Saturday Night Live: Jack Harlow
October 30, 2022 7:40 PM - Season 48, Episode 4 - Subscribe

Negroni Sbagliato with Prosecco recipe

  • Cold Open - PBS NewsHour: Heidi Gardner, Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day, Cecily Strong
  • Monologue: Jack Harlow
  • Halloween Wedding: Heidi Gardner, Jack Harlow, James Austin Johnson, Chloe Fineman, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Sarah Sherman, Jeff Probst
  • A Message from Skechers: Cecily Strong, Bowen Yang, Chloe Fineman, Punkie Johnson, Marcello Hernandez, James Austin Johnson
  • Post-Halloween Red Carpet Special: Cecily Strong, Mikey Day, Chloe Fineman, Devon Walker, Marcello Hernandez, Jack Harlow, Bowen Yang, Molly Kearney, James Austin Johnson, Kenan Thompson, Michael Longfellow
  • AA Meeting: Michael Longfellow, Bowen Yang, Jack Harlow, Molly Kearney, Chloe Fineman, Kenan Thompson, Cecily Strong, Tom Hanks
  • 2020 Part 2: Chloe Fineman, James Austin Johnson, Mikey Day, Punkie Johnson, Bowen Yang
  • Tableside Bartenders: Heidi Gardner, Jack Harlow, Cecily Strong, Kenan Thompson, Michael Longfellow, Marcello Hernandez
  • Jack Harlow - Lil Secret/First Class
  • Weekend Update: Michael Che, Colin Jost
    • Drunk Uncle: Bobby Moynihan
  • David S. Pumpkins: Jack Harlow, Ego Nwodim, Andrew Dismukes, Kenan Thompson, Sarah Sherman, Tom Hanks, Bobby Moynihan, Mikey Day, James Austin Johnson
  • Jack Harlow - State Fair
  • The View: Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, Chloe Fineman, Punkie Johnson, Jack Harlow
posted by rhizome (31 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I know the David S. Pumpkins sketch was a retread of the original, but it still works because Hanks totally commits to the bit.
posted by Servo5678 at 9:06 PM on October 30, 2022 [4 favorites]


Harlow was a bit shaky throughout, but all in all I thought it was a pretty strong show!

Cut for time: JNCO Longs
posted by rhizome at 1:06 AM on October 31, 2022


Loved Drunk Uncle sarcastically doing a TikTok dance!
posted by ellieBOA at 1:50 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]


I thought this was a week episode overall and was disappointed in the lazy "lol women drivers" joke and whatever the other "lol women" joke was (I have forgotten now) in Weekend Update, which is usually my favorite part of the show. But I thought 2020 Part 2 more than made up for the lackluster episode. And David S. Pumpkins was a really fun reprise.
posted by joannemerriam at 6:23 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


The smile on my face when I realized that they were doing a Halloween ride sketch and we'd already seen Tom Hanks and Bobby Moynihan. Was it as good as the original? Of course not. Was it fun anyway? Hells yeah.

¿Preguntas?
posted by Etrigan at 6:47 AM on October 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


I had no idea who Jack Harlow was. Pretty forgettable, frankly.

Halloween Wedding felt like a bad gag about “hickspeak” and drawn-out into an entire skit.

Sketchers skit was hilarious, if overly long.

AA Meeting was cute and funny.

Table Bartenders was pretty “meh”.

2020 Part 2...I kind of get what they were going for (at least, I think I do) but this one fell flat for me. If they keep shoveling out “i guess we’ll settle for biden” sketches over the next couple of years...well...that’s how you end up with a Trump v2 administration.

Drunk Uncle felt tired and done. WU in general has felt a bit underwhelming so far this season. Like the guys don’t have their hearts in it anymore.

David S. Pumpkins...Yeah, it’s cute and super odd. Once. It was okay, I guess. It certainly doesn’t have that “wtf am i watching?” effect it once did. You know the gag.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:47 AM on October 31, 2022


Also, I want a movie that just consists of Ego Nwodim doing her Is this boy really trying this? face as many times as possible for an hour and a half.
posted by Etrigan at 6:48 AM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


I thought this episode was dire. Aside from Drunk Uncle, which used to be one of my favorite running bits, I think I only laughed once—when the puppet luggage joined the song at the end of the AA sketch. The cast themselves are very funny and talented but I think I’m starting to feel embarrassed for them that they have to be in this show.

Related from TheWrap.com: Is It Finally Time to Put ‘Saturday Night Live’ to Bed?
posted by ejs at 7:02 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I thought this was a bad, unfunny episode. Most notably the David S. Pumpkins retread, one of the finest examples of SNL's 'hey, remember that thing that was super funny? well here it is again with no changes except everyone is older!' tradition of unfunny repeats of past glories when out of ideas.

