The image of Kate McKinnon playing center-stage piano on Saturday Night Live is a fraught one. It immediately recalls the first episode after the 2016 election, when she appeared as her then-signature character, Hillary Clinton, moaning a mournful “Hallelujah.” Although it made sense at the time as a eulogy for the first female presidency that wasn’t and a preexhausted lament for what was to come instead, it later came to symbolize the excesses of Trump-era resistance porn, where every hacky Colbert joke carried the implicit heft of activism.
During McKinnon’s first-ever outing as host this week, she brilliantly subverted this image in her monologue by playing a piano that is roughly one-eighth the size of a normal piano.
The monologue, like the episode that followed, was completely devoid of political commentary. Despite the news this week about Hillary Clinton planning to take on a bigger role in Biden’s 2024 campaign, McKinnon avoided dusting off her blue pantsuit to antagonize James Austin Johnson’s Trump. She similarly declined to revive her Rudy Giuliani, with his even more topical news peg. Instead, the old costume she most wanted viewers to see was the Ren Faire dress she wore to junior prom, which she trotted out during the monologue — a far more authentic representation of who she is than any Trump associate or foil she portrayed on the show.
McKinnon’s triumphant return to SNL was a swerve in the best possible way. She not only ditched all her old political impressions, but she resisted her back catalogue of recurring characters almost entirely. Rather than simply play the hits, she and the writers put together an optimized version of a typical prime McKinnon Christmas episode. By inviting her old castmates Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig to return for several sketches — the SNL equivalent of a video-game cheat code — along with a cameo from veteran writer turned Girls5Eva star Paula Pell, there were real getting-the-band-back-together vibes that lent the feeling of an event.
It was an episode that should remind viewers McKinnon spent four whole seasons on the show prior to 2016, building her reputation as a scene-stealing, shape-shifting, Emmy-winning star, the kind of performer who, when she shows up as Weird Barbie in the biggest movie of the year, audiences can only think, Of course. With at least one future-classic Christmas sketch in tow and killer consistency throughout, McKinnon has led the cast to a high-water mark for the season so far. Hallelujah!
Here are the highlights:
Pongo
Pongo is a hole-free, undead, synthetic dog the whole family can attempt to enjoy. Just as the idea of Pongo gets creepier as more is revealed about it, this sketch gets increasingly twisted as it goes along. Eventually, what started as an infomercial morphs into a horror movie when the nightmare of Pongo itself is exceeded by the nightmare of the entire family choosing Pongo over Mom (Sarah Sherman). In addition to everything else going for this digital short, it’s the most Sherman has shined in a sketch where she wasn’t the weird thing happening at its center.
ABBA Christmas
This is everything you would want from Rudolph and Wiig joining McKinnon for an SNL sketch in 2023: ridiculous accents, mechanized dancing, and ABBA slander coming from a place of love. Bowen Yang looks quite happy to be rounding out this foursome, but everyone here is clearly having a blast. When they launch into a number using ABBA’s signature “Standing close and singing in different directions,” nobody is able to resist breaking a little. Simply put, if the only way to see this sketch were to buy a ticket and go to a theater, I would be seated.
Gifts From Mom
Anyone in the current cast playing a mom who can’t stop apologizing for herself during a Christmas gift exchange would probably crush it, especially with writing this solid. McKinnon’s delivery fits the role like a bespoke suit, however, and she makes lines like “I did my best, but my best is bad, put me in a home” sound like (hilarious) music.
Tampon Farm
Speaking of music, the Lilith Fair lilt of “Tampon Farm” seems destined for TikTok ubiquity. The song first seems like it might be about a horse girl’s farm-set summer of sapphic exploration. It takes its sweet time (a minute into a two-and-a-half-minute song) to get to the reveal that it’s a song about a farm that inexplicably grows tampons. The production design team brings the ideas to full fruition with a bunch of inventive ways for tampons to grow: a cruciferous cluster like a head of cauliflower, applicators growing out of cornstalks, musical guest Billie Eilish shaking them from a tree. It’s a bountiful comedic harvest even before the final punch line: The tampon farm went out of business because the farmers sang instead of farming.
Weekend Update — Christmas Joke Swap 2023
The Update tradition of Michael Che and Colin Jost writing jokes for each other to say on air during Christmas episodes, without having seen them in advance, is always a highlight. This year, however, the pair outdid themselves. Not only is the joke-writing as airtight as it is embarrassing for each teller — the Michael Jackson joke is especially a doozy — but the addition of the esteemed yet apparently un-Googleable Dr. Hattie Davis on hand to react adds another layer. Watching this poor woman endure a Coretta Scott King joke that is technically at Scarlett Johansson’s expense is a high-wire act of cringe comedy I will not soon forget.
Cut for time
• This sentence from the 95th Annual Christmas Awards cold open really takes you on a journey: “Please welcome the Leonardo DiCaprio … of hotel TV, Mario Lopez.”
• McKinnon’s impression of Lorne Michaels during her monologue is pretty solid, even though it only consists of two words.
• All of the social-media business in the North Pole News Alert was so spot-on — “No words. #PrayForThePole.” — it was only just barely overshadowed by McKinnon’s Scottish elf puking Skittles.
• Ego Nwodim crushes on Weekend Update as Rich Auntie with No Kids, rocking a NeNe Leakes wig and a martini glass. The best part, though, is probably how delighted the character is with herself, punctuating her jokes with “Michael, I am cutting up tonight.”
• Boo to the Weekend Update joke comparing Harvard president Dr. Claudine Gay to Steve Urkel, but also boo to me for laughing at it.
• What the hell is that thing around Michael Longfellow’s neck in the Yankee Swap sketch that looks like headphones but fans? Do we all know what this is and I’m just old or what?
• Personally, I would have subbed in the cut-for-time Paperless Post sketch instead of Yankee Swap, but your mileage may vary.
• Between her assistance in introducing Billie Eilish’s first number and her cameo in Tampon Farm, I simply must ask: When is Greta Gerwig hosting? (Her only previous appearance was a cameo in Saoirse Ronan’s episode around the time Lady Bird came out.)
• “Like all classic Christmas films, the plot revolves around a bunch of white people who are happy but get even more happy by Christmas.” Amen, Reese De’What.
• The idea of anyone cursing Judy Garland to hell and telling her “Wizard of Oz was mid,” as McKinnon’s character does in the Cinema Classics sketch, is a little Christmas gift in itself.
• The Whiskers-r-We duo of McKinnon and Billie Eilish is a reprise of the hysterical Hotel Ad sketch from Eilish’s last appearance on the show two years ago — watch it right now if you’ve never seen — when she had even more trouble not cracking up than she did this time.
