Saturday Night Live: Kim Kardashian / Halsey

October 10, 2021 1:17 AM - Season 47, Episode 2

The noted billionaire hosts for the first time.

• Cold Open - Haugen & Congress: Heidi Gardner, Mikey Day, Cecily Strong, Kyle Mooney, Aidy Bryant, James Austin Johnson, Chris Redd, Alex Moffatt, Pete Davidson
• Monologue: Kim Kardashian
• White Aladdin: Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian, Cecily Strong, Kenan Thompson, Bowen Yang
• Grown Women in the Club: Cecily Strong, Kim Kardashian, Ego Nwodim, Punkie Johnson, Chris Redd
• The Dream Guy: Alex Moffatt, Kim Kardashian, John Cena, Kyle Mooney, Chris Rock, Chace Crawford, Tyler Cameron, Blake Griffin, Amy Schumer, Jesse Williams
• The Switch: Kim Kardashian, Aidy Bryant, James Austin Johnson, Mikey Day, Other Kardashians
• WEJJ News: Kenan Thompson, Aidy Bryant, Chris Redd, Kim Kardashian, Ego Nwodim
• Halsey - I Am Not a Woman, I'm a God
• Weekend Update: Colin Jost, Michael Che
  • Terry Fink, Movie Reviewer: Alex Moffatt
  • Kelly Party, Life Coach: Heidi Gardner
• The People's Kourt: Kim Kardashian, Melissa Villaseñor, Other Kardashians, Mikey Day, Chris Redd, Heidi Gardner, Pete Davidson, Chloe Fineman, Kenan Thompson
• Desk Hard Seltzer: SNL Writers
• Halsey - Darling (with Lindsey Buckingham)
• SKIMS: Kim Kardashian, Punkie Johnson, Kenan Thompson, Heidi Gardner, Melissa Villaseñor, Sarah Sherman, Aristotle Athari

posted by rhizome (20 comments total)

Not normally a big fan, but Kim's opening monologue had some hits.
posted by box at 6:27 AM on October 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Kim was an awfully good sport. Dream Guy was cute! Skims are a thing! And I hope we get more random bits like the hard seltzer one this season.
posted by mochapickle at 7:59 AM on October 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I thought I wouldn't enjoy this week but she was surprisingly funny and a very good sport! Kinda wooden in spots, but miles better than a lot of other non-actors, and good at keeping a straight face.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:11 AM on October 10, 2021

The hard seltzer skit was good.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 11:37 AM on October 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of the best SNLs in years. Kim was superb.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:27 PM on October 10, 2021

Oh, and every second of Alex Moffat's movie review was so fun! Has he done that character before?
posted by mochapickle at 1:48 PM on October 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Most of the high points were her capping on her family, which: easy, but were good enough to make this K-ignorant old chuckle in context. I thought the Freaky Friday thing could have used a day or three more work for it to become a classic. The People's Kourt was also pretty good. I wish there were more outlets for Chris Redd's Kanye.

Grown Women in the Club was funny, but it's also a pretty well-worn bit. I happened to see a King of Queens just the other night that had a similar plot, but naturally this one was much better. I could watch Ego Nwodim playing a beleaguered character all day every day.

I think that might have been Sarah Sherman instead of MV in People's Kourt, but it made me notice that they look similar.

All in all, better than I thought it would be, but I also had no idea how good it could possibly be. Is this the first time KK has performed fiction (beyond her public image)?
posted by rhizome at 1:52 PM on October 10, 2021

Given the sheer number of cameos in this episode, I'm a little disappointed they didn't get actual Myspace Tom on.
posted by ckape at 4:14 PM on October 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

I liked a few of these sketches (Freaky Friday was great, The Dream Guy was super fun) but the Hard Seltzer sketch was the only one my spouse looked up at from his computer and watched all the way. It felt more like a College Humor/Buzzfeed style YouTube sketch but it was really funny and I liked that the jokes were coming from the writing and not from cartoony characters.
posted by rogerroger at 8:33 PM on October 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

I liked most of the episode. I was especially surprised and pleased with how KKW and her participating family members were game. However, although I liked the Dream Guy sketch overall, was it really necessary for Kyle Mooney's character (the loser in a room full of obvious winners) to have a speech problem? Also, and I know I have commented on the very same thing before... Halsey and her lip syncing. I read that it's her fourth time to be the musical guest. Every time I see her on ANY show, she is obviously not actually singing. I don't know how much money Lindsey Buckingham needs, but... I was sad for that dude when I saw this.
posted by lilywing13 at 4:19 AM on October 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