Maybe it's just me? ALL of it landed sour, the political humor is desperately trying to thread a needle that doesn't even exist anymore, Weekend Update was a series of variations of 'get off my lawn,' sketches all started with one weak joke that went nowhere, the host was completely unfunny, ugh. The political humor is especially tone deaf, it's been clear for a long time that the 80s and 90s white-privilege framing of politics ('isn't it all terribly entertaining?') is dangerously out-of-touch with our political reality and the actual world that creates on the ground, yet SNL persists with 'both-sides-are-terrible-amirite' all the way into the year 2022, unbelievably enough.

I think the ultimate problem is that everyone on the show's sense of what's funny still has to satisfy a nearly-octogenarian showrunner, and that cultural gap is just unbridgeably large.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:18 AM on October 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


The show wasn't terrible but it wasn't great either. I had no idea who the host was and I still don't. I guess he's been a rapper since 2015 or something? His monologue was bad and they could have replaced him with just about anyone in the sketches.

I could have sworn Cecily left the show.

It was weird that they revealed that Hanks was there before the David S. Pumpkins sketch. Honestly, nobody needed that, nobody asked for it. The only good joke was when they asked him where he's from and he said "from before."

I had mostly forgotten about Bobby Moynihan but it was good to see him again.

I really feel like they don't have any way to make fun of Biden beyond "he's old and senile." Surely, they can come up with more.
posted by bondcliff at 10:05 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


An Oral History of ‘David Pumpkins’ (This story originally ran in October of 2017. Following David’s return to Saturday Night Live this past weekend, we are republishing it.) [Vulture / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA at 10:08 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I could have sworn Cecily left the show.

I believe she was doing live theater somewhere. Her Kari Lake plus the soft-focus + lighting difference had me fooled for a split second in the cold open. I thought the joke was going to be SNL caricatures of Walker and Oz with repurposed actual footage of Lake.

Drunk Uncle was great and it is a testament to how committed he is to a character. Also the funniness comes from the character's status and POV i.e. his dialog. That's why there have been perhaps a half dozen Drunk Uncles that feel funny to me but David S. Pumpkins falls flat in its reincarnation. DSP just repeats the same things in a slightly different context. Props to the design/costume/makeup crews for the other characters but that is a "good job" not "haha it is funny". Agreed the "from before" line was the only thing that was funny and its joke construction references the original (I think the guests ask about the skeletons and they say "they're part of it").

I think the ultimate problem is that everyone on the show's sense of what's funny still has to satisfy a nearly-octogenarian showrunner, and that cultural gap is just unbridgeably large.

It is definitely that plus they are always shooting for the broadest possible jokes...which if fine in the 70s/80s when very few people are exposed to any comedy let alone topical comedy (the Tonight Show/Letterman being the exceptions). Now, all the easy jokes are made plus there is very little shared mono-culture. They need to get into the details. Case in point, the Weezer sketch. I know perhaps 2 Weezer songs and nothing about the members or their other albums. I am sure everything referenced in this sketch could be found in a passionate /r/WeezerFans post and that level of specificity + the passion of the odd characters makes it really great.
posted by mmascolino at 10:37 AM on October 31, 2022


I think they should have kept Hanks under wraps until the ds pumpkins sketch because as soon as I saw him I thought: oh god they're doing another david s pumpkins, please spare me, and then it was basically identical to the first one, alas. maybe if I did not know in advance it would have hit differently.
posted by dis_integration at 10:38 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'll say it - the best thing about the show this week was the anticipation of the David S. Pumpkins retread. Big Purr and I were talking about the original David S. Pumpkins skit and animated special over the weekend, and when I saw Tom Hanks show up, I turned to him and "it's happening!" and then the fun was second guessing ourselves if it the skit was going to happen or if it was a bluff- obviously when Drunk Uncle showed up we knew the skit was going to happen. The host/musical guest was objectively horrible, but I did manage to stay awake for the entire show in anticipation of Mr. Pumpkins, and danced along with the skeletons and yelled the catch phrases. For some reason I just find it really funny, though this probably should be the last time the exact retread should be used. I wouldn't mind if they showed the animated special every year, though.

The way I'm defending it makes me feel that David S. Pumpkins is the cheugy PSL of SNL.

I liked the halloween red carpet skit, because we used to go and gawk at all the costumed 20-somethings lined up to go to bars.
posted by Hermeowne Grangepurr at 10:43 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]


I guess he's been a rapper since 2015 or something?

He's been a rapper since 2015 in the same way Vanilla Ice has been a rapper since 1990.

I knew who he was and specifically didn't watch this episode because of him. I'll probably watch Weekend Update on YouTube because I usually like Drunk Uncle.
posted by fuse theorem at 12:07 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


AA Meeting was also worth your time. It was a well put together sketch. The Sketchers filmed piece was well executed but needed an editor with a heavy hand.
posted by mmascolino at 5:35 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I did not care for either the host or the musical guest this week.

I'll let them have the David Pumpkins repeat. The beats were all the same with slightly modified lines, but if they can manage to keep his appearances to at least 6 years apart I think it can avoid feeling beaten into the ground. Plus, they did fix the one problem with the original sketch, where the camera switched too fast on the punchline and was on his face a beat too long before the "Any questions?"

