Saturday Night Live
Dua Lipa
May 4, 2024
First things first for my fellow Gen-Xers: what is a Dua Lipa? Glad you asked. Dua Lipa is a gorgeous English/Albanian Grammy-award-winning pop star. I don’t know any of her music, but it’s disco-y and danceable — though, apparently, she’s not exactly known for her dancing. She’s also not exactly known for her comedy stylings, and SNL asking her to be both the host and the musical guest seems like a heavy lift.
That said, I’ve seen a lot of grumbling about this episode, calling it the “worst of the season,” … but, y’all, I remember the Pete Davidson, Bad Bunny, and Shane Gillis episodes, so you’re not going to pull that one over on me. I think this is an example of diminishment by comparison: the previous episode hosted by Ryan Gosling was so beloved and well-received that whoever was tasked with being his follow-up was never going to live up to expectations. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a great episode — but it’s also not as terrible as some are making it out to be.
And honestly, I’m just proud of the writers for restraining themselves from making every sketch about how hot Dua Lipa is. God knows they haven’t been able to resist in the past.
The cold open takes on the campus protests with a community affairs program in which concerned parents talk about their college-aged kids’ involvement. While two parents are concerned about their children’s safety or legal woes, Kenan Thompson’s character is determined that his daughter at Columbia better not be participating in any protests when he is paying $68,000 a year for tuition. It’s a toothless way to take on the college protests, but it’s also so inoffensive that it’s hard to be mad at it.
Grade: B
Dua Lipa’s monologue is all over the place: it touches upon her name (which, yes, really is “Dua Lipa”), introduces her parents, offers “advice” to “audience members” using her “radical optimism,” and addresses her lazy dancing which became a meme. It’s a whole lot of nothing much — kinda like her dancing.
Grade: B-
In this bit, Young Spicy, an aspiring rapper and his producer direct a couple of backup singers as they improvise, but the only things the women can think to say about Young Spicy are unflattering at best, completely inappropriate at worst: that he’s in the closet, dm-ing high school students, that he’s a lowkey Trump supporter … This is actually a reprisal of a sketch from last season when Ana de Armas hosted, and while I still liked the premise well enough, it lacked the element of surprise this time around.
Grade: B+
The Anomalous Man is a five-minute-long one-joke bit: what if the Elephant Man landed a beautiful woman only to cheat on her? That’s it. That’s the entire joke.
Grade: C+
A pair of very white morning talk show hosts try to break down the whole Kendrick Lamar/Drake beef while their Black colleague looks on in horror in this bit. As a fellow clueless white person, I felt this sketch pretty deeply.
Grade: A-
The strangest sketch of the night — possibly the entire season — goes to this bit in which a woman shows her date her extensive collection of Sonny Angel dolls (which apparently are a real thing which I did not know because I do not have any “sad shy teenagers” in my life) but then it morphs into a parody of the current Zendaya movie, Challengers? I don’t know what is happening here and I do not like it. It does beg the question, though: wither Sarah Sherman?
Grade: C-
This commercial spoof is for the one thing that is there for us at all of life’s big gatherings: a “big ass aluminum tray of Penne Alla Vodka.” It’s “loved by none but tolerated by all.” Possibly the strongest bit of the night.
Grade: A
“Weekend Update” tackles the Kristi Noem puppy scandal (honestly, what on earth was she thinking, though?); the hush money trial; the campus protests; and an all-nude cruise among other things. It’s fine, though Che does repeatedly bomb, which in and of itself is pretty funny, too.
Grade: A-
Kristi Noem’s Other Dog comes to the Weekend Update desk to defend her (and literally beg for help).
Grade: B
Chloe Fineman does a remarkably good Jojo Siwa impersonation to mock the pop star-dancer-TV personality for her whole “reinventing” herself as a “bad girl” thing.
Grade: B+
Finally, Jerry Seinfeld comes to the “Weekend Update” desk as “A Man Who Has Done Too Much Press” as a means to do yet even more press for his middling Pop Tart Netflix movie. It’s not funny. But then again, Jerry Seinfeld is not particularly funny.
Grade: C
It’s been a minute since SNL has done a gross-out sketch, but they make up for it with this one, in which Kenan Thompson plays an OB-GYN whose previous work experience had been as a barbecue pit master. He bastes a pregnant mother’s belly; he uses tongs to examine her; there’s some finger licking. The cast barely holds it together, but it’s no Beavis and Butt-head.
Grade: B
Here, celebrities extol the benefits of wearing teeny tiny statement pins to make it look as though they care about a cause, without the danger of being forced to defend said cause, or be confronted about it. I’ve seen some strange takes online about this sketch, basically accusing SNL of mocking the Gaza protestors … or something. But I read this as SNL mocking the cowardice of the celebrity class who want to look like they are empathetic without having to be held accountable for controversial positions. But maybe I misread it?
Grade: A-
This is another reprisal of an older sketch, this time from the Jenna Ortega episode from last season, in which a cheesy lounge act is brought in to write a jingle for a flooring company. And for no good reason, they saddle Dua Lipa with doing a very bad Long Island accent? Seems unnecessarily cruel.
Grade: B-
Final Grade: B-.
Saturday Night Live airs at 10:30/11:30 p.m. Saturdays on NBC and streams on Peacock.