Kyle Mooney's character

Excellent point. I think it would have been actually funny if they made up Mooney to be as conventionally attractive as he could pull off instead of dressing/ acting him down. You know, like a normal dude compared to all the Ken dolls. Felt like punching down.
posted by porpoise at 11:29 AM on October 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

My understanding was that when Kyle was speaking with altered pronunciation, his suitor character was playing the "Sherlock Holmes" cat character as referenced by KK, but point taken, that was unnecessary, and he didn't have to be the loser in the sketch. I feel like a really smarmy Beck Bennett suitor character would have been funnier as the butt of the joke. (Still enjoyed this sketch though, which had an ACTUAL Bachelorette contestant - Tyler C - thrown in for fans of the show.)
posted by rogerroger at 3:56 PM on October 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

That way of speaking is very common across other similar lower status characters that Kyle has done in the past so it is likely a crutch. I was surprised that the reveal wasn’t Kyle playing himself.
posted by mmascolino at 7:18 PM on October 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

That was a pretty good episode. That's the first time I've seen a Kardashian in anything. I am, of course, aware of their empire and that they have some reality shows and to be honest I was not expecting much from her. I thought she was really good in just about everything, a little wooden in times but no more than anyone else reading cue cards.

I'm hoping the Hard Seltzer crew is going to be the new Lonely Island and we'll get something like that in most episodes. It reminded me a bit of some of Mike O'Brian's short films.

Lindsey Buckingham always looks like an SNL cast member parodying Lindsey Buckingham.
posted by bondcliff at 8:44 AM on October 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

She could have introduced him as Bill Hader.
posted by rhizome at 3:59 PM on October 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

I went into this episode thinking of Kim K as some boring, inescapable non-entity from a trash reality show, and there was nothing here to dissuade me from that notion. Like, I never hated her personally, she's just kind of there like a big dumb sports stadium that clogs up traffic and makes it harder to get across town. She's part of that same ecosystem that gave us truly evil shit like Trump, and I don't want her to die or anything but I'd like it if her inevitable irrelevance would just hurry up and happen already. There were way too many jokes here that seemed like they just existed to get all the dumbos twittering about how Kim "went hard" on her sisters or some shit. I'm surprised they didn't actually get Kanye in there, just so everybody could lose their minds over that for way too long. (It was probably only Kanye's ego that prevented it from happening. That, and they knew that if they got him onstage it was entirely possible he'd go off-script, starting ranting about Trump and his own brilliance, and they wouldn't be able to get him out of there until after the goodnights.)

Of course they did a couple of sketches about how Kim was simply too hot for some "average," schlubby guy, one of those wearisome tropes they use to suck up to conventionally attractive hosts. (I didn't even get the Aladdin thing. The cartoon characters always seemed like they were both designed to be as appealing as the animators could make them. Aladdin definitely wasn't some little nebbishy dude. Was the whole sketch just an excuse to show off Kim's bod in a Jasmine outfit?) At least the entire episode wasn't one of the super creepy drool-jobs they've given to people like J. Lo or what's-his-name from Bridgerton, but that stealth ad for Kim's shapeware things was redeemed only by the presence of those lovable, floppy doggos.

After Kelly Party, I think I'm officially done with Heidi Gardner's characters. She's a talented performer and she's OK in other people's sketches, but her original characters make me climb the walls. She doesn't write, she just gets out there and hits the same repetitive beats in an annoying voice. When they said they were gonna have a movie reviewer on I was cringing, thinking it was gonna be Gardner's teenage vocal fry girl, so it was a relief when it was the LSD guy instead.

I liked the lottery numbers thing, and the acid movie critic, and... that was pretty much it. I've literally forgotten the cold open. It struck me as the most lazy and cynical episode in a long time. Maybe since Trump hosted. I picture the writers sitting down on Monday of that week and groaning, "OK, Kim wants some sketch where she wears a sexy outfit, we gotta plug Skims, come up with a bunch of roast jokes about her family and cram in like a dozen celeb cameos. Jesus, it's gonna be a grim week."
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:33 PM on October 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

I agree with Ursula Hilter. I felt gross after watching this episode. It was so, so hollow.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:31 AM on October 13, 2021

Wait...Skims are real?

It makes me a little sad, but I agree with the Heidi criticism.
posted by rhizome at 11:48 AM on October 13, 2021

Surely this...
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:43 AM on October 14, 2021

In the Aladdin sketch, i had the same initial visual reaction, but then I felt like they did make a point to explain the premise that a person whose only calories came from stolen bread and who then spent all those calories evading the consequences of stealing bread would not be rockin a killer or even similarly sized bod in comparison to royals who never worried about a meal. Basically, they said "Aladdin, but with this one aspect more realistic than the cartoon".
posted by solotoro at 5:03 AM on October 25, 2021