The wedding feels more like it should've been at the 10-to-1 sketch. And come to think of it The View sketch probably should've been when the wedding sketch was, considering it's a parody of a well-known show with the host playing a character with the same name. Only problem with that is it's not a good sketch.
posted by ckape at 7:45 PM on October 31, 2022


Related from TheWrap.com: Is It Finally Time to Put ‘Saturday Night Live’ to Bed?

That's not a great article; Svetkey favors us with the hot take that "To be even more honest, the show was never all that great, even during its early golden age in the 1970s", because, see, humor from nearly a half-decade ago doesn't seem that funny. (Imagine someone in the seventies getting paid to write that about a pre-depression vaudeville routine.) He also gets some basic facts wrong, such as saying that Chris Farley and Adam Sandler "skedaddled from the show" (Sandler admitted some time ago that they were fired).

But, mostly, Svetkey seems unaware that the "Saturday Night Dead" article is itself a venerable institution, dating back to 1980 at least. (Lorne Michaels even called it that when a New York writer did a cover feature on the show in the mid-nineties, when Farley, Sandler et al. were starting to phone it in.) Michaels (and others) has revived the show several times, and while his being in his seventies may be more of an issue than when he did it in his fifties, that's not self-evident. Eventually, someone will be right, if only because we'll all be too busy fighting the cockroaches for rat meat to tune in. But I don't buy that it's received wisdom that it's this year.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:40 PM on October 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


ugh, meant "half-century" above.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:52 AM on November 2, 2022


Okay, I have a different question.

Why on earth is everyone suddenly talking about that specific Negroni recipe? What did I miss?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:54 AM on November 2, 2022


Why on earth is everyone suddenly talking about that specific Negroni recipe? What did I miss?

Someone from the dragons show went tiktok famous for talking about it:

BuzzFeed has the skinny
posted by dis_integration at 7:14 AM on November 2, 2022


The David S Pumpkins was really sad, like a really hollow imitation of itself in a way that makes me think they never knew why it was funny in the first place.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:37 AM on November 2, 2022


> Why on earth is everyone suddenly talking about that specific Negroni recipe? What did I miss?

Someone from the dragons show went tiktok famous for talking about it...


....and it ties into SNL how?

(Or am I being hit with a David Pumpkins kind of moment?)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:53 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


The David S Pumpkins was really sad, like a really hollow imitation of itself in a way that makes me think they never knew why it was funny in the first place.

Ah, but that was the point of it. Look at the first two “scares” of the ride. Neither was actually scary. But they were references to things that, in their original context, were very scary. And then David S. Pumpkins comes along and shows the riders — who had previously bought in to the premise that the mere appearance of a thing that they remembered as having been scary would be scary in and of itself — that true fear is in the unexpected, to wit, a thing they had previously dismissed as ridiculous suddenly appearing behind them.
posted by Etrigan at 10:00 AM on November 2, 2022


(Really, I don’t entirely believe that, but I’d certainly like to think it was deeper than “It’s Halloween and Tom and Bobby are available.”)

((It wasn’t.))
posted by Etrigan at 10:01 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


Did Cicely ask for that negroni in the tableside bartenders skit? That is what I though it was referring to, but I have no energy to go back and check.
posted by Hermeowne Grangepurr at 1:07 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]



....and it ties into SNL how?

Did Cicely ask for that negroni in the tableside bartenders skit? That is what I though it was referring to, but I have no energy to go back and check.


yeah. It was referenced in one of the sketches. Most likely that one, but I can't really remember now
posted by dis_integration at 1:30 PM on November 2, 2022


Good enough for me!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:32 PM on November 2, 2022


Did Cecily ask for that negroni in the tableside bartenders skit?

It was Cecily!
posted by ellieBOA at 1:44 PM on November 2, 2022


I only know the that Negroni from the sketch, but the lines around it made me think it was an actual trend, and apparently I was right! Plus it's not always easy to come up with a sentence to put in the required text box, since I don't want the whole post displayed in the show index listing.
posted by rhizome at 1:49 AM on November 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


I've always felt like this was going to be a rebuilding year and this seemed like a rebuilding-year show. Jack Harlow I only know from a Lil Nas X video, but I thought he was fine. His music isn't quite my thing but he was definitely capable in sketches. I liked the visuals in both of his musical numbers. It was funny, to me, that all his clothes were so big. I've been waiting for bog clothes to come back in! Other things I liked

- the wild energy that Hernandez brings to everything. He's fun.
- same thing with Longfellow's weird staring thing
- How does Devon Walker look so much like a Black Pete Davidson? I guess it's the height and the dimples. He's great.
- Molly does a great job showing off that they're not just an Aidy replacement
- I thought 2020 Part 2 was funny though yeah, they're not great at digs on Biden otherwise
- I liked that DSP was a weird retread in a less funny way
- genuinely liked the AA sketch

Ego had some good parts, was good to see Cecily again, all the new folks are getting screen time. I usually watch it a day to a week later so that may have something to do with me being more forgiving of the show's many shortcomings.
posted by jessamyn at 4:19 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


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