Best, Worst of Jon Hamm's 'SNL'

by Julian Spivey
For the second straight week, “Saturday Night Live” brought back a memorable host from the show’s past who hadn’t hosted the show in some time, with Jon Hamm, who hosted three times during his “Mad Men” heyday.

​During his monologue, Hamm explained that although it had been 15 years since he last hosted the show, he hadn’t exactly been a stranger to it, making a whopping 14 cameo appearances in the years since.

Here’s the best and worst from Hamm’s episode… 
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Photo: NBC

Best:
It may have been on the nose. Hell, TV reporter Josef Adalian joked about it on social media earlier in the week, posting: “I was messaging someone about a certain HBO show and autocorrect changed it to ‘the white POTUS.’ There’s your SNL skit right there.” This made me chuckle when the show parodies “The White Lotus,” a week after its season three finale, with “The White POTUS.” I wonder if they saw Adalian’s post?

“The White POTUS” is nearly a pitch-perfect parody of “The White Lotus,” with the only blemish being Sarah Sherman’s take on Aimee Lou Wood’s character, which was horrible. It was so bad that Wood has already called it out for being “mean and unfunny,” which I’d typically roll my eyes at, but it was pretty awful.

The rest of the sketch was perfect with President Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) taking on the Jason Isaac’s role and almost catatonic, Chloe Fineman playing Melania Trump but with the outrageous North Carolina accent used by Piper Posey in the HBO drama, and the Ratliff kids from the show being the Trump kids with terrific cameo reprisals by Alex Moffat as Eric Trump and Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump. It was also nice to see Beck Bennett return to the show in a reprisal of his Vladimir Putin impression. My biggest laugh was their use of actual show footage of Jon Gries from “The White Lotus,” because you know he will be there. He’s always there. 

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Worst:
Hamm was considered one of the show’s best hosts when he frequently stopped at Studio 8H 15-plus years ago. However, I don’t remember those episodes well and have not re-watched them. So, I greatly anticipated what the show would give him to do this week and was disappointed when it was not much of anything worthwhile. He played a game show contestant so scared of embarrassing himself on TV that everything he said or did was the worst thing he could say or do, which came with a horrible fart sound effect. Later, he played part of a gay couple with Bowen Yang, who appeared at a friend's event with a baby they hadn’t had the night before and were annoyed by the questions about how they got it (there were some laughs, but not enough). The Icebreaker sketch, where Hamm’s icebreaker reveal is that his mom killed his dad on an episode of “Jackass” was equally bad. The show just seemed to be running on steam on its third consecutive week of shows.

Best:
It’s not often that one singular punchline from a Weekend Update joke will give me the biggest belly laugh of any ‘SNL’ episode, but that happened Saturday night with a Michael Che joke I didn’t see coming. Che set up a joke about an incident that occurred on a New York City subway in which a person robbed and sexually assaulted a dead passenger. The punchline was simply Che singing “Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,” from the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind,” it was so unexpected, it was perfect.

Best:
Lizzo in comeback mode, though it hasn’t been all that long since she was atop the pop game, proved to be one of the best musical guests of season 50 with a medley of “Love in Real Life,” which saw her ripping on guitar (didn’t know she had that in her bag) and “Still Bad,” which proves exactly what the title says. For her second evening performance, she put on her best Tina Turner/Aretha Franklin with “Don’t Make Me Love You,” a quieter ballad than what we typically see from Lizzo, but I felt it worked well. It’ll be interesting to see how her upcoming album Love in Real Life fares among listeners, after some controversies in her life might have her less beloved than she once was, but what I heard on Saturday night was nice.