Saturday Night Live: Emma Thompson shines but audience mostly keeps mum

Saturday Night Live opens on Meet the Press, where Chuck Todd (Kyle Mooney) asks a trio of Republicans – remorseless reptilian Mitch McConnell (Beck Bennett), multi-chinned bootlicker Lindsey Graham (Kate McKinnon), and pushover Susan Collins – “What would it take for President Trump to lose your support?”

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The answer, of course, is absolutely nothing. Even if he “hypothetically got gay married to the leader of Isis” they will, as McConnell puts it, “always be ride or die bitches”.

An especially flat cold open, it likely took longer to get McKinnon and Beckett’s prosthetics right than to write the sketch.

Emma Thompson, star of the film Late Night, is the night’s host. In honor of Mother’s Day she brings out Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and they translate “motherspeak” for any sons and daughters watching. For example, when “your mom tells you you look tired, what she means is: you look bad” and “When she says, I’m going to book club tonight, what she means is: I’m going to get turnt at Linda’s tonight”. While it’s always great to see Fey and Poehler, the mom humor is mostly groan inducing.

Etiquette Lesson sees Meghan Markel’s cousin Chantee Thomas (Leslie Jones) in England for the christening. She is given lessons in royal ceremony protocol by Vivian Hargrave (Thompson), a “crazy-crazy” etiquette teacher who oscillates between light singing and sudden bursts of violence. The sketch makes good use of Thompson’s musical skills and Jones’s talent for slapstick.

With A Perfect Mother, SNL wishes viewers a happy Mother’s Day via its holiday template: a family (in this case, a mother-daughter pair played by Thompson and Heidi Gardner) happily reminisce about their experiences while quick cut-aways show us the messy, disgusting truth. The focus here is on the various indignities mothers suffer when raising poopy babies, screaming toddlers and slutty teens.

Cinema Classics, hosted as always by the world’s worst husband, Resse De’What (Kenan Thompson, as what may be his best and definitely his most underrated recurring character) introduces Always Be Sisters, a black-and-white melodrama starring a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford-like duo who refuse to cede the final line. The parody is clever enough but De’What’s deranged coda earns the biggest laughs.

Chopped and Judge Court are entertaining reality TV parodies full of surreal sight gags and absurdist dialog (Chopped is especially imaginative with its tuxedo salads, kitchen gunfights and kitten burgers). They’re followed by a performance from the reunited Jonas Brothers, who play the single Sucker.

Weekend Update opens with Colin Jost discussing Trump’s uncovered tax records. He notes the audacity of publishing The Art of Deal around the same time Trump lost a billion dollars, which would be “like if right now R Kelly was writing a book on babysitting”.

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Their first guest is teen movie critic Bailey Gismert, who spirals into a panic attack after Michael Che asks if she has a crush on Detective Pikachu, who she says “can get it”. Pete Davidson shows up to discuss what it’s like living with his mother. He welcomes the actual Amy Davidson on to the show, though she barely gets in a line about wanting to date James Spader before the segment ends.

In Beauty and the Beast, Bennett plays a bro-y version of the cursed Disney prince, whose creepy behavior (including fathering a kid with Thompson’s Mrs Potts) is exposed by his sentient weight set. Most of the sketch falls flat but the closing song, which describes exactly how the Beast got it on with a teapot, earns some big laughs.

The Jonas Brothers return and perform Cool and Burnin’ Up.

The final sketch is the overly broad Wait a Second – That Shouldn’t Be There, a trivia show on TMC that covers glaring errors in classic movies and TV shows. Clearly inspired by the Starbucks coffee cup boner in Game of Thrones, examples include a slurpee in Roots, a Dell computer and N’Sync poster in Shakespeare in Love, and a giant inflatable tube guy in Jurassic Park.

The second to last episode of the season, this was a middle-of-the-road effort. Thompson was fine, as were the Jonas Brothers, but no moment really stood out.