Maybe it’s the promise of a nice long vacation, or maybe it’s having a nice thematic hook to hang their sketches on, but Saturday Night Live tends to excel at its Christmas episodes.  Thanks to some over-long football and an inconsistent livestream, my viewing of this week’s SNL wasn’t quite as linear or complete as I would have hoped, but there was clearly plenty of funny in the week’s show.  The cold open began with a recap of Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, but that was quickly glossed over for a visit from Vladimir Putin (as always, shirtless), who snuck down Trump’s chimney to “state officially” that Trump is Russia’s Manchurian candidate. After gifting the president-elect with a suspicious-looking Elf on the Shelf, John Goodman arrived with an inspired take on Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, who has a literal secret handshake with Putin and a firm plan for expanding oil drilling in Russia.  As has become standard in these Trump sketches, Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway got the best line – she promised not to go too far away because, she acknowledges: “I’m handcuffed to you for all of history.” While the show has, in the past, focused on Trump’s seeming incompetence, here the writers doubled down on the president-elect as a pawn, not even getting to say “live from New York” before Putin and Tillerson beat him to the punch.  Casey Affleck’s self-deprecating monologue acknowledged that he seemed an anti-climactic host for this special pre-Christmas episode (and his awful scraggly beard was also smartly acknowledged). With some support from Alec Baldwin and Goodman, he vowed not to sing about Christmas, a welcome relief from the excess of musical monologues the show has been serving up in recent years. My livestream skipped before I could see whether he held fast to his non-singing vow; one can only hope.  While singing monologues are often a weak spot on the show, I have long been an evangelist of SNL’s Christmas-themed musical numbers – “Santa’s My Boyfriend”, “Dick in a Box”, and “Twin Bed” remain all-time classics. This year, they delivered again; a pre-tape with Kenan Thompson and musical guest Chance the Rapper resurrected some classic hip-hop for an ode to Barack Obama’s final Christmas as president. Celebrating the “first and maybe last black president”, the duo rapped about birth control and legal weed under the tree, with a guest verse about Leslie Jones’s love/lust for Joe Biden. It was catchy and clever and current, and I’ll have it stuck in my head all week.  Weekend Update had a strong turn this week, with Michael Che comparing the meeting of Trump and Kanye West to the baffling mash-up of Scooby-Doo and the Harlem Globetrotters, while Colin Jost theorized that Trump chose Tillerson for secretary of state “because he was three cents cheaper than the Chevron CEO across the street”. And Fred Armisen and Vanessa Bayer resurrected their back-talking best friend characters as childhood buddies of Putin for a delightfully bitchy take on the Russian president.  Despite her relatively low profile, SNL seems preoccupied with Hillary Clinton, or at the very least, with looking for excuses for McKinnon to resurrect her brilliant impression. This week featured a spoof of the only scene of Love, Actually that we’ve all seen (the one with the cue cards), wherein Clinton tries to secretly convince an elector to vote for anyone other than Trump when the electoral college votes on Monday. “Tom Hanks,” she urges. “The Rock. A rock.”  While it wasn’t perfect – one late sketch featuring a trio of horny elves was equally confusing and unfunny – it was definitely an above-average turn for the series. There were some egregious examples of product placement – Dunkin’ Donuts and Microsoft – but they’re working on fitting them in more seamlessly.  Maybe during the break, the show will figure out a longer-term strategy for their Trump impression, since Baldwin would presumably like his Saturday nights back at some point. And given the pace of news this year, the show’s writers will have a lot of catching up to do when they return in mid-January.
Donald Trump is dominated by Rex Tillerson and Vladimir Putin, and any excuse is used to resurrect McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton