<\/p>\n
Why do I love Jane Wickline? Why might you? I won\u2019t say \u201cshould\u201d because comedy is funny that way. (Ha ha.) Humor resonates with something individual, possibly innate and probably inexplicable inside each of us; our sense of it is something we can\u2019t control. \u201cHelpless laughter,\u201d that\u2019s a phrase.<\/p>\n
I know from online testimonials that I\u2019m not the only person who loves Wickline, just as I know that there are those who do not like her at all (to put it mildly), who believe she has no place on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d where she\u2019s finishing her second season as a featured player, or in any public space whatsoever. I can do nothing for such people, beyond expressing my condolences; they are missing something special. (There are also the inbetweeners \u2014 haters edging toward acceptance.)<\/p>\n
And, of course, it\u2019s more than possible that you have no idea who I\u2019m talking about. So let\u2019s talk about Jane.<\/p>\n
There is the \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d Jane, best known for the songs she urgently performs during \u201cWeekend Update,\u201d but there is also TikTok Jane, who began making one-woman multiple-character sketches in 2020, and Dukes<\/a>, her ongoing live double act with Liva Pierce. Even before \u201cSNL,\u201d where she has appeared in some 100 sketches<\/a>, albeit often with only a line or two, she had amassed a considerable body of work; you can find multiple fan-made supercuts of her homemade videos, running as long as four hours. I came in late to this party, working backward from \u201cSNL,\u201d but, like the singer of Wickline\u2019s \u201cParty<\/a>,\u201d who refuses to depart even after the hosts have gone to bed, gotten up and gone to work, I have no plans to leave. I like the free-associative nature of her humor, the droll precision of her speech, and the fact that, while I know she will zig and zag, I never know which way she\u2019ll turn.<\/p>\n As regularly as \u201cSNL\u201d has been declared dead over the years, it continues to generate passionate responses, and every new player arrives with a target painted on their back. And Wickline is hard to miss; she\u2019s only the third member of a small club, alongside Leslie Jones<\/a> and Ellen Cleghorne, of the show\u2019s 6-foot women. But she seems to have wandered in from some other aesthetic universe; the very qualities that lead some to say she doesn\u2019t fit in are those that make her feel fresh to me. More so than many cast members, who wear their pedigrees on their sleeve, she generates a feeling of \u201cWell, well, what do we have here?\u201d with no easy, immediate answer. The fact that she\u2019s so polarizing is, in its way, a recommendation. She\u2019s different. She\u2019s a mystery.<\/p>\n Here is what I know about her, factually. She\u2019ll turn 27 in July. She went to Santa Monica High and graduated with a degree in creative writing from Oberlin College, where she performed sketch comedy and edited the campus humor magazine. She worked as a copy editor in Philadelphia. She was part of \u201cStapleview,\u201d<\/a> a TikTok-based sketch show. Along with her demonstrated keyboard skills, she plays solid jazz trumpet. Haters point out that long before Wickline was born, her mother worked as an assistant to Lorne Michaels, as if that is the only possible reason she\u2019s on his show, and that her father, Matt, wrote for \u201cLate Night With David Letterman\u201d and \u201cIn Living Color,\u201d as if that must have had something to do with it as well. Besides the fact that the notion of \u201cnepo babies\u201d is tedious in itself, it\u2019s hard to imagine Michaels casting anyone as a favor. And I reject the idea that she\u2019s untalented as a writer or an actor, though the formality of her speech and language, which strikes me as oddly poetic, does clearly read to some as stiff or awkward.<\/p>\n Jane Wickline and \u201cWeekend Update\u201d anchor Colin Jost in last week\u2019s segment where she performed a song about being perpetually late.<\/p>\n (NBC\/Caro Scarimbolo\/NBC)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n Though I\u2019ve seen one brief example of Wickline onstage doing stand-up, in some seemingly earlier time, she\u2019s constitutionally a sketch comic, even when she\u2019s the only member of the troupe. Her comedy is dialectical, it rides on characters talking at cross purposes, inhabiting separate clashing realities. Even on \u201cWeekend Update,\u201d playing her songs in what are nominally solo spots, she caroms off anchors Colin Jost or Michael Che, who comment, interrupt and regard her with bemusement.<\/p>\n In nearly all her TikTok skits, Wickline plays all the parts, cutting back and forth, sometimes distinguishing the characters only by the tops they wear, the camera angle and the background, which might be inexpertly flown in, cutting off part of her body. (I prefer to consider this an aesthetic choice, rather than merely an easy or affordable one; they do get a little less lo-fi over time.) Her delivery can vary little from character to character \u2014 she assumes attitudes, but doesn\u2019t put on voices \u2014 which forces you to pay attention, especially because the dialogue and editing can move fast. But there is always enough in the writing, and the acting, to keep things straight.