Lady Gaga has appeared as a musical guest three times on Saturday Night Live, but she only did double duty once back in 2013, at a very different time in her career — several years before A Star Is Born, back when she was promoting Artpop and her biggest screen credit was a supporting role in Machete Kills. In the last decade, she’s grown tremendously as a musical artist and actor, so it’s a real treat to see her in her element here, game for any sketch. Her easy charm and commitment make for one of the more animated episodes of season 50.
Many of those sketches inevitably involved singing and/or dancing because why not use a voice like that when you have the chance? And, of course, Gaga killed the episode’s actual musical performances, between the cramped glass-house choreography of the catchy single “Abracadabra” and the epic production of “Killah” beginning backstage and ending with a show-stopping tear-away dress moment.
What comes across here even more than Gaga’s talent is her sincerity, an ideal tonal match for a series of pretty strange (compliment) sketches. The first green screen-heavy skit relies on the humor of “ridable luggage,” with Gaga torn between the boyfriend she loves and her ambitions of moving to Paris and becoming a chef — but the joke mainly keeps reverting back to her and her fellow suitcase-riders screaming “go around!” at the cars speeding past them on the highway. The funeral home skit offers some dark humor, particularly at the idea that a pair of unconventional funeral planners (Heidi Gardner and Gaga) would suggest a murder mystery theme to memorialize a man who was murdered (it’s still unsolved). Their eventual fixation on the Roaring ‘20s also allows for an impressively quick outfit change when Gaga and Gardner reappear as flappers.
Even when this episode wasn’t always laugh-out-loud funny, it had a playfulness and silly energy that I appreciated, and a willingness to go dark and weird. It’s not every day you see a heart-removal ritual on SNL, after all, but that’s what you risk when you lie about your birthday for a free sundae!
Here are the highlights:
Look, I can’t deny the power of Gaga’s charisma and radiance. We got plenty of her singing later in the episode, so it was nice to just spend some time with the alternately confident and self-deprecating Stefani Germanotta during the monologue. She opened the show by reminding the audience that she’s an amazing actor before comparing herself to other “aging” pop stars (“Tate McRae is my biological grandmother”) and acknowledging the unfortunate guest performer (R. Kelly) from the last time she hosted. From there, she joked about the performance of Joker: Folie à Deux and its Razzie wins, even promising “to act, to sing, and to not do Joker 3.” Another standout: Bowen Yang in superfan mode, looking sick to his stomach to be in her company. I get that, Bowen.
Some would argue that the latest Dan Bulla short outstays its welcome, presenting a cute but light-on-laughs story of a mouse named Pip who decides to participate in the weightlifting competition at the human high school he attends. As you might expect, it gets pretty dark near the end: The roof collapses on all the kids who bullied Pip, and it’s up to him to save them — but at the last moment he lets Marcello Hernandez’s jock douchebag die, leading to a shocking (if you’re not prepared for it) spray of blood as the bully gets crushed. Gaga’s empathetic classmate is a highlight, especially when she starts to doubt him at the end: “It just got too heavy. Right, Pip? It was an accident. Right, Pip?”
Shout out to Bowen Yang, who got the opportunity to duet with Gaga not once but twice in this episode. They sound great together while they dance close to a version of Eric Clapton’s titular ballad on a date at a fancy restaurant. If the skit falls victim to the classic “we didn’t know how to end this” problem, at least it lands some big, unexpected punchlines, the highlight being this dirty Yang quip: “I recently came into some money. There were no tissues nearby, and I had to blast it somewhere, so why not a wad of twenties?”
There’s little here as cutting as in the appropriately dark post-inauguration episode, but Kenan Thompson did his thing as Kendrick Perkins (at one point removing his own beard to pat the sweat on his face), and Jost and Che landed a few good ones, including the blood donor joke ending with a delightfully grotesque straw sound effect. But far and away the highlight was Mikey Day’s British aristocrat Lord Gaga, husband of Lady. Beyond the easy punchlines (“I was simply born this way,” etc.), it’s just a funny idea enlivened by a game Day and some great character details — like his dripping condescension toward his wife’s “hobby” and total shock at learning of her apparent success. The peak, of course, is the Jost-roasting (Joasting?) conclusion, when the lord takes aim at Jost himself by suggesting it would be a “living nightmare” for a man’s wife to make more money than him. I think Jost is doing just fine when it comes to income, but he always makes a good punching bag nonetheless.
SNL often feels out of touch when it pokes fun at generational slang (and/or AAVE), but honing in on the word “slay” specifically makes for another catchy song for the second Gaga-Yang duet of the night. The sketch loses some steam when it hits some other examples (bops, sus, etc.), but Dismukes perfectly lands the line, “And I named my son ‘Mother.’”
• Mike Myers is back for a sequel to last week’s Elon Musk Cold Open, this time centered around this week’s argument between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Not the most memorable, but Myers’s flail-laughing at his own insufferable jokes remains a pretty funny encapsulation of Musk’s self-satisfied riffing. Knowing that he likely hates every second of this is the most delicious part.
• “Elon, stay in your lane. You’re not the boss.” “But I paid you $300 million.” “And that’s why you’re the boss.”
• Jost in response to those who doubt the possibility of Donald Trump, Jr. winning the presidency in 2028: “You’re clearly unfamiliar with how things work here in hell.”
• Big episode for Ashley Padilla, who appears quite often and contributes some nicely unhinged side characters, like the woman who goes “full nuclear” with her cackles in the L’Oréal easy-run mascara commercial. On the other hand, where’s Emil Wakim? And as someone who really enjoyed Devon Walker’s stand-up when I saw him perform at Friends and Lovers in Brooklyn in 2019, it’s disappointing that he’s practically nowhere to be found.
• The best moment in that mascara ad is the specificity of Heidi Gardner’s “You know how much my art show meant to me!”
• Add The Great British Baking Show’s Prue Leith to Chloe Fineman’s repertoire of impressions, here appearing in an ad for little red glasses.
