Ariana Grande Sings Her Way Through a Contagiously Fresh SNL Episode

Hours before the episode three premiere of Saturday Night Live, my partner and I were discussing Ariana Grande’s upcoming hosting gig—to which I declared that the odds of a Bowen Yang-starring Wicked sketch would certainly be high last night. During the pop star/actor’s monologue, where she ran a clinic on singer impressions (Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Miley Cyrus), Yang did show up dressed as a pinked-out Glinda for a moment—but, alas, that was all of the Wicked-related content of the night, despite the new film hitting theaters next month.

The last time Grande hosted SNL was when she pulled double-duty in March 2016. She cut her teeth on Broadway at 15 years old, appearing in the musical 13 before getting cast as Cat on the Nickelodeon hit series Victorious in 2010. Since signing with Republic Records a year later, Grande has remained one of the world’s biggest stars—the run of albums she’s had since 2016, beginning with Dangerous Woman and ending with this year’s Eternal Sunshine, is one of the very best in all of pop music. All of this is just to say: If there was ever a “sure thing” when it comes to hosting SNL, a multi-hyphenate like Grande fits the bill pretty well. Nine years ago, during a “Wheel of Musical Impressions” bit on The Tonight Show, Grande showed just how good she is at capturing the styles of other singers (a trick she, of course, brought into her monologue and elsewhere tonight).

Delays (football-induced and otherwise) threw some of the show’s timing off, but Grande’s second turn as host went off with very few hitches. How good was it? Well, as a wise cue-card says…

“Live from New York…”

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but thank God we got a little bit of James Austin Johnson’s Trump impression this week. We’re only three episodes in and the Rudolph/Harris, Samberg/Emhoff, Gaffigan/Walz and Carvey/Biden combination is growing stale already—which is not a knock on the performances (for the most part), but a knock on the writing. As is the case with most of the show’s history, the jokes write themselves—because they’re just regurgitations of what these characters have been riffing on for two weeks now.

Of course, SNL needed a reason for those four actors to make an appearance together this week, so they dug deep into their bag of safety and pulled out one of those sketches that’s always been used as a vessel for guest appearances and impressions: Family Feud. Ever since Kenan Thompson revealed to the world that he could do a pretty serviceable Steve Harvey impression, the Family Feud format has become an opportune formula when the show wants its cast and cameo actors to really flex those impression muscles. So this week, we got the usual suspects, including Bowen Yang as J.D. Vance and Mikey Day as Donald Trump Jr., and none of the performances managed to move the needle at all.

The “Election Showdown” premise meant practically nothing in this instance, as it was just another opportunity to fit as much Maya Rudolph into SNL episodes as possible before the vote in November—just in case Kamala Harris loses. Harris mentioned her glock and got some good one-liners in there (“I love seeing a man get paid millions of dollars at his Black job,” “I have a message for young women: You need to go to the ballot box if you want the government out ya ballot box!”) and, after proudly announcing that the Harris campaign has raised over a $1 billion, Harvey asked, “How are you not winning by a landslide?” When I tell you that Rudolph conjured a Harris-style response laugh that will certainly tickle your funny-bone, just trust me. It was the highlight of an otherwise abysmal sketch.

Samberg tapped into the “Hey, I’m just a quirky dude” aura for his “Doug the Shrug” Emhoff impression, and it was about as interesting as Gaffigan leaning on the “Hey, I’m just a quirky dude but from the Midwest” aura for his Walz impression (neither of these are interesting at all). We got a funny moment when, upon being introduced, Carvey’s Biden mistakenly called Harvey “Regis,” but he quickly fell back into the same schtick he did in the first two episodes—the “Anyway. And guess what!” bit. Having Carvey in Studio 8H is, in spirit, a very fun thing. But him doing a Biden impression gives me flashbacks to his George H. W. Bush impression 35 years ago, which, if you may recall, was nothing but a couple of catchphrases recycled over and over again. His versatility, or lack-thereof, hasn’t aged so gracefully—even during the current, dreary state of SNL.

