Image Credit: NBC
I really can’t wait to see whether Louis C.K. makes an episode of Louie about hosting Saturday Night Live. The sketch show itself was fine if uneven this week, careening between dizzying highs (the cold open; that “Lincoln as Louis” short), terrifying lows (basically everything post-Update), and creamy middles (Weekend Update’s guests, with one possible exception). Behind the scenes, though, things must have been a lot more interesting — how did the cast and writers manage to compose and rehearse 90 minutes of new material despite Monday’s devastating hurricane? For that matter, how did the crew manage to build the sets we saw last night? And just as pressingly, what was it like for cerebral Louis to enter a world that counts liberal use of the word “boner” as a totally acceptable punchline?
Sadly, we won’t know until Louie‘s fourth season, which doesn’t hit FX until early 2014. In the meantime, let’s discuss what we did see: an SNL that started off with a bang, thanks to a cold open that poked fun at New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his overly expressive sign language interpreter Lydia Callis, and New Jersey’s lovably blunt Governor Chris Christie.
If you didn’t spend all of Monday watching Bloomberg discuss storm preparations while Callis gesticulated wildly at his side, you missed out — it’s not for nothing that she became an Internet phenomenon. SNL newcomer Cecily Strong imitated Callis’s elastic face beautifully, and Nasim Pedrad was almost as good as Roxy, Christie’s fictional guidette signer. The segment also nailed Bloomberg’s heavily accented Spanish, which became a meme of its own during last year’s big hurricane. Sure, the sketch was a little insider-y — residents of New York and Jersey must have been much more amused by it than anyone else. But after what the tri-state area endured this week, it seems fitting to give its citizens some extra attention — even if many of them can’t watch Saturday Night Live until their power is restored.
