Saturday Night Live
Emma Stone & Noah Kahan
December 2, 2023
As I have said twice before on this very site, Emma Stone is a natural for Saturday Night Live: she is charming, she is delightful, she is gorgeous, and she is game for anything. Stone clearly loves doing the show — she does not sleepwalk through the sketches; she is clearly enjoying herself as much as anyone.
And that’s why it’s always something of a disappointment when she hosts: she has so much to give … and SNL has so little to offer her. Even her monologue this week feels half-assed despite the fact that she joined the Five-Timers Club with this episode. Granted, this week’s episode received a much higher grade than the last two times she hosted — they gave her two pretty great sketches this week, and she made the most of them. That said, Emma Stone isn’t a B+ host; SNL needs to start giving her A+ material.
Last week, George Santos’ gift to the world of comedy came to a dramatic end when he became only the sixth person to be expelled from Congress in the history of ever. Saturday Night Live sent him off in style with Bowen Yang’s brilliant take on the thieving fabulist hosting a press conference before serenading himself with “A Scandal in the Wind.” Santos’ expulsion will make Congress a slightly better place, but SNL a little less fabulous.
Grade: A+
This is Emma Stone’s fifth time to host, which means she’s inducted into the prestigious (?) Five-Timer’s Club. Tina Fey and Candice Bergen are on hand to welcome her into the Women’s Section, specifically, “a big luxurious place to cry.” It’s underwhelming, and it pains me to say that considering how much I love me some Tina Fey.
Grade: B
“Question Quest” is a game show spoof, in which Stone’s player wins a giant tortoise that can live up to 175 after answering only one question correctly. She does not want the tortoise. That’s the entire bit. And it sounds dumb when I write it out like that, because it is. But I also didn’t hate it —
Grade: B+
This is a song about dealing with one’s depression, seasonal or otherwise, by doing gross, messy things in New York City while fully naked. Sure! Why not! Weird, funny, disgusting, and uncomfortable, it works.
Grade: A
It’s been a minute since we last saw Treece Henderson, Keenan Thompson’s lounge club singer who inevitably receives bad news mid-performance. This time he learns that his hotel room has been flooded by his trumpet player’s ex-husband, ruining Treece’s Hermes “scooter boots.” Treece has never been one of my favorite recurring characters’ this does nothing to change that.
Grade: C+
This week, the “Please Don’t Destroy” boys try to fix a damaged sketch by recreating Emma Stone’s footage using AI to overlay her face onto Punkie Johnson with horrifying results. It’s absurd in all the right ways (though they don’t exactly stick the landing) and I’m beginning to find the “Please Don’t Destroy” sketches to be more reliably funny than the rest of SNL. I did not see that coming, honestly.
Grade: A
“What’s in the Kiln” is a talk show in which amateur potters show off their terrible pottery. This had the potential, and for a minute I thought we were going to be something similar to the spoof of the Bakeoff shows in which the cakes become hideous monstrosities. Instead, it’s just middle-aged ladies being inordinately proud of some mediocre bowls. Oh, and a vagina joke that fails to land. Meh.
Grade: C+
“Weekend Update” comes for the usual suspects: George Santos, Elon Musk, Melania Trump, Michael Che makes an unnecessary misogynistic joke, you know, the usual. Points for the cruise ship joke at the end.
Grade: B+
Michael Longfellow visits the “Weekend Update” desk as “Old Fashioned Cigarette” to complain about vapes and prove how much cooler he is than them. It’s the best thing all night, and Longfellow needs to be given more to do on the show, please.
Grade: A++
Here, Mama Cass records the iconic “Make Your Own Kind of Music” while her manager, played by Stone, cheers her on. The manager explains that this song will be a huge hit before being forgotten for a while, but that 40 or 50 years later, it will have a resurgence after a show about a mysterious island uses it in its second season premiere when it shows up in a bunch of action movies when a character goes on a rampage. Stone then goes on to act out such scenes, leaving absolutely nothing on the table. First of all, Chloe Troast can SING, but second of all, Emma Stone is having the time of her life here.
Grade: A
Here, a high schooler struggles with his physics homework, and his posters come to life to assist him, including a hot Instagram model, played by Stone, who is actually more hindrance than help because she’s so dumb. Get it? Pretty girls are stupid!
This is actually the third go at a sketch that they have done twice before when Emma Stone hosted, once in 2016 and once in 2019. Here’s what I said about it the first time they did it:
“All I want to say about this awful sketch where a teenage boy’s posters come to life to help him with his math homework, except that ha-ha, the sexy blond is no help at all, is that I know the writers think they offset the inherent sexism of this sketch by having Kate McKinnon play a bad-ass female video game character, I know they thought they could brush away criticism by having her be the character who directly confronts the blond’s idiocy, but I’m here to say: NOPE. DIDN’T WORK, ASSHOLES.”
Literally, replace “math” with “physics” and “Kate McKinnon” with “Ewo Nwodim” and we’re done here.
Grade: D-
Finally, an ad for Oil of Olay’s newest skincare product: a face cream that is just straight Diet Coke. I don’t entirely understand the punchline … ladies be drinking Diet Coke? But I’m not mad at it either. It’s just … kinda dumb.
Grade: B
Final Grade: B+.
Saturday Night Live airs at 10:30/11:30 p.m. Saturdays on NBC and streams on Peacock.