43x13 Jessica Chastain and Troye Sivan

[9.1/10] That’s two outstanding episodes in a row for SNL, which is an encouraging sign after some real duds this year. Natalie Portman acquitted herself well, playing characters who were strong parts of sketches and not just being the straight man.

The political material was quite good this week. As usual, the opening Trump-adjacent sketch didn’t do much for me, as it hits a bunch of easy jokes, but the rest was pretty great. The parade of first ladies there to coach Melania had all kinds of fun moments, clever gags, and absurd stuff like Martha Washington hacking in through a window. And the Weekend Update commentary was well done too, with Che doing some funny voice work to drive his jokes home, and the two having some particularly good interplay.

It was a great week for the correspondent bits as well. Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon as a pair of French actresses on very different pages about #TimesUp brought the laughs from their disconnect and the specificity of the performances. Pete Davidson’s mini stand-up bit about his dockers ad and injured hand were very funny. And god help me,Kenan Thompson’s Willie character used to be kind of a chore, but I’ll cop to getting a kick out of how dark and absurd they’ve gotten with his segments.

Speaking of something that seemed ill-conceived but eventually got some good laughs out of me, there were also a pair of pretty loony sketch. One featured Beck Bennett as an alien whose butt was his face and whose face was his butt. I instantly rolled my eyes at it, but man, Beck committed to the bit and won me over with his performance, and they even found some actual layers to the joke, By the same token, the Nickelodeon Awards sketch featuring Portman’s character losing her voice seemed to be a cavalcade of easy “can’t hear you” gags, but the introduction of the vocalizer and Kate McKinnon’s Ellen impression took the sketch into funny and weird places.

And what would a return engagement from Natalie Portman be without a second helping of her rapper persona? The second Natalie rap doubled down on the Lonely Island original, with more hard-edged verses to contrast with Portman’s public image, and even some good Prequel humor. Her monologue was also good stuff, turning into both a riff on NBC's Olympic hype and a bit that found the humor in applying Olympic-style analysis to a monologue joke in a way that felt meta on multiple levels.

(Side note: I skipped the Stranger Things sketch because damnit, I’m going to get around to watching that show, and I’m an inveterate spoilerphobe. In its place, I watched the “Stepchildren Doll” sketch that was cut for time, and it was a cute spin on the “Wells for Boys” skit the show did in Emma Stone’s episode.)

There was also a bit of topicality in the Patriots vs. Eagles sketch that found a nice mix of football-based gags, the usual poking fun at regional stereotypes and pecodilios, and kept it fresh with the Revolutionary War conceit. It’s the sort of clever layering of humor that I appreciate from the show.

That just leaves the ten-to-one sketch featuring Aidy Bryant as a slightly-deranged catfisher who is, somehow, also a little inspirational in her lust for life (among other things) was amusing enough, if unlikely to be the show’s next break out character.

Overall, it was an episode full of great laughs, some superb lines, and a wide variety of types of humor. That’s what you hope for from a great SNL outing!