Paul Mescal’s Musical Gladiator, Trisha Paytas, Church Lady

Election 2024 is in the rearview mirror finally, and with it went the season’s political players that have dominated the cold opens. Well, one of those players actually did stick around, but it was to dust off one of the 50-year-old series’ most iconic characters of all time, Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

A popular character through the early part of Carvey’s SNL career, Church Lady has made a few appearances since, with the latest coming just ahead of Donald Trump’s last election victory in 2016. While everyone seemed to remember Trump this year, the audience didn’t seem to know q uite what to do with this character through much of her usual schtick.

In fact, the audience appeared to take a bit of time to find its funny bone in this episode, leading to some awkwardly quiet sketches. Thankfully, Heidi Gardner was on hand to wake them up with an unhinged performance as a shocked mother when her son gets his ear pierced, while Weekend Update finished the job of reminding them this is a comedy show.

This was a huge week for the season’s new Featured Players, with all three of them getting three different sketch appearances, and at least one major role on the night. And to their credit, it was a strong showing for all of them. Jane Wickline showed off her awkward musical chops, Ashley Padilla was fully committed as an aspiring commercial actress, and Emil Wakim was able to keep up with Heidi’s aforementioned affronted mother, which is no small task for anyone.

As we shift from politics into the actual celebrating of 50 years of Saturday Night Live, this was more like the show dipping its toes in the waters of its legacy. We appreciated the look ahead with the Featured Players, but we’re not quite feeling the celebration yet. 50 years is a big deal, SNL. It’s okay to go crazy — though maybe NBC is trying to hold back for that 50th anniversary special on February 16, 2025.

Even Trisha Paytas’ surprise appearance couldn’t elevate the night, while alum David Spade’s turn as Hunter Biden may have actually dragged it down a bit. He didn’t even appear to bother learning his lines and couldn’t have looked less interested in being part of the night.

As usual, we’re ranking all the sketches from worst to first, including the Monologue, Cold Open, “Weekend Update” and any sketches that were cut for time but made their way online. We’ll skip the musical guests, because they’re not usually funny — unless Ashlee Simpson shows up. We wrap up with a look at the cast-member who had the strongest week.

Paul had a nervous kind of awkward charm to him throughout this monologue where he never quite looked comfortable but was definitely happy to be here. He got a kick himself — even though he knew it was coming — when they followed up his “comedy” film scene montage of himself crying in various movies to his doing the same in Gladiator II with poorly doctored footage. The bit with Marcello Hernandez joining him in short shorts fell flat, with even Marcello seemingly acknowledging it with his awkward exit. This audience tonight has been giving nothing and it’s definitely bringing down the energy.

We could get behind Paul Mescal’s top Spotify Wrap artist being some obscure new age artist played by Bowen Yang, but the Trisha Paytas cameo didn’t bring anything new to the sketch, and the ending again felt like they didn’t really know what to do. None of the characterizations made sense in said ending as they went from not knowing who Bowen’s character is to suddenly loving him and singing along. Maybe had there been a line about how he seems to magically pull people into his fandom or something. All in all, the piece felt a little disjointed and unfinished as if someone said, “We should do something about Spotify Wrapped lists,” but they couldn’t come up with anything good.

Andrew’s Bruce Sprigsteen made zero effort to match his appearance save for a wig and his delivery wasn’t much stronger. We did appreciate Chloe Fineman’s Timothee Chalamet and James Austin Johnson’s Bob Dylan — particularly Bob’s obsession with getting to the hors d’oeuvres at the end of the red carpet that BuzzFeed’s Heidi Gardner was not letting him get to. Once again — a running theme on the night — the writers didn’t seem to know how to get out of the sketch, so they went with some lame question to chase down a headline. At least it wasn’t too long.

A huge crowd pleaser during Dana Carvey’s original run, we have a feeling SNL was hoping for a stronger response from this audience. There was literal dead silence to her first utterance of “Satan!” “Well isn’t that special” didn’t get much better, until a fairly obvious applause sign went off, triggering a sudden response. As we enter the nostalgia era of this anniversary season, this audience did not seem all that familiar with this iconic character. And with no audience to feed off of, much of Dana’s material fell very, very flat.

It didn’t help that David Spade’s surprise appearance as Hunter Biden was one of the laziest cue-card-reading performances of the season. We did get a kick out of Church Lady asking him,

“Last I checked, Jesus wasn’t walking around in a robe with no underwear hanging out with prostitutes,” and Hunter Biden’s response that he kind of thought he was. Unfortunately, this was neither biting satire nor hilarious comedy. Instead, it looked worn out and tired, which hopefully is a fluke as we suspect we’ll see more of these classic character retreads — unless this moment alone leaves Lorne reconsidering.

