Best, Worst Moments from Chris Rock's 'SNL'

by Julian Spivey
Former cast member and stand-up comedy royalty Chris Rock returned to Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center in New York City to host Saturday Night Live on Saturday, Dec. 15. Ridiculously, he’s the first former cast member of the show to host an episode in the milestone 50th season – former writer John Mulaney has hosted. It’s actually the furthest into a season the show has gone without a former cast member hosting since season 43 (2017-2018). The episode marked Rock’s fourth hosting stint and his first since the 46th season premiere in 2020.

Here are the highlights and lowlights of the episode:   

Photo: NBC

Best:
You always expect a great monologue when the show brings in a stand-up comedian to host, but we’ve seen some weak ones thus far this year, from Nate Bargatze bringing a rare less-than-A+ performance to the absolute abomination that was Bill Burr’s post-election monologue. Chris Rock, thankfully, didn’t disappoint with an eight-minute set that covered CEO killer Luigi Mangione (I particularly enjoyed the “you know, sometimes drug dealers get shot” line), how it’s been a bad year for “his people – blacks” and how maybe the best way to combat immigration is not to give Latin baseball players $700 million.     

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Best:
The 50th season has been one filled with cameos, which has been one of the season’s highlights, seeing so many legendary faces of the past (while also feeling like we haven’t seen enough – which is strange, I admit), but this particular episode felt like one that might not have any cameos as it was past 2/3 mark of the episode before maybe the most surprising one of the season occurred. Rock, Ego Nwodim, Bowen Yang, and Emil Wakim were playing medical professionals who thought they were supposed to remove a gallbladder, and it turned out they were supposed to remove the appendix. The mistake was made by Sarah Sherman’s inept nurse, Lizley, who worried everybody would hate her for her mistake and compounding mistakes we’d soon realize. It felt like the beginning of what will become a recurring character for Sherman – and it might – but the sketch would soon be hijacked (not in a bad way) when the patient awoke, and we realized it was ‘SNL’ legend Adam Sandler who began spraying everybody wildly with blood (an often used ‘SNL’ joke) and seemed to get a lot of glee in dousing his old buddy Rock. Sure, it kind of “broke” the sketch, but in a good way. I wanted Sandler to host an episode this season, and I hope this isn’t all we’ll see of him in season 50, outside of the multi-hour special in early 2025.     

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Best: 
There were so many great punchlines in Rock’s monologue on Saturday night, but the award for best joke of the night belonged to Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost with the simple and astute: “Donald Trump has been named TIME’s Person of the Year because no person on Earth has taken up more of our goddamn time.”

Worst:
The worst part of this week’s ‘SNL’ episode is that it was merely average, a bit ho-hum. That’s the type of thing that doesn’t draw my ire, as you’d rather have an average episode than an outright bad one, which we’ve seen on a few occasions this season. It just might stand out more than an episode is of average quality when it’s a milestone season, and you’ve expected more from it. There wasn’t a bad sketch the entire evening, but there weren’t any sketches I’d expect to make my season-end list of the 10 best ‘SNL’ sketches of the season. It’s just an episode that was.