By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 16, 2012 |
By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 16, 2012 |
Last night’s Christmas episode of “Saturday Night Live” was an amusing and occasionally downright hilarious episode, featuring host Martin Short, who turned out to be an unexpectedly perfect guy for the gig, bringing in a lot of old-school humor and playing well with the many celebrity cameos. The only sour note of the night came from Sam Jackson, who needlessly threw out an F-bomb during the “What’s Up with That,” sketch, and as if to punctuate the fact that it wasn’t an inadvertent slip, Jackson followed it up with a “bullsh*t,” although Kenan Thompson came back with the perfect ad lib. (Jackson, for his part, insisted on Twitter that he only said FUH, but the K is fairly apparent).
Anyway, the cold open struck the perfect note in light of the tragedy in Connecticut, as a New York City children’s choir led with a rendition of “Silent Night” (they would return later in the night to sing that terrible McCartney Christmas song, “Wonderful Christmas Time,” with Paul McCartney).
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Martin Short kicked off the rest of the show with a holiday musical number (“The Most Amorous Time of the Year”) that featured a number of cameos (Jimmy Fallon, Sam Jackson, and Tina Fey), but it’s not yet embeddable. Alec Baldwin showed up as Tony Bennett to do the “Tony Bennett” Show but that, likewise, isn’t embeddable either (it was fairly forgettable, save for a squeamish hemorrhoid joke).
The sketch of the night, however, was Royal Family Doctor, which featured Martin Short playing the family doctor and discussing with Kate Middleton’s gynecologist about the proper protocol (Hader, again, nearly loses it on a few occasions).
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Charlie Brown’s Rat Bastard Christmas featuring Hader’s Pacino as Charlie Brown was also fantastic, especially Edie Falco as Lucy.
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Seth Meyers appropriately avoided bringing up the Connecticut shooting in a stellar series of Weekend Update jokes, while the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation at a Party with was the best one, so far.
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What’s Up with That, besides the Sam Jackson sourness was, as always, exceptional thanks mostly to Jason Sudeikis, who I could watch dance in a red track suit for the rest of my life and never stop smiling. (The Jackson F-Bomb is muted in the embed)
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Also not embeddable, but worth finding later this afternoon, was Paul McCartney’s reunion with surviving Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, as well as the Foo’s Pat Smear, to perform “Cut Me Some Slack.”