This was one of the night’s several sketches where the ending didn’t quite work — and seemed tacked on when there were no better ideas. To that point we were enjoying the idea of an All-Male Revue that was more about the narrative and the story than the stripping, while the bachelorette party attendees tried to make sense of it. Some of the nonsense on stage was pretty funny, though they definitely didn’t really go far enough with most of it — except for when Marcello Hernandez finally took his shirt off and — well … yikes! This was a solid-enough concept that wasn’t executed brilliantly but had some fun moments along the way.

When you don’t have an ending to your sketch, just skip it entirely. It didn’t hurt this courtroom piece at all as Andrew Dismukes continued to prove why he’s the best in this cast at portraying confident buffoonery. His defense attorney was clearly a moron, as was his planned Devo-inspired defense of Paul Mescal, but it was nevertheless entertaining to see him try — and get a giggle out of Sarah Sherman for the intensity of his delivery. This is the kind of stupidity we can get behind!

We’re not entirely sold on that ending, but loved everything leading up to it. Huge kudos to Ashley Padilla for redeeming her poor grandma performance earlier with a great performance opposite Paul Mescal’s seething intensity as two actors in an Italian restaurant commercial. The premise of her single ad-libbed line mistake triggering a full-on mental breakdown from Paul was building up perfectly to a crescendo that got a bit derailed by the ending we got, but it doesn’t entirely take from the big laughs that preceded it.

Absurdist brilliance exploded from the boys’ simple statement that serious actors are often a bit too intense, with Paul Mescal agreeing that they can be emotional. And then the emotions started, leading to a genuinely bizarre and surreal fantasy creation of what life could look like if they continued to follow this narrative thread of their bond together established in … this first meeting? This is the kind of simplistic chaos that Please Don’t Destroy has built their reputation on and it was carried off brilliantly here by Paul leaning into his dramatic chops to create comedy gold.

Leave it to Heidi Gardner to put in the work to save the start of the show in the first post-monologue sketch. Emil Wakim got his first major starring sketch role, but it was Heidi’s over-the-top reactions and energy that really sold the piece — but also had us convinced she was going to go through that table. Paul Mescal was totally believable as a college student who brought home a (gasp!) pierced ear, sending his parents into increasingly erratic outrage. Ashley Padilla did not even try to sell her vocal performance or delivery as that of a “grandma” character, though she took those falls like a champ (still no table). This was the sketch that appeared to wake up the crowd with genuine moments of shock and laughter.

Colin Jost’s joke about Diddy’s “Incredible grip strength for a guy covered in baby oil” in response to allegations he dangled a woman off a 17-story balcony was definitely one of the highlights in a segment that saw Michael Che again chastise the audience for their shocked response by telling them “it’s the ’90s.” The boys kicked off the segment with some dark jokes about the United HealthCare CEO’s shooting death, but nothing compared to what the internet has been saying, while they also got in a dark jab at president Biden and Che shamed the audience in advance for an “objectively very smart joke,” telling them they’re dumb if they don’t laugh. That’s one way to manage a crowd.

Once again, Heidi was all performance all the time as the mother of a kid just signed to the NFL basking in the money and faux fame (that’s mostly in her head). We were getting a bit of Ego Nwodim’s performance style in a few of her line deliveries, but this was another great showcase for her character commitment. Marcello was a great foil as her son who sacrificed his personality so she could live this dream on the back of his success. There were a lot of great moments throughout, including a pretty funny cutaway to Jost, but full props to Heidi for continuing to be a scene-stealer when she’s on her A-game.

There were some hilarious moments throughout this musical spoof trailer for Gladiator II, which apparently bowed to the success of Moana 2 and Wicked by adding 50 minutes of musical numbers. We loved that this didn’t impact the brutal violence, but the best part was seeing Paul Mescal in beautiful voice and fully decked out from the film giving us moves like the floss and classic Broadway dance. The Lin-Manuel Miranda rap sequence was inspired lunacy, but really the whole piece was inspired brilliance … and lunacy. Honestly, we’d kind of see this movie.

PLAYER OF THE WEEK

There were great showcase pieces for some of the most reliable repertory players including Andrew Dismukes, Sarah Sherman, and Bowen Yang, while the featured players each got a chance to really shine in their biggest collective episode of their young careers yet. This was their chance to prove their unique comedic voices, and we really feel they made the most of it.

But when it comes to who carried the night, we kind of suspect we gave it away throughout this piece. How could we not praise the incredible level of commitment Heidi Gardner gives every single time she’s on that stage. She may have gone most viral for breaking during that Beavis and Butt-head sketch, but she’s even better when she’s got it together.

She was brilliantly hilarious as a trashy sports mom on Weekend Update and even better as an emotionally erratic mom discovering her college-aged son got his ear pierced. Then, she can balance out those performances by playing it straight as she did in the BuzzFeed sketch, proving she can be the glue holding absurdity together, or be the absurd. One of the show’s most versatile weapons, Heidi has emerged as perhaps the top performer in this current cast.

Saturday Night Live’s 50th season continues next week with host and SNL alum Chris Rock and musical guest Gracie Abrams.