42x19 Chris Pine with LCD Soundsystem

[7.6/10] I’ve spent the past few months watching the original Star Trek series off and on, which makes it mildly surreal to see Chris Pine do his thing up there – if you only catch him out of the corner of your eye and listen to his voice in the right intonation, for a split second, you think you’re seeing a young Shatner, and that’s before the episode busted out a Trek-related sketch. But it’s not just a look or a voice, it’s a sort of leading man actor willing to seem equal parts stuffy and silly vibe that he brings to the table, which made him a very nice choice to host. He committed to every part, whether he was playing the straight man or vital part of the goofiness.

And that was the common thread in this episode of SNL. With the political material mostly sidelined, the episode focused on a series of sketches where ridiculous things are happening and everyone is wide-eyed and ready for it, with hardly a moment of tongue-in-cheek irony to nudge the audience with. That tack mostly paid dividends, with one big noted continuing exception.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but the Good Neighbor guys (Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett) just never work for me as a team, and their fingerprints were all over the pre-taped segments this week. The “World Peace” Slavic pop song was a big bastion of weirdness in lieu of actual comedy which is pretty much their calling card. “The House” parody of Real World-style shows was fine at skewering the rhythms of reality television, but as usual, stretched the joke too far and repeated it over and over. And the “Handmaid’s Tale” parody had the germ of a good idea about men being oblivious to the challenges of women, but lost it in a sea of bad attempts at bad accents and dumb, obvious dialogue.

Still, apart from the Mooney-Bennett duo, the silliness was in full force and very funny. Chris Pine himself kicked that off nicely with a hilarious sketch about how people confuse all of the blockbuster protagonists who all have the same kind of matinee idol looks and all happen to be named Chris. It’s some nice self-deprecation and the song and its interruptions kept finding new wrinkles to the bit.

There was a lot of other good silliness as well. “Where in the World Is Kellyanne Conway” continued the show’s recent propensity to regurgitate 90s pop culture, but did so in such a pitch-perfect way (seriously, Sasheer Zamata’s impression of the chief was uncanny) and the sketch itself was so short and punchy that it really worked. The political cold open featuring weird sexual tension between the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe might have landed better with me if I watch the show, but the sketch got by on the oddness going on between the anchors’ and the other reporters’ confused reactions.

Speaking of things that would probably be funnier if I was more versed in the referenced show, much of the RuPaul’s Drag Race sketch was lost on me. Still, the notion of a bunch of man’s man car mechanics slowly but surely admitting they were all into a drag queen competition show, and then getting more and more into it was a good bit regardless. On top of that, seeing Chris Pine and Bobby Moynihan do their best lip sync battle was a comic treat that didn’t quite reach Farley/Swayze levels, but still soared with the inherent comedy of a buff guy and a pudgy guy getting their dance battle on.

“Weekend Update” was particularly sharp this week. Michael Che especially had some lines that made me gasp a little bit (his one-liner about it looking like Congressional Republicans were congratulating one another on “inventing sickle cell” was cold as ice but I appreciated the edginess of it). Leslie Jones did her usual Leslie Jones bit, and while her shtick has grown on me, the funniest part was still her interacting with Jost and his reactions rather than any of the mugging-filled story she was telling. But the award for the best performance of the night goes to Vanessa Bayer for her incredible Mushmouthed Meteorologist bit. The way that Bayer delivered heaping spoonfulls of word salad while perfectly capturing the tones of local weather reporters was just inspired. There’s not much more to the bit, but I still hope it sees a return before Bayer heads on to greener pastures.

That just leaves a trio of my favorite sketches of the night, each of whiched doubled down on the absurdity of the situation and made hay from it. The first was the “SWAT Recon” sketch where a pair of cops accidentally spy a couple of guys having a “cotton candy dance party” with the silliness escalating from there. What elevated the sketch is that rather than it just being a parade of randomness (though it was that too), there was the undercurrent of the cops wistfully thinking about what it was like when they could just “cut loose” like that which added an interesting dimension to the sketch. There’s a certain Space Pants/Pizza restaurant/Kevin Roberts/David Pumpkins quality that the show keeps going back to in these sketches, but what can I say, it’s working on me.

The other two sketches were equally ridiculous. One featured Aidy Bryant and Vanessa Bayer singing along to “That Boy Is Mine” as office executives fawning over employee Chris Pine. All three actors absolutely committed to the bit and sold the sketch with their physicality. And the other, “Couple Game Night” was a bit of a rehash of the “Debra’s Time” sketch Strong performed in a Christmas episode, but again, the specificity of the bit wins the day. Strong and Pine’s commitment to a Sondheim-aping psychodrama musical about Joe Frasier didn’t necessarily make me laugh out loud, but definitely made me smile, especially with the rest of the sketch participants’ reactions to the madness.

Overall, this was a nice break from the heavier-handed political humor that the show does well enough with, but which can still certainly take a week off for the show to deliver this sort of episode, one devoted solely to the goofiness of its humor and the gameness of its host.