If Megan Thee Stallion can ride out a whirlwind few Hot Girl Summers, during which she ascended to superstardom, lost her mom, allegedly got shot by Tory Lanez (sparking endless trials both on Twitter and in a court of law), and endured a heavy conservative backlash to “WAP” — all while experiencing the same pandemic everyone else went through — then hosting Saturday Night Live should have been a breeze. However, barely 24 hours before airtime, armed gunmen reportedly broke into Megan’s house, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods. Not exactly the type of thing that puts a musician into the right frame of mind for being funny on live TV and for posterity. (Right after the news broke, she announced an imminent extended break.)
Somehow, though, without knowing any of the above, the only evidence to be found of any turmoil roiling through Megan’s mind during the episode was her tearing up while performing the deeply personal track “Anxiety.” (Which she crushed.) Elsewhere, she handled herself like a total pro, disappointing any haters hoping for an exhibition of embarrassment.
With her debut as both host and musical guest, Megan Thee Stallion joined the ranks of SNL double-duty luminaries such as Lizzo, Harry Styles, and, uh, Gary Busey. (1979 was, apparently, wild.) While her last appearance on SNL hinted at her depth, with a powerful performance dedicated to Breonna Taylor, this one marked her chance to give the fullest display yet of her comedy chops. Anyone who has parsed Megan’s lyrics or watched her videos can see that she is a funny person. (The director behind “Thot Shit” gives her full credit for that video’s humor.) The closest she’s come to a sketch show until now, though, has been teaching She-Hulk how to twerk in an episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law last month, and teaching Sarah Cooper how to twerk in Sarah Cooper’s Netflix special, which exists. (2020 was, apparently, wild.)
Sure enough, Megan also teaches some people to twerk in her SNL episode too, but in a far less gimmicky way. This time, the instruction is couched in a sketch about an unorthodox exercise class. (More on that later.) The writers did an excellent job constructing sketches around Megan’s personality and what people know about her, without making every moment a wink at the fans. Her first sketch, “Hot Girl Hospital,” for instance, perfectly sets the tone. It’s a bit weirder than the Megan-referencing title suggests — its premise only fully revealed at about the halfway point — and with charisma to spare. Megan flubs a line but doesn’t lose a step, and Ego Nwodim and Punkie Johnson seem extra energized by being peas in a pod with her.
A lot of what follows throughout the episode similarly rests on her shoulders, but as Megan has demonstrated over and over, her knees are strong as hell.
Jan 6th Final Hearing Cold Open
Where to even begin here? How about Sarah Sherman’s Chuck Schumer impression, which is somehow as endearing as it is brutal. She plays him like a guy you might not mind being briefly cornered by at a family function but who is wholly unsuited to a position of immense power. Pretty much everybody in this sketch, though, gets off some great jokes and performances at the expense of the January 6 committee, whose purpose may be noble but whose self-seriousness is excruciating to behold. As much as it mocks centrist Democrats for the West Wing fantasy of getting Donald Trump in a courtroom and asking him, “Who do you think you are, Mister,” the sketch also, of course, puts Trump on blast for being just gobsmackingly dead-to-rights guilty of what the hearing alleges he did. It’s a nine-minute tour de force, and SNL’s finest political cold open in ages.
We Got Brought
This woeful musical ode to being part of a lump sum of plus-ones should resonate with anyone who’s ever been forced by friends into making prolonged small talk with strangers. It captures with raw honesty the kinds of doomed conversational gambits one might come up with when there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. (“Did you know there’s only been 25 deaths at Disneyland since 1955?” asks Bowen Yang’s character, a line the self-styled Disney Gay likely wrote — and perhaps lived — himself.) This is why they invented staying home on a Saturday night: to avoid situations like these, and to catch sketches like this one as they air.
Girl Talk
Megan Thee Stallion projects poise as the guest in this talk-show sketch, but Ego Nwodim deserves a special shoutout for the subtle variations of inflection and micro-nuances of facial expressions she packs into every utterance of just the word, “Girl.” Incredible stuff.
Weekend Update: Debbie Hole and Stacy Bussy
In this sketch, which is based on a real person, Heidi Gardner and Chloe Fineman play two Southern religious ladies with filthy names who hate filthy things with great fervor. Specifically, they find the long-awaited Disney sequel, Hocus Pocus 2, has such satanic implications that watching it could open up a porthole to hell. Of course, in accordance with the bylaws of Chekhov’s Hellmouth, by the end of the bit, a demon has fully taken over Fineman’s Debbie Hole — and it’s amazing. Fineman first broke through on SNL in 2020 with her spot-on celebrity impersonations of everyone from Britney Spears to Nicole Kidman. She’s become so known for chameleon-like mimicry that she played the entire cast’s understudy in a memorable sketch from last season. Seeing how unhinged she gets here, however, in the throes of demonic possession, is a nice reminder of her incredible range beyond impressions, and her willingness to just go for it.
Please Don’t Destroy: Wellness
The PDD guys are back in the office this week, and chock-full of bad ideas as ever. In a likely unintentional echo of the mental-health message Megan Thee Stallion shared in her monologue, they are on a quest toward wellness. Rather than mock snake-oil trends in a satirical way, though, they just approach wellness in as backwards as possible. It just goes to show that sometimes the simplest premise works as well as the highest-concept ones.
Stray thoughts
• The website Megan mentions in her monologue, www.badbitcheshavebaddaystoo.com, is very much real — created by Megan as a buffet of resources for people who are going through it and might not otherwise think of looking for help.
• This season is now three for three with new cast members getting to do “Weekend Update” desk pieces. Now that Devon Walker mentions it, cat-caller dudes do seem to wear similar fits.
• Speaking of clothes, the New England Patriots, Slipknot, and Dunder Mifflin sweatshirts in the Women’s Charity sketch are a representative example of the three shades of the ex-boyfriend spectrum. Also, not to single out the guy in a sketch about women, but Kenan Thompson’s unexplained shift from singing “Hallelujah” to “Gangsta’s Paradise” (RIP Coolio!) cracked me up.
• Michael Che’s scathing joke about Nancy Pelosi’s stock options on Weekend Update only reiterates the subtext of the cold open — that SNL is not the bastion of resistance-lib comedy that many make it out to be. (I will keep banging this drum here all season.)
• The pacing is way too, shall we say, deliberate, in this Classroom sketch, which is a shame because the jokes get really funny toward the end.
• I would rather watch a feature-length documentary on how this Deer sketch made it past dress rehearsal than watch the sketch again.
• I kind of love that if you watch the episode in reverse, Heidi Garner’s arc is showing off her “deflated whoopee cushion” ass in the exercise class sketch and ending up with a Brazilian Butt Lift at the Hot Girl Hospital.
