41x14 Jonah Hill with Future

What can you do? Jonah Hill is affable enough; he's a comedian; he's done well on the show before. But this was mostly a dud, with a few bright spots here and there. I chalk it up mostly to weak writing in the sketches -- few of them had a decent premise to begin with, but Hill wasn't really upping the ante.

The highlights were at the beginning and the end. The political cold open was great, and now that the show has a pretty firm take on all of the major candidates, it's a reliable well to go to. Chris Christie as Trump's lackey was obvious but amusing, and it's the same story with Hillary's great "stuck in the middle with me" line. Taran Killam seems to be leaning more into physicality in his Ted Cruz impression which is good for a laugh, and the writing for Jason Sudekis's return as Mitt Romney was sharp.

Then, the final sketch of the night nearly lost me, but Hill had such a commitment to his odd supercharged caterer character on the phone with his friend, and the sketch upped the weird energy as it went on, to where it eventually won me over fair and square. It's never the kind of sketch that's going to go viral, but it has a lot of the casual strangeness and specificity of character that scratches my absurd comedy itch.

But man, the rest of the night was more or less a wasteland. The worst offenders were the Murder Mystery/Diarrhea sketch was a one-joke bit where the joke was dumb, and the Inside SoCal pretaped that goes back to the dull awkward comedy of the Good Neighbor guys that's just never done it for me.

The rest of the night's sketches were less noticeably awful, but still didn't offer much. Hill's exchange with Kyle Mooney during the monologue was kind of fun, but the segment as a whole didn't have much juice to it. The "Racists for Trump" sketch is falling into a predictable pattern for the show lately, where they do some political commentary that isn't especially clever from a comedic standpoint (though Killam's surprise Nazi armband was a clever reveal), but that gets attention because it's aimed at the right targets. Fond Du Lac action news was mostly an excuse for bad Wisconsin accents, where that was most of the joke.

There were a couple of better than average, if still middling offerings though. "The Champ" pretaped bit had a funny premise, but went on too long and kind of killed the energy of the sketch. And the student auction attended by Middle Eastern barons had a sufficiently weird flavor to it that made in interesting, despite the mild xenophobia on display.

And Weekend Update has solidified as a bright spot on the show. I never thought I'd enjoy OJ jokes this much in 2016, but here we are! The Girl You With You Hadn't Started a Conversation with at a Party is a reliably good bit, Vanessa Bayer interviewing a "110 year old woman" was some great cringe comedy, and giving Jay Pharoh time to run through his list of impressions was cheap but enjoyable.

In the final tally, there's a few bright spots here and there, but this was mostly a forgettable episode where even the best sketches were "pretty good" rather than true stand outs.