“I’m as shocked as you are that I’m here,” Nate Bargatze began this week’s Halloween-themed episode of Saturday Night Live. It’s the Nashville-born comic’s first appearance on the show, and given that the actors’ strike is still going on, the reliance on musicians and stand-up comedians so far this season isn’t a surprise. (It looks like the next episode will break that streak—more on that in a bit.)
But despite the modesty, Bargatze has been having one hell of a year: he released his Prime Video special, Hello World, this January, which became the streamer’s most-viewed original comedy special in its first 28 days. In April, he drew 19,365 attendees to a performance at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, breaking the venue’s all-time attendance record. And now he’s taking center stage at Studio 8H in promotion of his current “The Be Funny” stand-up tour.
It’s a lot to be excited about, though the episode didn’t quite have the celebratory pep of previous Halloween editions, despite a spirited appearance by an SNL favorite and a returning performance from Foo Fighters.
Cold open: Joe Biden meets Papa Pumpkin
Another season, another presidential cast shakeup: after Jim Carrey played POTUS during the 2020 election season and James Austin Johnson portrayed him last season, Mikey Day is the latest to step into President Joe Biden’s shoes. Day’s exceptionally breathy commander-in-chief runs through a laundry list of Old Joe jokes (“A lot of my closest friends are ghosts!” “When I was a kid, ladders were cutting-edge technology”!) and even with an appearance from newly appointed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Michael Longfellow) and his “Adult Black Son” (“I’m only 11 years younger than him and I’m kind of a secret,” quips Devon Walker), this week’s open isn’t exactly a Halloween treat.
That is, until Christopher Walken and his delightfully insane intonations arrive as “Papa Pumpkin” to explain the true spirit of Halloween, i.e. “Meet the neighbors you don’t want to see any other day!” It’s not the sharpest writing but we could listen to Walken add several extra syllables to the word “spooky!” forever.
Monologue: Solid jokes, shaky delivery
Bargatze is known for his “everyman,” anecdotal humor, which he leans into for his opening monologue, discussing everything from the future (“2057, I don’t even believe that’s a real year. My movies didn’t even go that high in fake years”) to his family (“My dad has surgery eight times a year probably. He loves it!”) to fist-fighting orangutans. (Okay, maybe not so everyman, unless that kind of thing is normal in Tennessee?)
There’s good material here, particularly about his self-proclaimed lack of smarts (“Every history movie I watch, I watch on the edge of my seat…I watched the movie Pearl Harbor and I was just as surprised as they were”), but you could tell that the nerves were creeping up on him throughout and bungling his rhythm.
Best sketch of the night:
As the show went on, our host relaxed into the gig, especially during this “Washington’s Dream” sketch. With Bargatze as a deadpan George, the general explains to a group of Revolutionary Way soldiers about the changes they can expect in America, including freedom, liberty, and “our own system of weights and measures.”
The Founding Father guides the military men through such confounding concepts as the metric system (“How many liters are in a gallon, sir?” “Nobody knows!”), temperature scales, and non-English football (“There’s no kicking?” “There’s a little kicking”). Extra points for Washington’s pointed disregard for Kenan Thompson’s slavery-related questions. (“Where all men are free, right? Right?!”)
MVP of the night: Sarah Sherman
Sarah Sherman brightly stood out in two strike-themed bits this week, the first as SAG-AFTRA president-slash-The Nanny star Fran Drescher, who pops up on a neighborhood trick-or-treat route to critique children’s costumes based on the union’s recent guidelines to avoid “dressing up as characters from non-struck content.” (“This makes all of these children a bunch of adorable scabs!”) Sherman’s Fran makes some solidarity-minded suggestions, including opting for daytime and reality TV personalities like Hoda Kotb (“The wig is fake but the wine is real!”) or “minor characters from the Bible who have not appeared in any film adaptation.”
Sherman also made an appearance at the “Weekend Update” desk as Colin Jost’s agent, serving up a majorly receding hairline and loads of bad career advice. Among the proposed projects for her actor client? Not All Heroes Are Sandwiches: The Jared Fogel Story, a porn version of Jurassic Park (“They’re looking for a mofo with short arms to play a horny T-Rex”), and a live-action Pocahontas reboot called John Smith’s Revenge, “the story of the man who hit it, quit it, and then remembered what team he was on.”
The saddest pronunciation of Foo Fighters:
In keeping with this season’s trend of having a guest other than the host announce the musical act (see Pedro Pascal and Lady Gaga last week, and Taylor Swift the week before), Christopher Walken returned to do what he does better than anyone on the planet: introducing the Foo Fighters. Or the Foo FIGHT-ers, as he famously proclaimed 20 years ago in his 2003 SNL episode, delighting the world with his offbeat choice of emphasis on the band’s name.
Crushingly, it seems some accent coach got ahold of the legendary actor before he took to the stage to welcome Dave Grohl and Co. for their ninth musical appearance on the show because this week’s introduction was entirely devoid of that signature Walkenian flair. We’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more Foo FIGHT-ers!
Stray observations
- Bargatze oddly failed to introduce H.E.R., who joined Foo Fighters for a rousing rendition of “The Glass,” but she made her presence known with a searing guitar solo and some adorable closing-credits fangirling over Padma Lakshmi, who had dropped in earlier in the ep during a cooking show-related bit.
- With no new episode next week (NBC will air a re-run of the Pete Davidson/Ice Spice premiere), the show will return on November 11 with Timothée Chalamet as host and boygenius as musical guest. And yes, that noise you hear is the sound of chronically online women losing their goddamn minds.
- The show movingly honored the memory of Friends icon Matthew Perry with a special tribute card, mere hours after news broke of the actor’s tragic death. He was 54. Perry hosted Saturday Night Live on October 4, 1997, with Oasis as the musical guest.