<\/p>\n Among the many situations she presented:<\/p>\n An astronaut who lands on the moon to find two women arguing about a sandwich. A plant sitter<\/a> who eats her clients\u2019 plants while insisting she\u2019s very good at her job. A ghost stuck<\/a> forever in the Halloween costume she wore \u2014 a ketchup bottle \u2014 on the night she died. A woman dining in the Space Needle restaurant<\/a> finding that she is eating in a non-rotating \u201csecond location\u201d at the bottom of a building attached to a Target. (Woman to waitress: \u201cCan you look me in the face and tell me this place is spinning?\u201d Waitress: \u201cThe theme of this place is \u2018spinning restaurant.\u2019\u201d Woman: \u201cThat was not<\/i> my question.\u201d) A high school student invited to join a NASA program on the basis of a science fair project. (\u201cMy baking soda volcano?\u201d \u201cIf that\u2019s your name for it, then yes.\u201d) A batter who doesn\u2019t understand that no one on the field is on her team. (\u201cIt\u2019s me against all of you?\u201d)<\/p>\n Sometimes there will be a sort of punchline. (\u201cI should have told her about our cult. I\u2019m such a space cadet in the morning.\u201d) Some skits end so abruptly you wonder if there isn\u2019t a longer version you\u2019re not smart or cool or young enough to find.<\/p>\n In one particularly twisty example, Jane 1 (we\u2019ll call her) sits on an egg<\/a>, breaking it. \u201cI see you found the first egg,\u201d says Jane 2, who declares, \u201cYou\u2019re about to face the most challenging Easter egg hunt ever.\u201d This somehow swerves through Hamlet to Jesus meeting \u201ca kindly warthog \u2014 who taught him that growing up is all about accessing one\u2019s innate sexuality\u201d to \u201cPeanuts\u201d (\u201cAnd now you see, that\u2019s what Easter is all about, Charlie Brown\u201d) to Jane 1 asking, \u201cYou want to play Connect Four?\u201d \u201cYou know me so well,\u201d Jane 2, replies tenderly. \u201cThis was always about Connect Four.\u201d<\/p>\n On \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d Wickline is used more and less well (though never ill). Her performance in \u201cWinter Olympics Promo<\/a>,\u201d in which she played a reluctant luger (\u201cI hate luge. It\u2019s way too fast. It scares me to death and I seriously hate it\u201d), finally sent screaming downhill, is what turned me into a fan.<\/p>\n Wickline certainly doesn\u2019t need me to defend her. She may not be a typical cast member \u2014 she doesn\u2019t do impersonations, for one thing, and I can\u2019t imagine her in the sort of \u201cSNL\u201d film comedy players have regularly graduated to, though David Lynch<\/a> might have had a part for her, or Wes Anderson. But she\u2019s doing fine in the sketches, making her little impressions, whether as a podcasting 12-year-old boy<\/a> or a clapper loader on a Norwegian film set<\/a> or leading a romantic production number about a tiny baby shoe<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s during \u201cWeekend Update\u201d that the spotlight shines on her playing a few bewigged characters. With Marcello Hern\u00e1ndez, she\u2019s half of \u201cThe Couple You Can\u2019t Believe Are Together<\/a>,\u201d Alyssa to his Grant. (She\u2019s \u201ca student at Barnard getting her master\u2019s in 18th century graveyards\u201d; he teaches \u201ca SoulCycle class on the tarmac at LaGuardia, baby.\u201d) In a long blond wig and glasses, she was a \u201cGen Z sexpert<\/a>\u201d who might have had sex, or just done a somersault. As Tamara, \u201cpronounced Tamara,\u201d she presented her New Year\u2019s resolution<\/a> to get \u201c365 buttons, one for each day. I want to do more fun stuff, and I\u2019m getting scared of time passing and I want to be more conscious of it.\u201d (Che: \u201cThat\u2019s a nice idea. So what\u2019s your plan for the buttons?\u201d \u201cMy plan is one button each day.\u201d)<\/p>\n But it\u2019s in her songs, which have a habit of turning dark, that we get the full Wickline. One conflates \u201cthe child actors from \u2018Stranger Things<\/a>,\u2019\u201d with AI as \u201cthe greatest threat to humanity right now.\u201d (\u201cWe must kill them while they\u2019re still weak, the child actors from \u2018Stranger Things\u2019 \/ What if they become self-aware? We need to keep them occupied.\u201d) Another, beginning as an apology for chronic lateness<\/a>, becomes an uncharacteristically aggressive defense of it. (\u201cNo one needs to know if I\u2019m on my way. Calm the eff down and focus on you \u2026 I\u2019m gonna show up 40 minutes late with an ice cream cone.\u201d) A love song, \u201cI Choose You<\/a>,\u201d turns into the trolley problem.<\/p>\n When she comes on to play, toting her digital keyboard, it\u2019s always as herself, or mostly herself, with her name spelled out across the screen: Jane Wickline.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n