and Kate McKinnon as a pair of old people physically incapable of reading copy for a pot pie commercial is a nice excuse for them to speak hilarious gibberish. And his monologue was tops, with Ferrell and co. riffing on the usual self-congratulatory SNL host songs with the zany left turn of Ferrell just having suffered a head injury.
It wasn’t a perfect evening, though. The Mooney/Bennett Big Brother-style reality show parody pre-taped sketch came back and continued its diminishing results. And the other reality show sketch, which saw Ferrell and Strong as a pair of regular folk who’d been changed by Hollywood relied a little too much on weirdness and in-your-face behavior as a substitute for good writing, but even there, the performances and reactions saved it by the end.
That just leaves another pair of loony sketches that featured Ferrell being Ferrell. One is him as an afterlife-denying flight attendant who ruins his co-workers’ well-rehearsed safety rap in an amusing fashion (bolstered by Leslie Jones buying it and Luke Null’s faux-reluctant beatboxing). The other felt like a classic 90s SNL sketch, where Ferrell’s character misunderstands the difference between Cracker Barrel and Crate & Barrel and has an over-the-top reaction to it, taking things comically too far with his co-workers.
The final sketch was a doozy, verging into some trangressive territory when a seemingly simple ad for a 1950s rock compilation gets cringey as the presenters slowly realize that the singer’s songs are all about inappropriately young women. That could be a lazy premise on its own, but instead, the sketch keeps finding new places to go and make the bit funny, from McKinnon’s increasingly disbelieving reaction to the songs, to Bennett’s reveal that the singer is his grandpa, to the twist that these were all actually recorded in the 1980s. It’s a great example of how having a dark premise doesn’t have to be an excuse for laziness and that more jokes and writing are needed to make it work.
Overall, this was a homerun, and a sign that with the right ringer, this cast and this era of the show is capable of doing outstanding work.