Saturday Night Live (SNL) held an episode in honor of the show’s 50th anniversary, featuring over 100 celebrities. The celebratory episode features 19 segments and notes the show’s 50 years of airing in almost every sketch. SNL is a nightly humorous show that often makes fun of tragedies and the state of both the world and the United States that occurred the previous week. This allows the audience to turn their fears or annoyances of these events into joy and laughter. Despite the previous successes of SNL, the anniversary show itself was rather disappointing, especially considering the large amount of talent featured and the great expectations placed on it.
Although there were a few funny moments, many segments were lacking or obviously only used to get more celebrities on screen. The actors themselves did well in most of the sketches and segments, but the writing of those segments was boring and bland. One of these segments was “Scared Straight,” a skit where an officer has different prisoners attempt to scare kids considered high-risk for crime not to go to jail, resulting in many gay jokes packed inside movie references. This made a rather ironic sequence, as it followed the “In Memoriam to Cancelled Sketches” montage, and its topic is already controversial. The jokes themselves were boring, unfunny and homophobic, taking away the little positive energy left from the other sketches.
One might expect this large celebration to attract better ideas, especially considering the significant viewership increase of the episode. A highlight of the show, as it typically is, was the “Weekend Update” with Colin Jost and Michael Che. The two hosts have been leading the segment together for over 10 years. The duo did well, made funny jokes and had very well-developed chemistry, as they do almost every week. After the typical part of the “Weekend Update,” many different characters came up to make fun of different people in SNL. This included Vannessa Bayer and Fred Armisen as “Lorne’s Best Friends from Growing Up,” who claimed Lorne Micheals, the producer of SNL, was rude to them and framing him as a generally lousy person. Another actor in the sketch was Bill Murray, who made fun of the Weekend Update hosts by ranking the 10 best hosts of the last 50 years.
The episode was obviously a celebration of SNL, featuring many different recurring characters, such as Chad, Debbie Downer, The Maharelle Sisters, Coffee Talk and Black Jeopardy, with the last even including Doug, played by Tom Hanks, a featured character in one previous episode in the recurring sketch. This unoriginality was unsurprising and disappointing, as the skits followed a predictable formula and lacked the shock factor that SNL so often brings. Despite this, seeing the popular characters is always fun to watch, but sadly, none of these were top performances in their respective series. One of these, “Debbie Downer,” seemed just to be there to fill time, including almost entirely bland writing and mundane jokes. The most positive thing about the sketch was Robert DeNiro, who played himself. Even this highlight was rather dull, as it was too simple and predictable. In the scene, DeNiro became angry at Debbie Downer, making empty threats as Jimmy Fallon, Ayo Edebiri and Drew Barrymore held him back from injuring her.
Another repeating piece of the episode was the montages. These sequences of clips, “Physical Comedy,” “Commercial Parodies” and “In Memoriam to Cancelled Sketches,” added little to the show itself. Their only purpose was to have knowledgeable fans point at the television and exclaim, “I know this one!” These unmemorable sections took up a significant amount of time, which would have been better suited for new sketches or even commentary on the characters by the actors to allow the viewer to feel close to the set and people on SNL.
