Almost a year ago to the day, Jack Black hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in 20 years, fresh off the success of “A Minecraft Movie.” Now, the star of another freshly minted videogame-to-movie hit, “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” has returned after crushing it last time with a high-energy performance.
Having reached the Five-Timers Club, as addressed in an obligatory monologue sketch featuring Jonah Hill, Tina Fey, Candice Bergen and others, Black was a returning hero. He’s frequently cited as one of the favorite hosts among the cast. And while this time may not have reached the frenetic highs of last year’s manic and musical outing, it had some memorable moments.
Most notable was a video for a country-style song about gaining wisdom and then completely forgetting what that wisdom was. Black sang in that sketch along with musical guest Jack White. Black also appeared as a frustrated office worker trying to get a coworker (Ashley Padilla) to stop talking to him and others annoyed by the woman.
Black paired up with Marcello Hernández to play martial arts instructors who teach unorthodox self-defense methods. It played to Black’s physical comedy chops, but something felt off about the execution, especially because of the hard-to-understand dialogue. Black played the last Spartan to be considered for inclusion in the group of 300 Greek fighters against Persia (spoiler: he doesn’t make it in). He played an intrusive Airbnb host with Melissa McCarthy, who was also on board for the Five-Timers sketch.
And, finally, he played one of a set of awkward husbands who come to life singing “Carry On Wayward Son” together.
While the monologue was a blast of fresh chaos (or at least the sense of chaos) with Black jamming out with White, the rest of the show didn’t have the same kind of verve, falling back on familiar sketch formulas. That said, Black committed throughout and sang well when he had the opportunity.
Musical guest Jack White appeared in a few sketches and performed “Derecho Demonico” and “G.O.D. And The Broken Ribs.”
Breaking a streak of cold opens featuring President Trump and/or members of his cabinet, this week’s opening sketch featured instead a March Madness NCAA post-game roundup featuring Ernie Johnson (James Austin Johnson), Kenny Smith (Kam Patterson), Charles Barkley (Kenan Thompson) and coach Bruce Pearl (Jeremy Culhane). The joke here was that Barkley, already known for being outspoken, has been getting kudos for speaking out in favor of immigrants on a CBS broadcast. On the show, he jokes that it’s “the first time I went viral without a prescription for Valtrex.” Emboldened, this version of Barkley keeps saying he’s going to be careful with his words, before weighing in on the Iran war, the Artemis II space mission (“A waste of money. They just flying around the moon.”) and the firing of former U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi. Bondi (Padilla) appeared to refute the comments, referring to “The final four… years of this country.” Barkley said he was going to choose his words carefully one more time before delivering, “Live from New York… It’s Saturday Night!”
For his induction to the Five-Timers Club, Black was joined by a jacket-clad Hill who revealed that there’s something wrong with the lounge where the Five Timers hang out. The room, indeed, appeared spooky and abandoned with cobwebs and Fey wearing a robe made out of Paddington, which she said she got after hosting “SNL UK” last month. Fey revealed the lounge has fallen apart after literally being run into the ground by too many Five-Timers Club sketches. The suave Hernández character Domingo appeared briefly but was conked on the noggin by White, who also achieved Five-Timers status, but as a musical guest. He left early to move his hearse: apparently musical Five Timers only get their parking validated for 15 minutes. Black chose to rock out to revive the lounge, launching into a version of White’s “Seven Nation Army” with the guitarist accompanying him. After a brief musical rockening, Black told the audience, “Stick around, we’ll be White Black!”
Best sketch of the night: If only we could remember why this song was so good
Beyond his spot-on Trump impression, Johnson has proven to be adept at musical impressions, and here he does a nice job launching into a country song, “Words to Live By,” about a man who hears his father’s dying words … and then forgets what the wisdom was that was imparted. Black takes over as a man who climbed a mountain in Tibet and spent 20 hours with a guru, only to forget what he learned while walking down the mountain and getting a text from his wife. That would have been plenty, but a third section features Andrew Dismukes as an annoyed father refusing to listen to his 6-year-old son’s words. “You don’t even know how to wipe your own butt,” he sings, “you maybe only know the names of like 30 weird Pokemon guys.” The three singers at least remember the name of the “Men in Black” device that erases your memory: The Neuralyzer.
Also good: There’ll be peace when you are done (watching this sketch)
What looked at first to be a repeat of a recent sketch about wine-drinking wives chatting in the kitchen and playing truth or dare instead pivoted to a scene about husbands stuck together in a den with nothing to talk about. That might have been premise enough for a piece about men having trouble making friends, but instead, a mumbled lyric for the Kansas song “Carry On Wayward Son” turned into a full-blown sing-along that peaks when the men jam out with ribbon sticks and strip their outerwear to reveal colorful jumpsuits. When you have a guest who can sing as well as Black, you’ve got to lean into that talent.
‘Weekend Update’ winner: A scandal that keeps ballooning
Patterson had some funny moments as the new Black version of Professor Snape slated to appear in the new “Harry Potter” series, but Sarah Sherman was tough to ignore as Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon, currently embroiled in a scandal over online chats. Sherman as Bryon Noem wore two giant balloons under a shirt, challenging “Update” co-host Michael Che and others to make fun of his kink. “I dare you to find one thing that’s funny about this whole situation,” Bryon said. The segment got more and more absurd as Bryon challenged the cue-card master Wally Ferensten, Lorne Michaels (shown having already left, leaving a spinning desk chair), Kristi Noem (Padilla) and even the dog she shot, shown in heaven with a halo. It was as distasteful a segment as you’d expect from “Update,” yet also somehow straddled the line between wallowing in the scandal and mining some genuine laughs out of it.
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