Panning over to the Republicans’ side of the game, we got a joke about Trump’s wife, Melania, missing, along with a joke about Vance and Don Jr. being twins that doesn’t land. An Alex Moffat-as-Eric Trump cameo there would have killed. Alas, when Trump and Harris got up to the buzzer, the sketch started to become a blur of talking points cobbled together into what I presume was supposed to be funny material, but none of it really registered—even the audience’s laughter felt forced at points. The focus comes back, but only for a moment, when, upon being asked a question, JAJ’s Trump did one of his “signature weaves”—going off on a tangent about Jerry Seinfeld wearing mom jeans on Seinfeld, immigrants “who are ruining this country” wearing “bad jeans” and Haitians eating Moo Deng. Thankfully, the sketch got canned shortly after.

[Fun fact: The last time Grande hosted the show, Celebrity Family Feud was one of the sketches.]

“You look mahvelous!”

I have to give the “best sketch of the night” designation to “Charades with Mom,” which we got right before Stevie Nicks’s first song. That Grande/Yang link-up I mentioned about earlier? Well, it all comes to a head when two parents (Grande and Andrew Dismukes) meet their son’s (Michael Longfellow) boyfriend (Yang) for the first time. The premise is simple at first: a family game night, featuring two other siblings (Jane Wickline and Emil Wakim), gets a little competitive. I’d like to come out and say that, in these moments, Longfellow really does channel his best David Spade—(ironically) playing his character straight while fastening himself into a great deadpan.

My apologies go out to Dismukes, Wickline, Wakim and Longfellow, though, as this sketch was all Grande and Yang, who went toe-to-toe with each other during a few rounds of charades. After correctly guessing three answers, Yang gloats in celebration. “In your face, Diane!” he says. Grande’s smile dissolves into an angry gaze, as she levels with her son’s beau: “You got a tiny pecker, or something?” Normally, I’d argue that this angle rarely works, because it’s mighty difficult to pull off dick jokes without getting too profane—even on television at midnight. But, Grande and Yang sold it well, and we got one of the funniest line deliveries of the season so far, courtesy of Grande:

“Josh, I was just teasing,” Diane says.

“Okay, phew. Well, you’re going down this next round, girlfriend!” he replies.

“Well, I’ll shoot ya point-blank in the head,” Diane responds.

The father tries to get Diane to guess The Green Mile in the next round, and points at Josh’s green shirt to help with the clue. Grande starts rattling off a laundry list of insults: “Pathetic, fat, bad, evil, no nuts, poor, ugly short guy, pathetic little gay guy.” Of course, Grande “didn’t mean it like that,” as she meant “gay” as in “stupid and bad.” Diane doesn’t have a problem with Josh; she has love and a family. What does Josh have? “A toad chode,” according to her. The two get into a fight and Josh flings Diane’s body across the living room. “You did it,” Diane says. “Finally, one of my son’s boyfriends stood up to me. I need my son to have a man like you, who will protect him—because my son is so, so weak. And I don’t have any respect for him.” It was all so perfectly pulled off, thanks to Yang and Grande’s great chemistry together—which culminates in, as expected, of course, a massive make-out sesh between the two at the sketch’s conclusion. Not bad for a guy with a “rinky-dink pinky between his legs.”

“Yipee! Jerry Rubin died last week.”

Usually, it’s never a good sign when the two worst moments of a show are the cold open and Weekend Update. This week, however, those segments being lackluster was just a measurement of how good the rest of the show was. Colin Jost and Michael Che mostly played it safe this week, though Jost got in a pretty good bit about coat-hanger abortions while Che responded to the news Trump’s planned town hall event with an all-female audience by saying, “Good luck trying to talk over all those rape whistles!” At this point, I’m not expecting these guys to contribute anything meaningful to the current state of the union. Every week, you can count on them grabbing at low-hanging fruit, like Trump holding a rally at Coachella, Mayor Eric Adams’s feelings about a potential Mets versus Yankees World Series matchup, nursing home jokes, J.D. Vance’s disastrous New York Times interview, LeBron James and his son playing in a basketball game together and, least of all, the current drop in inflation with a jab at Biden in tow.

What does it say about Weekend Update when the only kind of schtick that always gets a laugh happens when Che makes fun of Jost’s privilege or misogyny or sexism or thinly veiled assertions that he’s a Trump supporter? I have no problem getting up on my soapbox and saying, again, that it’s time for these guys to step down as anchors. It should’ve happened one or two seasons ago, frankly. They’ve been doing this gig for so long, and they’ve made such an important institution at SNL into a seriously unfunny segment in the process. It’s time to pass the torch on to someone else. For my money, there’s an Update star waiting in the wings, and his name is Michael Longfellow—talk about a Norm 2.0.

