‘SNL’ Recap: Hope Hicks Bids Farewell To Her “Dead End” White House Job

After developing smart alternatives for their recent cold opens, Saturday Night Live brought back Alec Baldwin to parody the president in a week that saw even more chaos and scandal in the White House than usual.

Set at this week’s bi-partisan gun summit, the sketch is Baldwin’s usual riff-o-rama, with joke after joke parodying the events of the week as if off a checklist.

So we have Baldwin reading off his compassion note card from earlier in the week, following “I hear you and I care” with “Rent Lego Ninjago Movie,” his compassion list being conflated with his grocery list.

Flanked by Mike Pence (Beck Bennett) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (Cecily Strong) – who for some reason both go through the sketch silent, communicating only in expressions, gestures, and grunts – Trump’s surprising pro-gun control pronouncements receive a silent gleam of excitement from Feinstein, and quiet cowering from Pence. When he puts his hand on Pence’s arm, leading the veep to recoil, we also get the funniest joke of the cold open when the president says Pence is “worried this is a gateway touch.”

Soon, Trump’s fantasy about running into schools unarmed to take down shooters extends to a visceral hero scenario where he’s defeating Kim Jong-un with his bare hands. He’s afraid of competing countries, including Wakanda, and tells us when he said he’d run America like a business, he meant a Waffle House at 2 am. The sketch ends with an appearance from Kate McKinnon as Jeff Sessions, now officially my least favorite McKinnon character.

Host Charles Barkley used his monologue to defend the NFL players who knelt on the sidelines in protest this year, and all athletes expressing their political beliefs. He noted the history of athlete activism, including Muhammad Ali protesting Vietnam, and took a swipe at Fox News host Laura Ingraham for her recent comments telling LeBron James to “shut up and dribble.” Michael Che came out for some banter, and Barkley ended by saying, “LeBron, keep on dribbling, and don’t ever shut up.” He got a few jokes in that landed well, but this was more impressive for its message. A strong monologue from Barkley.

The first sketch was a valiant, if substandard, effort for an on-message Oscars take. Bennett and Strong played the fictional red carpet commentators for The Grabbies, an award show celebrating “this year’s worst behavior in entertainment.” I can review what the sketch was trying to do, but the title and premise pretty much give that away, don’t they? For me, this was weakened by its fictional setting. Rather than playing real-life celebrities, everyone here was fictional, playing the scenario exactly as you would expect them to based on the title. Given how much comedy has taken on real-life abusers, the creation of a fictional world to make the same points everyone’s already been making for quite some time now made this feel like a weak rehashing of those same old points.

So, Alex Moffat plays Tom Sturgeson, nominee for Handsiest Actor. When Strong approaches him with the mic, he replies with a smile, “Hey guys, it’s really upsetting to be here tonight.” After we learned he’s there for giving lots of unwanted massages to female co-stars and for showing an intern his penis and saying “Got any ideas?” he notes his chances of winning are still tough because “the competition is so stiff.” While the beats feel familiar, the fictional scenario puts us at a disconnect.

The one joke here that resonated for me came from Pete Davidson’s Lenny Martin, nominee for “Most Open Robe.” Asked for a preview of his speech should he win, he thanks his uncle, for “always saying ‘boys will be boys,’ even when it was, like, OJ.”

Next came a commercial parody taking a swipe at the NRA. After showing housewife Heidi Gardner struggling with a roach problem, we see Barkley as Ned, complete with cowboy hat and an American flag backdrop, introducing his new roach-fighting product, Ned’s Roach Away (NRA).

“At Ned’s, we know the only thing that can stop a bad roach is a good roach with a gun,” he says, showing a shooting range where cockroaches have been trained to shoot AR-15 rifles at other roaches. I love the visuals here, as roaches wearing ear protectors are shown at target practice. Once the roaches are trained, Ned says, you then let them loose in your home. That’s right, to combat cockroaches, simply fill your house with lots more cockroaches, but these are carrying AR-15s. Whenever they see a roach, the homeowner detects mini-bullets flying through the air, and gun shots coming from her kitchen cabinet. To deepen the comparison, Ned makes sure his roaches are good roaches because he sends them to little roach church, so they’re god-fearing. And, none of them are gay. The end result of Ned’s idea is stupid and absurd, which is exactly the point. The same way “The Grabbies” failed to find a creative way to make a much-stated but important point, this did the opposite, finding a unique and funny presentation for a point that can’t be made strongly or frequently enough.

