‘SNL’ Cast Evaluation: Vanessa Bayer Infuses All Of Her Characters With A Zestful Innocence

The recent Tina Fey/Amy Poehler-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live featured a charming moment at the end. As the whole cast took the stage for a Bruce Springsteen-led rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” Paul McCartney turned around and high-fived cast member Vanessa Bayer.

Bayer reacted as if the real Santa had brought her Paul himself as a gift. Smiling her wide, infectious smile, Bayer radiated a level of happiness one rarely sees anywhere, much less within the end credits of a weekly comedy show. While the others were thrilled at the special moment as well, Bayer’s reaction was instructive, as it displayed much about the nature of her characters.

There is something of a mainstream innocence to Bayer, a sense of conventional joy and warmth – as well as a seeming lack of a dark side – that makes it easy for her to slip into either a comforting mom or a naive child persona.

After joining the cast in 2010, it seemed for a time that Bayer would mostly be shoehorned into child and middle-age suburbanite roles. In time, though, layers would unfold. While Bayer’s inherent goodness defines her SNL persona, she refuses to let it limit her.

Here are some of Bayer’s pivotal SNL creations.

MILEY CYRUS

Debuting on Bayer’s second episode as a castmember back in 2010, Bayer’s Cyrus initially took on the old Miley – the sweet, innocent little girl who hadn’t yet discovered the pleasures of public nudity and weed.

Her Cyrus is a bit daft and predictably self-possessed, telling jokes that don’t make sense and believing herself to be a true “actor,” but the character is powered by exuberance, not arrogance. Bayer employs the force of youthful curiosity, of a successful teenager’s delight at the discovery of the world at their fingertips, and creates a lovable character that transcends ego.

It’s notable that in her second Miley sketch, she did a bit about how she’s “sexy” now. Showing stills of the new, sexy Miley, the joke was that, as she posed with her mouth wide open in a huge laugh, or holding up rabbit ears behind a male model, she’s been deemed “sexy” before her time, while her sensibility was still stuck in childhood. While viewable as a commentary on Cyrus, it also speaks to the perception of Bayer’s expertise at the time – portraying the innocence hidden behind Cyrus’ wild child persona.

Even as Cyrus began exhibiting rebellious teen behaviors, Bayer chose to emphasize her youth, as when she showed a photo of the “harder” side of her, the drug-using Miley, that resembled her exactly as she was before. When she finally confronted Cyrus’ marijuana smoking in her second season, it was playful, bouncing off stoner stereotypes such as Cyrus giggling as she munched Doritos, or making her father nervous by hanging out with hippies. (The video parody “Dancin’ w Dogs” interestingly predicted her psychedelic experiments with the Flaming Lips a few years later.)

LAURA PARSONS

In one sense, Laura Parsons was an inverted Miley Cyrus, a genuinely innocent little girl with a proclivity for acting out adult situations. Her first time out with Parsons in 2010, Bayer showed a finely-tuned sense of the complexities of maturity, as she and Scarlett Johansson portrayed two child actresses performing the “I can’t quit you” scene from Brokeback Mountain.

Three years later, Bayer turned subtext into text, as 13-year-old Parsons returned in a fake ad for the Spotlight Acting Camp for Serious Kids. Here, Bayer portrayed how kids (or bad actors of all ages) overcompensate for lack of experience or know-how with mugging and over-enunciation, all nasal delivery, flailing arms, and inappropriate cuteness.

This season, Parsons was brought onto Weekend Update to apply her adorable musical theater cadence to current events, and lend her sassy theater-kid delivery to punchlines like “Nazi Germany” and “AIDS.” Leave it to Bayer to make the dire state of our world more adorable than ever.

FORMER PORN STAR BRECKIE

If Miley Cyrus and Laura Parsons showed Bayer’s facility for youthful innocence, Breckie showed that Bayer could be more. (It’s worth noting that Bayer’s Cyrus sketches almost always occupied the first post-monologue slot. The former porn stars, on the other hand, came to dominate the famed 10 To 1 slot of the show, where things often get really weird.)

Bayer and Cecily Strong’s former porn stars are dense, blank, and faux sexy, women without a hint of sense or decorum doing their best to look exotic. Bayer manages this with ease, while also conveying a brilliant side-feature – an even subtler take than with Parsons on a non-actor trying to act, this time displaying the awkward facial contortions that come when untalented laypeople attempt actorly listening. Breckie comes to life just in time to speak her lines, but in between, we see her trying to stay focused on just being – stroking her hair, bulging out her eyes while trying to look like she’s listening, or licking her lips in a move that starts as sexy, but subtly shifts to a nervous affectation.

JACOB THE BAR MITZVAH BOY

While Miley Cyrus and Laura Parsons were confident takes on childhood, combining a youthful naivety with a desire for worldliness, podiatrist’s son Jacob is innocence personified, all nerves and fears, and still enamored with the sorts of cheesy jokes beloved only by children and the terminally unhip. Where Bayer excels with Jacob is in doubling down on the trials of youth. Jacob is often too nervous to respond when an adult talks to him, and doubly so for women, but still betrays an inherent joy buried deep within the nerves. Bayer’s portrayal of Jacob is so specific, so relatable as the young boy fighting his neurosis at a time when maturity is supposed to start kicking in, that the gender-bending is never questioned. Whatever their differences in real life, it’s clear that Bayer understands Jacob, and creates a character in him that tends toward love, not mockery.

ELF/MOLL

Even on the rare occasions when Bayer lets loose her dark side, it comes with smiles, as we saw in two sketches this season. One, from Christmas, was a carry over from last season. Playing a horny elf in the Ryan Gosling-hosted Christmas episode, Bayer, along with Gosling and Kenan Thompson, try to persuade Santa (Bobby Moynihan) to discipline them for misbehavior through spankings, or some other sexually violent shenanigans. The three elves are supposed to be joyous in begging for discipline, but Bayer looks like she won the lottery.

In the same episode, in a pre-filmed short called “Santa Baby,” Bayer and Gosling played a couple at a party who freak out when they hear that Santa is there. He isn’t really, of course – it’s just something host Beck Bennett told his kids – but the couple believe that Santa is real, and when they hear he’ll be there, they turn all Natural Born Killers as they set out the parameters by which they hope – nay, demand – to meet him. The criminal couple embrace the knowledge of their idol’s presence in an amalgam of lust and unhinged menace, and Bayer relishes the role, seductively arranging to sit on Santa’s lap. Given all we’ve seen from her, it’s the perfect blend of so much that she does well – joy, anticipation, and even, in her desire for a meeting with every child’s hero, a touch of innocence.

[You can stream Saturday Night Live on Hulu]

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. His greatest wish is to see Stefon enjoy a cheeseburger at John Belushi’s diner. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.