The Beck Marionettes was the best bit. Figures.
Yeah, the playing of music on silverware and dishes was great when Ernie Kovacs did it in 1956 and it’s still funny now!
Hugh–mostly wasted. The last sketch had promise but then went totally off the tracks for no reason.
It’s not on yet here, but I am taping it. Love me some Laurie!
It’s funny; so far the comments here have been harsher than that on Television Without Pity - a site that prides itself on being cynical!
Go fig!
I missed tonight’s episode because of an exceedingly rare occurrence of Having A Social Life. Glad to hear I didn’t exactly miss the rebirth of Saturday Night Live. I will, nonetheless, check for it in reruns just to see Laurie work.
Monologue: Okay, not great.
Borat: Typical Borat. Ha ha, women are objects.
TV Funhouse: Okay but forgettable. Poor timing. Not up to his usual crispness.
Maya’s song: Terrible. Turned the sound off until it was over.
Queen: Flat but merely eh.
Hardball: Really bad timing, and way, way, way too long.
Hugh’s protest song: Pretty funny.
Beck: Nice marionettes, though what they had to do with the song I couldn’t say. Beck’s bowtie made him look like a gift-wrapped package, but hey, de gustibus non est disputandem.
Weekend Update: Okay. The Tim Calhoon bit was pretty amusing. At first. Until it got way too long. I do like that the map behind them shows Europe just East of Asia.
Hospital sketch: Pretty funny. “Tuskeegee!” Hugh in drag: Amusing. Ending: Typically weak and not a funny wrap-up.
Late Night Movie: A one-joke sketch that wasn’t particularly funny.
Beck: Marionettes *and *percussive dinnerware in a little party. Other than “clap [hands]” being percussive, this again makes no particular sense to me. However, catchy.
Job interview: Pointless.
Borat bombed. Everything was just lame re-hashings of his usual jokes, maybe for the masses who don’t know him. Some were almost direct quotes. He obviously didn’t have anything.
This is the first time I’ve watched SNL in a couple of years. Borat was disappointing; nothing more than an extended plug for the movie. Laurie was completely wasted; the only bit he was in that I cared for at all was the protest song.
Most of the current cast seemed remarkably uninteresting, except for the guy who did Tim Calhoun. I did giggle all the way through the “Star Spangled Banner” sketch, but maybe that was only because I’ve been exposed to an inordinate number of hideous renditions of same at baseball and NASCAR events this year.
But Beck is a frickin’ genius. Loved the marionettes, and I never saw Ernie Kovacs play music on dinnerware in '56, or any other time, so it was fresh for me.
There. Now I’ve slogged through an entire episode of SNL for the first time in years, and I’ve confirmed that it’s still the ninth level of suck.
We laughed the loudest at Borat. Maybe because it was the first we’d seen him. “She got no name because she girl!” Funniest thing in the show.
Monologue was meh.
We also knew that when the first sketch was an extended fart joke, we were in trouble. The rest of the sketches continued in the vein SNL has been subscribing to for the last decade or more: Make a lame joke, and then beat it to death for the next ten minutes.
What a waste of Hugh Laurie’s awesome comic talent. I’m gonna have to put some Jeeves & Wooster in at some point today, or maybe some more of the Fry & Laurie DVDs that we still haven’t watched.
Okay, I’ll buck the tide and admit that I thought most of the show was really funny. During the monologue, when they brought out the map of the USA and Hugh Laurie just kind of looked at for a minute and then sighed and waved it off again: comedy gold. (Incidentally, he’s also much better at recovering from fumbled lines/prop mishaps than most of the regular cast members are, as evidenced in his nice save when he couldn’t manage to get his glasses on properly in the Queen sketch.)
I thought Maya’s Star Spangled Banner was a fairly amusing takeoff on the vocal contortions that most American Idol and other vocal contest singers tend to go through on even the blandest and most common songs. Really liked “Hardball”, primarily for Howard Dean’s riff on the Democratic platform. (“Come on, the one thing we have tried to be REALLY CLEAR ABOUT is that we are definitely going to raise your taxes! And not just for the rich! Middle class too! And the very poor!”) Hell, even the Late Night Movie cracked me up, and usually anything on after Weekend Update is poor-to-execrable.