Next, Barkley plays the star of cable access call-in show Homework Hotline, which he co-hosts with a puppet named Bobo. The premise is simple: children call in needing help with their homework. The reality is more complicated, as it’s apparently become a meme that Barkley has sex with his puppet. The callers, rather than needing help, are all calling to mock him about this, and the sketch is about their creative methods of getting past call-screener Aidy Bryant and getting sexual material on the air. I was impressed with Barkley’s ability to keep a straight face for this one, though it was touch and go for a bit. I enjoyed this, especially the caller who said he needed help with science homework, and called out scientific elements that Barkley wrote down until it spelled “Bobo’s Coc.” The next element was potassium, which is represented by the letter K.

Next came a sports talk show called The Champions, where Todd Hamel (Mikey Day) talks with Barkley, special guest Alex Rodriguez, and fictional football great D.C. Timmons, played by Kenan Thompson. Timmons is a shit-talker who suffered a hit to the head too many. He taunts Barkley and Rodriguez that football is a tougher sport, and his inability to remember their names or know how many fingers he’s holding up serves as proof. Thompson gets some funny lines in, talking about how half his teeth are fake and his eye is made out of sugar, but watching A-Rod enjoy himself is the real highlight here.

“Weekend Update” took on the chaos at the White House, with Colin Jost comparing the building to “that dead mall in your hometown. It’s just a sunglass kiosk and a couple raccoons fighting in a J.C. Penney.” Of White House Communications Director Hope Hicks’ resignation this week, he noted the absurdity of “a 29-year-old with no experience who works directly for the president think[ing], I gotta get out of this dead end job.”

After Che fumbled a well-written rant against guns, Strong appeared at the desk as Hicks, playing her as a naive college girl who was in way over her head, and treats leaving the White House like having to say goodbye to her friends at summer camp. In a well-placed shot at the media for treating Hicks, a key aide to the president, with kid gloves, Jost asks her why the media has been so nice to her. “If I had to guess, it’s because my hair and face are good,” she says, “but also, honestly, I try to stay out of that whole arena, because communications, White House – it’s such a mess.” There’s no reason to think we’ll see this impression again, but it’s probably the most anyone in the media has held Hicks to account during her time at the White House. At the end, she reads a note of thanks to those she worked with, including Kellyanne [Conway], who “showed me what I can turn into if I stick around too long. You’re like the human version of those pictures of black lung on cigarette boxes.”

Kyle Mooney also appeared at the desk, as himself, there to give his take on today’s Oscars. Turns out Mooney had no opinions on the Oscars, but was merely alone, and hoping to make plans with Jost or Che to watch the Oscars. This reminded me a bit too much of Mooney’s Bruce Chandling character, in that it’s all about the speaker’s loneliness and desperation. Mooney has been a shrinking presence on the show the last few years, and this bit shows why. Bluntly put, he needs a new schtick. This was severely underwhelming.

Leslie Jones also came to the desk as herself, to talk about her time in Korea for the Olympics (NBC sent her for commentary.) She fell in love with hockey, since you can beat people up, noting that if she played, she’d be called Penalty Box Jones. After Jost says he used to play hockey and can show her some moves, Jones brought out Hilary Knight, a member of the gold-medal-winning US Olympic Hockey Team, to help her taunt him. This was a fun bit, powered by Jones’ enthusiasm with an assist from Knight’s sheer joy and mile-wide smile at being on SNL.

Next came a VH1 talk show, Hump or Dump, where Barkley, Chris Redd and Moffat competed for Bryant’s attention. It’s the usual trashfest except for Barkley, who throws down high stakes from the get-go: if Bryant doesn’t pick him, he’ll kill himself. The rest of the sketch deals with the unfair pressure on Bryant to save Barkley’s life. This was quick, and didn’t develop its premise at all. The fact that it still worked is a testament to Barkley investing in the character, and perhaps the studio audience’s desire at the moment for something really dark.

The male cast members then played a construction crew cat-calling women who pass by, which lead to a discussion of their jealousy at women’s fashion options. As talk turned to what they would wear and how they would pose if they were actresses on the Oscars red carpet, it became clear that most of them had given this some thought, as they all had detailed gowns in mind for their red carpet debuts. This was utterly charming, although I thought the end – where Bennett, as the one man clinging to his macho, gave a redemptive speech about toxic masculinity – was an unnecessary step too far. After the sketch succeeded in subtly and cleverly making its point, Bennett hit the audience over the hit with the obvious premise. That aside, though, this was a winner.

The episode ended with McKinnon bringing back her last call horny barfly, Sheila Sovage, here to try to bring Barkley home with her. The sketch was its usual litany of grossness, bringing a few tepid laughs. Thompson, as the poor bartender forced to watch this and praying for god to turn him into a bird so he can fly away, was the funniest part of this one save for the final joke of the sketch, a bizarre bit of prop comedy involving dental equipment that worked for its sheer ridiculousness.

SNL returns next week with host Sterling K. Brown and musical guest James Bay.

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.

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