Chris Rock stepped onto Studio 8H looking like a new man. He used his monologue to take whacks at targets both expected and surprising. On the milestone of his old show turning fifty, Rock said “I want to congratulate Lorne Michaels on twenty five great years of Saturday Night Live.” Surely Jonah Hill didn’t see the stray coming at the end of Rock’s joke about alleged CEO killer and internet heartthrob Luigi Mangione. “If he looked like Jonah Hill, nobody would care. They’d have already given him the chair. He’d be dead.” Rock took a swing at pimply creatine bruiser Jake Paul for boxing Mike Tyson. “Who’s he going to fight next, Morgan Freeman?” But Rock saved his sharpest material for skewering those clutching their throats as if the office of the presidency has never seen the cruel and vulgar example of Donald Trump. “Come on man, this is not the most dignified job in the world…I mean you know what country we live in? You know how many rapists are in my wallet right now. A cup of coffee in America costs seven rapists.” Trump’s buddy Elon Musk got a shout-out for being the richest African-American in the world. And, finally, Rock commended Joe Biden for pardoning his son Hunter Biden. “I got to hand it to Joe, he don’t move as fast as he used to, he don’t talk as fast as he’s used to, but that middle finger still works, boy.”
Rock works best with a mic in his hand, alas. In sketches, he’s going to read a cue card like it’s the bottom row of an eye exam. He fared okay in “Mall Santas,” taunting white parents with the options of getting their child’s photo on the lap of a Black Santa or a white one. “What is your preference?” he goaded. “What do you want Grandma to do with the picture? Do you want to put it on the fridge or in the garage?” To throw shoppers into further disarray he upped the ante with the additional options of a queer female Santa, ho ho ho Jane Wickline, and Emil Wakim looking greasy in a wife beater as Arab Santa.
Just when the show seemed in danger of flat-lining, Rock got a super boost from his old pal Adam Sandler. Sarah Sherman played a needy dingbat of a nurse whom Rock’s doctor didn’t want his team taking to task. “When she cries she sounds like a Victorian ghost,” he said, in one of the better lines of the night. Up popped the patient from under his surgical blanket and wouldn’t you know it was Sandler wearing one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts. Sandler has to work to get his blood squirter to go off in Sherman’s face, but then he went to town spraying Ego Nwodim, Bowen Yang, and Wakim, whom the old-timer delighted in telling “So glad you’re getting air time, good luck, hope your parents are proud of you.” The highlight of the night was Sandler making Rock open his mouth wide to take a gusher of blood down the hatch. It was a big enough wave to shoot Rock’s glasses straight off his face.
Now what to do about Weekend Update? The shtick of Colin Jost and Michael Che, individually and especially as a duo, has grown increasingly tedious. We seem stuck in a pattern of Jost reminding us of what a sullen nerd he was in high school, or him getting teased in some fashion about marrying up with Scarlett Johannson. Meanwhile, we can take bets that Che is going to have a snicker over some lame misogynistic joke that doesn’t get laughs from the studio audience. “A drone crashed into a person’s backyard,” he said tonight, in reference to the New Jersey mystery drone sightings, “but at least now we know whoever is flying them is a frigging woman.” When his punchline is especially weak and off-putting, he’s gotten in the annoying habit of saying “It’s the 90s, guys.” Next week we’ll likely be subjected to the boys’ annual tradition of penning jokes for the other to read. Che will chuckle as Jost recites punchlines that paint him as a gleeful white supremacist. Jost will act mortified. I dread it already. These two great talents, the longest tenured Update anchors in the show’s history, can’t have this job forever. Good things should come to an end before they go sour altogether.
The best part of Weekend Update was Wickline, there to supposedly comment on the new Christmas special from Sabrina Carpenter. “I’m actually going to sing a song as her,” she explained with her trademark lack of affect. “For the purpose of this song, I am her.” She then proceeded to take on the Gaylor theory with a great deadpan song complaining about the internet’s refusal to speculate that she, Carpenter, is secretly gay. “I make out with Jenna Ortega, passionately, and everyone’s like I hear this song is about Shawn Mendes,” she sang. “Why am I the only straight pop star taken at their word?” By my count Wickline has already appeared three times on Weekend Update in the first half of her freshman season. Maybe just maybe we’ll see her wearing the anchor jacket one day.