I honestly thought it was a pretty good show. But then apart from a few episodes of “Jeeves and Wooster” and one episode of “House, M.D.” I haven’t seen Hugh Laurie in anything, so I wasn’t really expecting the show to be rife with British comedy in-jokes or whatever. I thought he was extremely funny, nonetheless.
Oh, and Beck was great! Don’t knock the marionettes, man. That was cool. And I loved the percussive dinner table, but then I’m a sucker for nonstandard percussion.
Loved Beck, loved Laurie the actor/person, hated virtually all of the writing and the rest of the cast. So pretty standard for any recent SNL episode with top-notch guests for both host and music.
For the late night monster movie sketch, when the mob went to Dracula’s castle, they flopped the video. It was the same set as the Frankenstein castle, just reversed. Notice that the torch Hugh Laurie carrries switches hands. They also flopped the film of the mob running to give the appearance of the mob going in the other direction. I guess noticing this was the second most fun thing for me on this episode. The Beck marionettes being the first.
As a fan of many of the British comedic masters in the past 20 years, I am almost certain that Hugh’s done the protest song before. In fact I think it was in the later seasons of A Bit of Fry & Laurie. So the highlight of the show was a bit he’d done years ago.
Also a big SBC fan, and the Borat sketch was so-so. I think he had a fake mustache on. Couldn’t they have brought on SBC in another sketch?
SNL really does suck. What, no House-centered skits?
This was probably the only SNL to feature two Cambridge graduates (SBC and Hugh).
I liked the bits with Hugh Laurie. Loved the protest song, the Queen skit, and the monologue. I thought he recovered pretty quickly after the Bottom joke fell flat (He expected an SNL audience to know Shakespeare?).
The star spangled banner bit went on far too long and the joke itself has been done better by others. The Hardball skit started well but just dragged on. Weekend update was lousy on par with Colin Quinn.
All in all I’d say that is was pretty much what I expected: strong when the talented host was involved and the standard garbage when he wasn’t.
Yes, but for those of us who are not fans of the British comedy masters of the past 20 years (it’s not that I don’t appreciate them, just that I’m more or less unaware of them, yes, yes, I’m a huge philistine, now let’s move on), it was a new bit, and quite funny. I think that the number of people who saw the protest song and thought, “Oh, bah, I saw him do that on Fry & Laurie years ago!” is far, far, far fewer than the number who saw it and thought, “Hey, that’s pretty funny.”
I also don’t think that this means that the majority of the SNL audience is a bunch of uncultured losers. (Please note careful placement of italics in previous sentence.) You kind of have to actively seek out archival British comedic television shows if you want to watch them, and it’s not everybody’s bag of chips. However, I will admit that the lack of laughter on the Bottom/Shakespeare joke was disappointing. You’d think that at least a few people in the crowd would have got the joke and then laughed extra-loud, because of course the only thing better than getting an obscure joke is getting an obscure joke when you’re one of the only ones who got it.
I wasn’t implying that the viewers are yokels; rather, that the funniest bit in the show was something Hugh did years ago… shame that a crack team of comedy writers couldn’t come up with something equal to that. And though I had seen the bit before, it was still funny.
Oh, okay; understood. Although I will still politely disagree with you as to general funniness of the rest of the show, as I personally thought it was a hoot.
I thought this was the funniest SNL in quite some time. None of the skits (up through Weekend Update) were duds.
Of course, Tim Calhoun absolutely cracks me up, so go figure.
I liked it, and I’ve been trashing the show this season.
I liked the monster sketch. “Dude! Back off with the torch!”
I liked the protest song.
I liked Tim Calhoun.
I liked Borat.
I loved Beck.
Didn’t much like the National Anthem sketch. After the first 20 seconds, the joke was done and it got tedious.
I liked the doctor sketch. “Tuskeegee! Tuskeegee!”. And Hugh Laurie in drag was amusing.
So, in all, a few skits that fell flat, a few that were amusing, a couple that were really good, and great music. Grading on the SNL curve, I give it a B.
I’m with you; most of it was actually funny and Hugh Laurie was wonderful. He looked as if he were really playing the guitar; am I right?
Loved Beck, his band, the marionettes and the percussion dinner table, too.