41x08 Chris Hemsworth with Chance the Rapper

I was ready to call this an above average episode for a little while there. Sure, some of the gags were easy, but Hemsworth was game to make fun of himself a bit and seemed to throw himself into the roles. But then the show just sort of died about 2/3 of the way in. It's like they just exhausted themselves and crapped out after a while.

The highlights were two sketches that played off of Hemsworth's public persona. The first was the pre-taped "Don't Have Time To Bleed" sketch. It had such a neat energy, where it was mostly playing the action movie tropes straight, to an absurd degree, in the midst of taking the bleeding out wrinkle to ridiculous extremes. Fun high concept stuff. The other was the "Hemsworth Pretends to be a Woman Named Claire" sketch. This one had less to do with Hemsworth, though he seemed to be having fun with the character, but more from the performances from the other ladies in the cast and their dialogue. The line "But Claire's been our friend for years, no wait, come to think of it, I've never met her before today" had me cracking up, both from the writing and Kate McKinnon's delivery. Cecily Strong was also a highlight in the sketch.

The other big highlight was, of course, Will Ferrel reprising his George W. Bush character. It was basically a stand up bit, but Ferrell has such a solid take on the character and on his comedic voice that it still totally worked from within the Bush persona.

As for the lowlights, the "Debra's time" sketch didn't have much of a hook, even if it's in the randomness humor that's often my wheelhouse. If anything, it felt like too specific a parody to really work. Plus the John Radinsky sketch featuring him as the pirate who makes the ship fun just completely died on the vine. There was next to no audience reaction, and it's not hard to see why -- the whole character was just generic wacky mannerism and dead on arrival. Same goes for the Tisch School strippers in another sketch that ran way too long. And then they just reran Aron's List, which is a funny fake ad, but not enough to run it twice.

And there was a fair bit of middling stuff too. The roughousing-based monologue was pretty easy gags without much creativity, as was the Star Wars Toy Nerd fake ad. The "Fox News Interviews Republican Candidates about Trump" sketch was fine, but not particularly incisive or clever. And the Disney Channel Twins sketch, which I believe they did the last time Hemsworth hosted as well, had some good chuckles and took a few amusing left turns into weirdness, but went on a little long.

Lastly, Weekend Update continues to improve. Jost and Che's rapport is growing (Che knocking Jost's papers in the monologue was the best part of it), and they're finding their roles at the desk, even if some of Che's extended commentary goes on a bit long. Leslie Jones's thinly-veiled stand up bits don't really do much for me, but McKinnon as Angela Merkel is always a hoot. Like Ferrell, she finds great characters that are not so much impressions of public figures as their are weirdness-infused caricatures that make them separate and apart from the real life people being parodied.

All-in-all it was an amiable enough episode that fell of a cliff after a while. Oh, and I only listened to Chance the Rapper's first song, which wasn't really my cup of tea, but was eminently listenable.