As for the Update segments, we finally got some decent material from Ego Nwodim this week—but at what cost? Her ruse as an overworked and exploited Amazon worker didn’t quite hit the mark, but it wasn’t for a lack of effort, as she was at an 11 for all three minutes she was at the desk. The whole gist of it all, after 2.5 minutes of her copiously taping a box and talking about her benefits (Amazon gave her a vest), got punctuated by Nwodim asking Che if he’s going to stop ordering packages from Amazon now that he knows the workers are being forced into unethical work conditions. Che looks at the camera and gives a “Well…” kind of smirk.

Elsewhere, JAJ and Sarah Sherman played Noel and Liam Gallagher and poked fun at the Oasis brothers’ multi-decade feud—teasing and grabbing at each other like bickering children but coming together to agree on a few things, like the best Rugrats baby (Tommy Pickles, legend), the best Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (Donatello, legend) and who the worst Sex and the City boyfriend was (Mr. Big, toxic legend). It was mostly fine, and Sherman was a spitting image of Liam, mop, glasses and all.

“In a word? Chaos.”

The post-monologue sketches have been a mixed bag so far this season, as “$100,000 Pyramid” in episode one was putrid but “Washington’s Dream 2” in episode two rocked. This week, “Bridesmaid Speech” built off of last week’s momentum by giving us something special: Ariana Grande intentionally singing off-key. Four bridesmaids (Heide Gardner, Nwodim, Sherman, Grande) sing a song their bachelorette weekend with the bride (Chloe Fineman), a song delivered to the tune of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.” “They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” Grande boasts. “But, we didn’t go to Vegas—we went to Charleston. Hit it!” Heidi Gardner exclaims. The song starts off all well and good, making jokes about the bride needing a break from her new husband Matthew (Dismukes). But, all quickly dissolves into pure dread, as the bridesmaids’ ditty becomes a recounting of the bride cheating on her then-fiance with a man named Domingo (Marcello Hernandez)—a random guy they all met and certainly didn’t tell Matthew about.

Being the first sketch of the night, “Bridesmaid Speech” took the sing-song energy of Grande’s monologue and popped us over the head with it. She even said in opening remarks that she “wasn’t going to be singing,” only to then do exactly that. Sure, Grande wasn’t the musical guest last night—but that wasn’t going to stop SNL from handing her a microphone in nearly every pre-Update bit. Most of the time, this would’ve been overkill, but Grande’s talent measured up to the demand, even as the “Bridesmaid Speech” sketch started to run out of gas by the time Hernandez makes an appearance at its conclusion. But it was one of those instances where the leading women of SNL got a chance to share the stage together. They’re all dynamite together, and we don’t get enough of that—having Grande in the saddle this week lent them a perfect opportunity.

“You are weak like H.R. Pickens!”

The worst sketch of the night goes to the cold open, which says a lot about the quality of Grande’s performance, as it was the only sketch she wasn’t in. The skit, as a whole, was a bit of a misfire. When it comes to guest stars in SNL sketches, two’s a party, three’s a crowd and four’s an absolute disaster. Again, the magic of this show is its cast, not its cameos. Having three alums taking the spotlight away from the weekly players remains a bummer, and the fact that the material is falling flat makes it an even tougher pill to swallow.

I’ll also give a shoutout of shame to “Celine Dion Sports Promo,” where Grande plays the titular Canadian hero and records a promo song for the UFC. The real life Celine once said that “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” was perfect for NFL rivalries, so SNL thought it would make sense to do a… UFC bit? While Grande’s impression of Dion singing is a masterclass, her impression of Dion speaking leaves a lot to be desired. Like, a lot a lot. But, it’s not the worst recorded segment this season (here’s looking at you, “Spirit Halloween”)—just a low point in an otherwise funny episode.

“If you have a $50 bill, we can give you 50 singles.”

We got two recorded sketches last night: “Celine Dion Sports Promo” and “Saturday Night Live Midnight Matinee – My Best Friend’s House,” both of which spotlit the versatility of Grande’s singing chops. In “My Best Friend’s House,” which was written by the great Dan Bulla (the guy who produces movies with Adam Sandler and wrote the “Tiny Horse” sketch), Grande goes to her best friend’s house and gets sentimental about the smells and sights: a brother’s deodorant, candles, a father’s cooking, a full refrigerator and a warm fireplace. But then, things get dark real quick, as Grande returns to her friend’s home and finds it condemned into a crime scene, as the father (Day) turns out to be a serial killer with more than a dozen victims, including the decapitated head in the fridge belonging to Sherman.

