<\/p>\n
Some of the less endearing Saturday Night Live hosts, sometimes even full-time main cast members, have an unfortunate case of Doing Comedy Face. That\u2019s an expression that can\u2019t stop itself from telegraphing the zaniness of everything around them, so that the performer in question comes across as a \u201csketch comedy character\u201d in quotes and\/or neon lights, rather than a character in a comedy sketch, if that makes sense. Sabrina Carpenter, host and musical guest for this week\u2019s SNL, has something different. She has Variety Show Face. It\u2019s not exactly the opposite of Doing Comedy Face (if there\u2019s an opposite in the current cast, it\u2019s probably Ashley Padilla, but more on her later). But it\u2019s definitely a vastly different effect (and affect, for that matter). It\u2019s a kind of perma-poise that says: At any given moment, I may be called upon to sing, dance, do comedy bits, or possibly some combination of the two, and I will do my best to make the transition seamlessly. It\u2019s not mugging, it\u2019s not deadpan; it\u2019s more of a grin-and-bear-it showbiz shield.<\/p>\n
So while Carpenter, in her first double-duty hosting-and-musical-guesting gig after getting chummy with the show during Season 50, wasn\u2019t giving powerhouse Ariana Grande or Lady Gaga star turns, she was displaying remarkable dexterity in roles that often amounted to doll-like dress-up\u2014or could have, if she didn\u2019t make dress-up silliness look pretty graceful a lot of the time. That\u2019s also part of the reason her musical performances were able to lift up more of the show than usual. The show has plenty of well-staged musical performances, but the live-music-video stage-show elements for \u201cManchild\u201d and \u201cNobody\u2019s Son\u201d were particularly clever and, if you\u2019ll excuse the diminutive connotations for one of pop\u2019s most famously diminutive stars, cute. That she slipped in a couple of \u201cfuck\u201ds on live TV for the second song with seemingly no remorse only made it more endearing.<\/p>\n
OK, so there\u2019s not exactly a straight line between Carpenter jumping off a bed in her custom SNL underwear and dressing up as a washing machine with a bizarre array of wash-is-done jingles, but that\u2019s part of the point: She treated those jobs with seemingly equal attention, seriousness, and playfulness. Granted, sometimes the sketch choreography failed to match her own. For example, the sketch where Carpenter plays the leader of a girlboss confidence seminar who suffers a head injury early in her motivational dance-speech and bravely soldiers ahead spouting concussed nonsense tripped over some actual technical difficulties (one ably handled by forever-pro Kenan Thompson) and even in conception probably threw too much of the comedy to dancers tossing a Carpenter-sized ragdoll around.<\/p>\n
That was fresher, though, than a fourth \u201cDomingo\u201d sketch. The main novelties there were (a.) letting it serve as the cold open, supplanting the usual wan political sketch (b.) letting the concept of the sketch fully get away after several goodwill-coasting revivals. I can accept that the original \u201cDomingo\u201d became the SNL version of a hit single because of Carpenter\u2019s song \u201cEspresso,\u201d and, as such, it\u2019s hard to resist putting Carpenter into a revival of said sketch, singing someone else\u2019s song in turn. I can even maybe set aside that this already happened on the 50th anniversary special. But much like the increasingly revue-style John Mulaney New York City sketches, only way less funny, this edition lazily grabbed at several different pop-song parodies rather than focusing on a single song that it might be clever to assign Carpenter to sing. Add in the swap-outs for Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim and the fact that Carpenter didn\u2019t lock into a strong gimmick (Grande\u2019s off-key warbling of a fellow pop star\u2019s smash is at least forty percent of why \u201cDomingo\u201d hit) and all you\u2019ve got is some espresso-flavored mush.<\/p>\n
With that out of the way, though, Carpenter and the cast were able to quickly move on to (some) better material, and there\u2019s something additionally charming about Carpenter clearly having fun without angling for write-ups talking about how she could have been a full-time cast member in an alternate career. (When you can see from their expression that a host has been told that a lot, that\u2019s called Justin Timberlake Face.) Carpenter did something more delicate: She made SNL her fun little variety show without fully taking it over.<\/p>\n
The sketch about Andrew Dismukes and Ashley Padilla shopping for washing machines was one of those deeply silly but satisfying sketches that makes you wonder why more of these can\u2019t be that joke dense, with even the \u201cstraight\u201d elements of the sketch doing goofy jokes (Padilla alluding to her infidelity; Dismukes brandishing a sack of money labeled with a giant dollar sign) in between the truly ridiculous spectacle of Sabrina Carpenter and Veronika Slowikowska skipping through music styles and trilling about clothes that may not be dry or even less dirty. If that didn\u2019t work for you, I don\u2019t know what to tell you.<\/p>\n
If the Snack Homiez podcast didn\u2019t work for you, I\u2019m more sympathetic. Let me say that as a parent of an almost-10-year-old, I am unfortunately deeply aware of the accuracy of the performances Carpenter, Slowikoska, Chloe Fineman, and Jane Wickline gave as mostly-12-year-old boys speaking almost entirely in repetitive and easily confusable slang. They captured the constant oscillation between aw-shucks goofing around and bottomless, yammering need to talk despite saying almost nothing that kids raised on the idea of internet broadcasting as a career seem especially prone to. As intentionally annoying as it is, I could have listened to the quartet tie themselves in linguistic knots without bringing James Austin Johnson\u2019s Trump into it at all, though it\u2019s an admittedly funny idea, and I\u2019m all for moving political pieces around the show to eliminate the tedium of that cold-open routine. The sketch didn\u2019t move quite fast enough before or during Trump to really pull off that midway pivot, but I\u2019m a sucker for the cast getting to act like dumb kids. No surprise, then, that \u201cGrind,\u201d a brash music-video tribute to awkward middle-school dances, also worked well.<\/p>\n
Look, should they have revived the Shop TV sketch just to get Carpenter, a clear fan of winking innuendo, to hawk an extremely vaginal-looking neck pillow to the consternation of Mikey Day? No, probably not, and I don\u2019t think I laughed once during that one. But I can see why that happened. I\u2019m less clear than ever about what Marcello Hern\u00e1ndez is doing as the Weekend Update \u201cmovie guy\u201d who doesn\u2019t watch the movies but sometimes makes puns in a Spanish accent. What\u2019s the character here? What\u2019s the joke? Is this a type of guy who exists? If so, is it notable in some way that he exists? Maybe it\u2019s a psy-op to convince the audience to hotly anticipate the next batch of regular Weekend Update jokes, which increasingly use current events as fodder for the anchors joking about themselves or each other.<\/p>\n
It probably should have been Veronika Slowikowska\u2019s to lose, and then Ashley Padilla had to do that sketch where her office worker spends her birthday farting and getting demoted. Not a great segment by any means; a sketch featuring loud farting noises is always going to be a steep climb for me. But what nearly sells the whole damn thing is how genuinely pained Padilla looks after a birthday surprise causes her to loudly flatulate. Her skewed posture and stricken closed-eye grimace, held for an epic pause in the action, are just weirdly good acting.<\/p>\n
Wait, Miles Teller and Glen Powell are both hosting? In the same month?! At least the forgotten Top Gun: Maverick costar gets to dip in first, after an oddly short one-week break.<\/p>\n