Saturday Night Live Recap: A Light Halloween SNL for Dark Times

In one of the most galactic-size understatements in recent memory, President Joe Biden — played for the first time ever by Mikey Day — kicked off SNL’s Halloween episode by noting, “The world is a pretty scary place right now.”

He went on to obliquely reference the Lewiston, Maine, mass shooting and the Israel-Hamas war, two stories that dominated the week’s headlines but are so monstrously dark they can only be glimpsed through the umbrella categories of “shootings” and “wars.” Future viewers of the episode might have no idea exactly which Pretty Scary week it aired during, given that the words “Israel,” “Palestine,” and “Lewiston” are not mentioned once throughout.

It’s probably for the best. While some cognitive dissonance may be required to watch a topical comedy show entirely sidestep what most viewers have either been thinking about or aggressively not thinking about all week, how could a topical comedy show on network TV successfully satirize the darkest parts of humanity? Is there any boycottproof sketch premise or Weekend Update joke about “shootings” and “wars,” or the experience of bearing digital witness to them, that would be neither alienating nor disrespectful to the dead?

Short of wheeling out Pete Davidson again to open the show with another classy direct-to-camera explanation of humor’s healing power in the face of horror, the most sensible option was to briefly ignore the unignorable and forge on with show-must-go-on aplomb. This decision produced an upbeat Halloween episode — the kind where a severed prop hand serves as punch line in two separate sketches — and hopefully gave some viewers a rare laugh in a week of profound and inexpressible sadness. Whether it was the right decision is in the eye of the beholder, but it was certainly the most sensible one.

Here are the highlights:

Nate Bargatze Stand-Up Monologue

Nate Bargatze is low-key popular in the same way a Twitch streamer no elder millennial has ever heard of but who is casually capable of inciting a riot might be. He has been quietly building out a catalogue of clean but not edgeless high-quality Netflix and Amazon specials over the past decade, while somehow remaining sitcom-free. He was overdue for some kind of critical mass moment, but hosting Saturday Night Live still feels like a surprise — to his fans, to the Bargatze-agnostic, and, as he makes clear in his monologue, to himself. The nearly ten minutes of disarming stand-up in his monologue, though, are an ideal introduction to his laid-back, gently self-effacing style, and effectively demonstrate why he is worthy of this honor.

Washington’s Dream

The scariest thing in this Halloween episode happens about 40 seconds into “Washington’s Dream,” when the host appears to have trouble reading a cue card. Anyone charmed by Bargatze’s work thus far can only be nervous that he’s about to blow it here, just as the sketch’s premise is being established. Thankfully, it’s only a slight stumble, and then the host regains his bearings and proceeds to lead the ensemble, George Washington style, into the funniest, most subtly subversive sketch of the night. On its surface, “Washington’s Dream” is just a hilarious takedown of America’s bug-nuts approach to systems of weights and measurement — one that should be cathartic to anyone who has ever struggled to translate fluid ounces in a Samin Nosrat recipe. Undergirding the sketch, however, is some sly commentary on what Americans have historically done with our freedom, and how our founders refused to even engage with the paradox of a free country built on slave labor. This sketch makes perfect use of Bargatze’s tossed-off style, letting him undersell every punch line, and the stirring background music gets funnier as the sketch goes along, descending into nooks and crannies of our weight and measurement systems that you might never have even noticed were utter nonsense.

Chef Showdown

Chef Dougie, played by Bargatze, is a super-white soul-food savant who cannot stop apologizing for accidentally making culture-defining cuisine. The turn in this cooking competition sketch — that the winning dish was not made by Ego Nwodim’s seemingly more obvious candidate — may be a little transparent, but the details are as exquisite as the food on Dougie’s plate. Especially funny are the prizes that surprise guest Padma Lakshmi bestows on the unlikely winner, namely a letterman jacket from (historically Black) Howard University.

Hallmark Horror

It’s incredible how many Hallmark movie tropes the writers are able to tap into with this short sketch mashing up that tear-jerking genre and slasher flicks. Main character finding love in a small town during a holiday away from the Big City? Check. Corporate muckety-muck fiancé getting tossed aside in favor of an old high-school flame? Double-check. The only difference is that Chloe Fineman’s rekindled romance is with Bargatze’s “hometown killer.” From the pun title, A Stab at Love, to the “almost human” names of the “almost attractive” stars — Gasheley Greigert and Bren Gloebog — this sketch is as sharply observed as a carved pumpkin (or a carved spleen).

Trick-or-Treat with Fran Drescher

SAG-AFTRA recently warned its members to avoid certain Halloween costumes during the ongoing strike, to avoid spookily promoting struck content. Since SNL is allowed to air during the strike due to an elaborate loophole, its otherwise striking members are in a rare position to draw attention to their cause in a funny and incredibly on-theme way. Armed with a jacket that is half Nanny Fine, half Batman villain (and the most unmistakable laugh this side of Seth Rogen), Sarah Sherman becomes SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher, here to help trick-or-treaters avoid becoming “a bunch of adorable scabs.” Each of the children’s costumes is a hoot, and one of those kids deserves some kind of emergency Emmy for only slightly breaking during the Wolverine joke while the studio audience cracks up.

Cut for Time

• Mikey Day’s Joe Biden, which he debuted in the cold open, is frailer, squintier, and more out of breath than James Austin Johnson’s take on the character, who was already coded as decrepit.

• Elsewhere in the cold open, Michael Longfellow steps in to play new House Speaker Mike Johnson, while Devon Walker plays his fully adult Black son, who mysteriously exists.

• Christopher Walken’s appearance as Papa Pumpkin in the cold open, returning to the show for the first time in 15 years, is only a warm-up to his true reason for appearing in this episode — bringing full circle a classic SNL story involving musical guests Foo Fighters.

• Speaking of Foo Fighters, front man Dave Grohl, who was once known for making funny music videos and who has been funny in SNL sketches during some of his eight previous musical guest turns, is funny this week in the “Lake Beach” music video as the worst kind of guy to play cornhole with.

• It’s funny that Andrew Dismukes in the “Lake Beach” sketch looks like a combination of the singer from Puddle of Mudd and Chad Kroeger from Nickelback, even though his music sounds like neither band.

• Bowen Yang has the line read of the night with his ominous inflection on the word “Okay,” in response to the passengers in the airplane sketch (correctly) deciding not to allow his mysterious “doctor” to assist in delivering an airplane baby.

• Speaking of enunciation, the hilarious difference between how Martin Herlihy says “dog food” and “dawg food” in this week’s Please Don’t Destroy video cannot be ignored.

• It’s the second week in a row with an oddly truncated Weekend Update. This time, the lone guest is Sarah Sherman posing as Colin Jost’s agent, in an unconventional twist on her usual Jost roasts at the Update desk.

• For the uninitiated, Zoheth, Son of Ishi, Who Beget Ben Zoheth, one of the costume ideas floated in the Fran Drescher sketch, is in fact an actual character from the Bible.

• Just before airtime, the news broke that Matthew Perry had died. For anyone looking for a testament to Perry’s gifts as a comedic performer, here he is in a mid-’90s SNL sketch playing on the sarcastic persona of his Friends character, Chandler Bing.