Saturday Night Live kicked off its 50th season this weekend, and in the lead-up to tonight’s episode, there was plenty of speculation over what viewers could expect. Vulture, for their part, had guessed that Simone Biles would show up as the host; instead, when the announcement came, SNL viewers learned that Jean Smart would handle hosting duties for the season opener.
Similar to Brendan Gleeson hosting an episode in 2022, Smart was a potentially unexpected but savvy choice. Why? Well, for one thing, she has range: in the last decade, she’s earned rave reviews for her work on Hacks, Watchmen, Fargo and Mare of Eastown, among others; she is also — as the plethora of awards she’s won for Hacks indicate — very, very funny. Which means that you can put her in a sketch playing a romance novelist who’s come out of retirement to write a math textbook — an unlikely premise, if ever there was one — and watch her make the material soar.
There’s a long tradition of someone making increasingly outlandish statements and treating them as though they’re the most normal thing in the world. This sketch, in which Smart’s character reads her work to a room full of appalled executives, gets to the heart of that very well.
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It’s a comedy milestoneIt doesn’t hurt that Kenan Thompson’s presence here hearkens back to his appearance as a romance bookstore owner in this 2017 sketch, which remains a personal favorite. Tonight’s sketch bears little resemblance to either romance novels or math textbooks as they currently exist — but when it’s this absurd, veracity is hardly the point.
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