![]() Put together, these three sketches feel like Season 46 grasping for something - something SNL has often been grasping at in recent years, whether it’s with the Jost/Che iteration of Weekend Update jokes or attempts to find “both sides” to their political sketches. Bennett plays a non-star who releases an impromptu anti-Trump rap, only to be told by everyone in his life, in no uncertain terms, that it’s opportunistic, embarrassing, and appalling. Bennett’s video, meanwhile, is the kind of ultra-specific cultural detritus he and Kyle Mooney seemingly live to collect and spoof, though this very contemporary form of quasi-influencing coming from an attention-coveting D-lister is a few decades removed from the ’80s and ’90s playground Bennett and Mooney usually occupy. It’s the kind of sketch that has to risk some discomfort in order to get at anything remotely pointed, and here it doesn’t quite have the big, cathartic laughs it probably needs to get out of the awkwardness with grace. The sportscaster sketch represents a much trickier needle to thread, because it requires two of the three characters to show real-life gravity in describing a situation that rings uncomfortably true while Burr’s white guy panics over the shtick he’s planned out to razz his coworker over a lost sports bet. ![]() Indeed, it’s the cast’s in-quotes performance of Italian-American gestures and pronunciations that provides both the fun of this sketch and a neat meta-twist to the dialogue about not giving too much credence to unfair assumptions and stereotypes. Or at least, that seems like the idea here most likely, Burr and the writers were more tickled by the notion of goomba stereotypes (it’s OK for me to say “goomba” I’m half-Italian) displaying surprising nuance in the discussion of gender pronouns and ethnic backgrounds. “Don Pauly” represented such a clear, coherent, hooky concept that it’s surprising the show didn’t drop it earlier into the running order: Don Pauly is flummoxed by the surprising wokeness of his old mafia chums, in a scene that pokes fun at the application of social sensitivity in situations that don’t really call for it. There was also a sketch featuring Burr as a sportscaster initially oblivious to the latest horrific incident of police violence against a Black person described so attentively by his (Black) co-anchors and a Beck Bennett video piece about an actor attempting to go viral with his anti-Trump, pro-voting screed. The most direct representative was “Don Pauly”, where Burr played a mafioso returning from a 20-year absence to find that his mafia goons aren’t so accepting of his racial descriptors, lack of attention to pronouns, and name-dropping of Jamie Kennedy. Three sketches toyed with ideas around “wokeness,” representing about half of the night’s sketch output. Then again, maybe Burr is just compatible with SNL’s ongoing struggle to figure out new, less predictable angles on, for lack of a better word to capitalize for faux-importance, The Discourse. Burr, though, had a whole episode that felt keyed into his lightly satirical yet not fully developed point of view. It’s not so far removed from the type of material Rock sometimes favors: acknowledging certain social ills without necessarily giving a left-leaning audience what they think they want or expect. Burr’s set ended with an abrupt “that’s my time!” without the usual big-laugh button that’s supposed to precede it. These jokes worked well enough on their own, if not wildly inventive in their development or execution. In his monologue, Burr poked fun at notions of wokeness and allyship, making his case that white women have hijacked national conversations about equality and that a longer, warmer gay pride month has an unfair advantage over February’s Black History Month. Unlike Rock’s gig, the Burr-hosted episode seemed to take some of its cues from Burr’s stand-up material - and with so few sketches making it to air, it only takes a few with common ground to make an episode feel more thematically unified than usual. Combined with the season’s endless debate sketches, a longer stand-up-based monologue can reduce the amount of airtime available for actual sketches. ![]() When Saturday Night Live has a genuine stand-up comedian as a host, it can shift the whole structure of the show, which is what happened last week, with Chris Rock, and this week, with less famous comedian Bill Burr.
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