By LAUREN KASZUBA
Co-Arts Editor
Live from New York, it’s the season 44 premiere of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ The premiere, hosted by Adam Driver and featuring Kanye West, proved to have a 7% improvement in ratings compared to 2017’s season 43 premiere.
The cold open featured Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh, spoofing his televised hearing in before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Damon nailed a solid impression, and performance, and considering Matt Damon’s name was a trending topic on Twitter for hours following this cold open, I’m going to take a wild guess and assume this one impressed most people. I know I was laughing quite a bit. Also, is delivering a cold open related to Kavanaugh surprising? Not at all.
What did the ‘SNL’ cast do this summer? Well, most of them “worked a little and traveled a little.” During Driver’s monologue, he revealed the one thing he hates the most about fall, or more specifically, working with ‘SNL’ players in the fall. He dreads hearing the same small talk from the players each time, and despite this, plays such as Beck Bennett and Kenan Thompson come on stage to talk about how their summer was full of, well, working a little and traveling a little.
I found this monologue to be simply “alright.” It wasn’t hilarious, but it wasn’t not funny, so I’ll call an in-between of sorts here. Toward the end, the repetitive nature of the monologue became somewhat off-setting.
I had reviewed an ‘SNL’ episode or two in our paper last semester. I don’t review the episodes in full, rather, I pull out what I thought to be some of the best skits from the show and discuss them a bit. This allows me to not only let readers such as you watch the episode in full without hearing a full synopsis beforehand, but also allows me to keep the review somewhat brief.
With that being said, “A New Kyle” knocked it out of the park. In this skit, ‘SNL’ player Kyle Mooney reveals he feels left out and begins to feel jealousy towards fellow player Pete Davidson because of all the attention Davidson had received over the summer. Mooney finds a great solution to all of this: dye his hair blonde, start calling people “bro,” and get a celebrity girlfriend (Wendy Williams makes a guest appearance here). After Davidson’s resentment towards Mooney’s similar look at personality, the two men duke it out “the SNL way,” using medieval weapons of war.
Honestly, this skit was hilarious not only because it was well written, but also because there are a few jokes in the skit that one could only understand if they knew a bit about the cast members. I suppose that because I fell into this category of understanding, I was able to appreciate the skit more. Driver taking an arrow to the thigh in attempt to be a mediator to the players was also quite funny.
“Coffee Shop” was probably the second best skit of the night, in my opinion. However, this is also a skit that is most likely more adaptable to the easily amused. In other words, it might be too “silly” for some people, but I found it funny, so I guess you could consider me easily amused.
The skit spoofs an infomercial concept in which normal, everyday people believe they are drinking high-end, “fancy” coffee when in fact they’re drinking Burger King coffee. One specific couple, played by Driver and Cecily Strong, don’t exactly understand the premise of a single-blind study.
They get fed up when they find out they were drinking “burger juice,” despite the man running the study (played by Mikey Day) trying to reassure them that it was just regular coffee served by Burger King. Because the duo appear to be richer, better-off people (and their personality shows this), they are outraged that they had to drink coffee that was $1.99. Driver plays an overprotective husband to his new wife (Strong), and I believe this is what carries the skit. The fact that he is so outraged because he unknowingly drank cheap coffee with his wife is funnier than it probably sounds on paper.
Overall, I was impressed with the ‘SNL’ premiere; with such a great premiere, this sets my hopes up for a great season. ‘SNL’ returns next Saturday with host Awkafina and musical guest Travis Scott.