The reason a sketch like “My Best Friend’s House” works is because, even though you know that a turn or surprise is coming, the payoff is executed well despite that anticipation. The way that Bulla focuses on how Grande’s character missed all of the signs because she was too busy enjoying her own nostalgia, it’s a stroke of excellence. Plus, it was another singing moment for Grande, who got to put away her off-key performance from the “Bridesmaid Speech” sketch and let her pipes loose for a few minutes.

Your very precious lunch hour…”

The post-Update sketches last night were all solid, as we finally got to see Fineman stretch out and do some good character work outside of the various news network hosts she’s been tasked with impersonating. Last night, she reprised her Jennifer Coolidge bit in a Maybelline commercial—done with that classic SNL, in-the-mirror trope. On the other side of the glass was Grande, also doing a Coolidge impression—and a far better impression than Fineman’s, might I add. They went through the motions of saying “Wow!” a bunch, but we did get a great exchange out of it:

“What’s a good conversation starter?” Coolidge asks.

“Lemons,” Coolidge replies.

“Heck yes! What topic should we avoid?” Coolidge quips back.

“Fish.”

“The band, or the animal?”

“There’s an animal called ‘fish’?”

Again, Grande’s impression was superb. Easily the best impression of the night outside of Rudolph’s Harris. When Fineman folds out another part of the mirror, a Coolidge-impersonating Carvey shows up and labors through the motions—pretty much ruining the momentum of the sketch altogether. Luckily, it was almost over anyway. As much of an SNL legend Dana Carvey may be, his presence in Studio 8H this fall has added virtually no edge to an already unproven period of the show.

In “Castrati,” Grande played a pale castrato named Antonio during the Italian Renaissance, in a four-minute sketch that was just a glorified bit building up to a very well-done “Twist & Shout” punchline. Grande delivered a glass-shattering falsetto with ease, and we also got a fun moment where Samberg called Thompson by his first name, nearly getting the SNL vet to break.

The black-and-white 10-to-1 sketch, aptly titled “The Hotel Detective,” was a Twilight Zone riff that was, more than anything, a chance for Grande, JAJ and Dismukes to do their best screwball shticks and bunch as many words together in one line as possible while arresting each other over and over. It’s not particularly funny, instead arriving absurdly—which is, I suppose, the mission of a 10-to-1 skit, at least partially. Even in sketches like these, the material doesn’t suffer, largely because Grande is such a camera-demanding and captivating star that the momentum can rest squarely on her and she doesn’t even flinch.

Not Ready For Primetime Power Rankings

1. Bowen Yang
Yang regains the top spot in the rankings this week, even with a light workload this week. His cold open performance as J.D. Vance didn’t offer us too much, but his turn in “Charades with Mom” was an absolutely heat-seeking missile. In a surprising turn, we didn’t see Yang once after Update—but we didn’t need to, this was a perfect example of a “host outshines all” episode.

2. James Austin Johnson
I guess I’ll give the #2 slot to JAJ, if only because he played three worthwhile characters tonight: Trump, the Hotel Detective and a member of Italian royalty. His Trump was a high-point in that bad cold open, and his Hotel Detective was a fun exercise in screwball acting.

3. Ego Nwodim
Nwodim can have the third slot this week, as her effort in the Amazon worker segment of Update was full of energy. While the material didn’t land, it was a result of the writing more than her performance. It was no “Lisa from Temecula,” but it’ll do. She was also in the “Bridesmaid Speech” sketch, so all of her screen time this week was of-note.

Goodnights

“A YouTube star totaled his $200,000 McLaren after he live-streamed himself texting while driving in the rain. Even more tragic: He survived.” —Colin Jost

“Submitted for your consideration: A nightmare world of concentric spheres of hotel detective bureaucracy. Also, this is purgatory and they’re all dead. Did we sell that? It doesn’t really feel like it. This would’ve not flown anytime before Season Five, but what do you expect from the 604th episode of The Twilight Zone?” —Rod Serling

Next week, the lights shine down on Studio 8H once more, as Michael Keaton arrives in New York City to host while Billie Eilish takes the stage.