This weekend, Saturday Night Live gave it a go from home. “Live from Zoom, it’s sometime between March and August,” said Kate McKinnon in the show’s gallery screen cold open. There everybody was in their respective homes—Kenan Thompson with his adorable daughters; McKinnon with her cat; Cecily Strong with her sleeping dog. It turns out Pete Davidson has a white board—and everybody has guitars, too! Our hearts skipped a beat at the sight of bandleader Lenny Pickett playing his saxophone alone, then broke a little, happily, at the sight of Tom Hanks.
America’s sweetheart, the Dad we can’t hug right now, stood in a suit in his empty kitchen, doing stand-up to the sounds of whistles and applause. “Hey all you cool cats and kittens,” he said—because nothing has been untainted by Tiger King. “I have been the celebrity canary in the coal mine for the coronavirus,” Hanks continued, referencing his and wife Rita Wilson’s March diagnosis.
It was a balm just to be in the man’s big-hearted presence, and also to marvel at how Hanks can land and move on punchlines without a live audience’s buy-in. In a bit about the trickiness of having his temperature recorded in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit while battling the virus in Australia, he explained that 36 was considered good, but 38 very bad. “It’s how Hollywood treats female actors!”
McKinnon deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom–from our next president, of course–for her sketch about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s home workout. It was by far the funniest, most delightful spot of the night, with McKinnon in a SUPER DIVA sweatshirt and gold collar describing how she keeps her abs, gams, tuchus, chicken wings, and critical thinking in fighting shape. From her Q-tip weights to her pasta tube foam roller to her cat trainer (“if I mess up, he eats me”), it was a howler. “Dr. Fauci, answer my DMs,” she purred into the camera. We need McKinnon now more than ever.
In another stand-out bit, Chloe Fineman did a phenomenal send-up of Master Class, one of those burdens of productivity and self-improvement one mustn’t get bullied into right now. She deserves a year’s supply of toilet paper and premium health insurance for her impersonation of Timothee Chalamet, who for an exorbitant fee could explain how you too can learn to be a coy boy king in a hoodie. The sketch would’ve killed if it had stopped there—but then she doubled down as six-year-olds’ Pied Piper JoJo Siwa, explaining how to nail Tik Tok, and Carole Baskin, showing how you too can learn to ride a bike and talk in a smug, drowsy tone.
There of course needed to be a sketch about Zoom, as that is where we live now. McKinnon and Aidy Bryant brought needed weirdness to the idea as corporate receptionists unfit for modern technology and group screens. “I thought this computer only did Solitaire,” worried a panicked Bryant.