It was a depressing return to form tonight for SNL. Not the show was particularly rape-y or anything, but rather that it was just sickeningly mediocre.
Much of the failure was due to the utter unpreparedness of host January Jones to perform on live television. She giggled and stammered her way through the sketches, her demeanor vacillating between uncomfortable and deer-in-headlights. It was only during a pre-tape that she showed any capability at all, and even then she was just playing Betty Draper.
Usually the show’s writers have some facility for aiding inept hosts, keeping them out of most sketches, sidelining them in the ones that feature them – the George Foreman special. Apparently everyone on the show this week assumed that Jones was going to be able to handle herself and wrote her a series of big parts. This proved a critical flaw.
But we’re not here for a sketch-by-sketch review, are we? No, we’re here to chart the show’s ongoing trivialization of a horrific sexual crime!
So let’s get started!
It was a clean week for SNL, with nary a single sketch or joke broaching that hideous topic. The show was so restrained that even a joke about Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Bernie Madoff failed to go to that well.
Bravo, SNL.
Things were a little less promising in our control category, the homophobia-themed jokes. There were two entire sketches where the only joke was that being gay is unusual and strange, one about doctor Jekyll making up Hyde to ‘hyde’ his gay leanings from his wife, and a return of the female reporter who aggressively hits on her female interview subjects.
So that makes the total for the week:
Rape – 0
Homophobia – 2
Until next week’s Joseph-Gordon-Levitt show I’ll leave you with a question:
Is there a Kristen Wiig character who isn’t nails-on-a-chalkboard horrible to watch?
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