Best, Worst of Walton Goggins’ ‘SNL’

by Julian Spivey
​The penultimate episode of the milestone 50th season of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” proved to be a standout moment for first-time host Walton Goggins, fresh off recent seasons of HBO’s “The White Lotus” and “The Righteous Gemstones.” The nearly perfect episode showcased Goggins’ willingness to do anything and was one of the best overall episodes of the season.

Here are the best and worst moments from the episode…

Photo: NBC

Best:
My favorite performance from Walton Goggins during his hosting debut was his flirtatious waiter Albee, serving a table during a Mother’s Day brunch, by getting really close with a couple of mothers played by Sarah Sherman and Heidi Gardner, while completely creeping out their sons, played by Mikey Day and Andrew Dismukes. The southern accent, the unbuttoning of the shirt and nearly everything else Goggins did during the sketch had me in stitches, but nothing made me laugh more than the lines: “You got to spend nine months in your mama, I’m trying to spend 20 minutes” and “Just ‘cause your mama baked you, don’t mean other men don’t want to see the oven.” Nobody does sleaze better than Goggins.

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Best:
While Walton Goggins was clearly the MVP of his episode, my single favorite performance of the night came during Weekend Update when Mikey Day played a new character – and one we’ll probably never see again – called “A Guy Who Just Walked Into a Spiderweb,” who was supposed to discuss President Donald Trump’s tariffs. What occurred was one of the best bits of physical comedy and pratfall humor in the history of ‘SNL,” hearkening back to some of the classic moments from Chris Farley and Chevy Chase. Anybody who has ever walked through a spiderweb, which I assume is most of us, will understand the feeling and enjoy this bit.

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Best:
Walton Goggins’ first sketch of the episode featured him playing a character named Matt, a truly kickass-looking and sounding dude, who happened to be in Philadelphia in 1789 during the creation of the amendments to the Constitution. After the group has decided on the First Amendment, it is Matt who produces the idea for the “second most important principle of our nation” to be GUNS. The initial pan to Matt and the way he utters, “Guns,” instantly made for one of the funniest moments on the show all season. The Second Amendment sketch is the perfect melding of a type of humor to a week’s specific host.

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Worst:
There’s a good chance this was my favorite episode of the season. The only two episodes that could compete with it were Martin Short’s Christmas episode and Lady Gaga’s episode. Frankly, it was hard to pick a “worst moment” from the episode, but I’ll go with the night’s final two sketches, as they didn’t have the same amount of laughs as the rest of the episode. Those sketches were the one-joke “The Deathly Diner,” with the unprepared staff constantly saying, “it might be your last,” and writer Dan Bulla’s latest “Midnight Matinee,” which featured Andrew Dismukes at his boss’s house and how he completely loses his mind thinking about the fact that he has a squatty potty in his bathroom. Both sketches had their moments, but didn’t quite hold up to everything that came before them.