Saturday Night Live Season 42 Episode 12 Aziz Ansari Recap

Aziz Ansari hosted Saturday Night Live this week and he did an absolutely amazing job. But we knew that he would be great. With musical guest Big Sean!

Saturday Night Live has been killing it recently with their commentary on Trump and his presidency, and Aziz Ansari’s episode was no different. They took on Putin and our new American truth, and it was everything we could have hoped for.

Cold Open

We got our first presidential address from supreme leader Vladimir Putin in the cold open this week. It was just Putin telling us that we’re going to be fine under Trump’s rule but the best part? Kate McKinnon coming out as a Russian woman, and then reappearing with her pink hat.

Opening Monologue

They let Aziz do his monologue like a stand-up set and it was amazing. If you didn’t know that Aziz is famous for his stand-up, they showed us why he is one of the greatest comedians we have. His monologue was very him and it worked really well for the show.

(As someone who loves Aziz Ansari, it was glorious for me.) “You have to go back to the pretending,” Aziz says to the Trump supporters who are openly being racist in America. Basically, they just handed Aziz the ropes and let him go and it was amazing.

Beat the Bookworm

The first sketch of the night that gave us Aziz’s famous “NOOOOOO” that made us love Tom Haverford. It wasn’t particularly hilarious but the premise was a bookworm game show and you had to go head to head against the bookworm in a final category.

Lucky for Vanessa Bayer’s character, the category was “90s Pop Culture”. It basically just gave us an excuse to hear the famous “no” from Aziz over and over again.

Police Hold Up

Ever have that movie that you love and want to make everyone love it? Well, this sketch was basically about everyone loving La La Land and trying to put those who don’t like it in jail. Honestly, I would also love to sit people down and ask them how they can hate La La Land.

It fits for me but maybe not everyone is super into the movie. That’s okay because we’re also putting people who don’t like Westworld in jail too.

The Lead

Kellyanne Conway avoids answering questions. How do we know? We have seen it with our own eyes but Saturday Night Live did a great job of pointing out what Kellyanne does. They did this by having her perform “Conway” to the tune of “Roxy” from Chicago.

Kellyanne just danced her way through the questions and refusing to actually answer whatever Jake had to ask her. Because to Kellyanne, she just instantly assumes someone is talking about the election and answers that question rather than what she is actually asked about.

Lawyers

You know those amazing commercials where the lawyers are talking about old cases and how much money they got for people? Well SNL took their own spin on it. The sketch was pretty funny and just had Aziz screaming about the fact that everyone else got millions of dollars and he only got 6,000 dollars because a cement truck drove through his living room.

It was very Aziz yet again and just had him screaming a lot and it was just a fun take on something that everyone has seen before.

Big Sean

He was fine. He didn’t sound great and if you’re not the biggest fan of his music, it was just an okay performance to watch. There wasn’t really anything special about it and that was a bit upsetting. Yeah, sometimes the musical guest just has to sing and not make a big deal out of it but it’s nice when the music guest has a cool set.

Big Sean just didn’t really. He was okay and his song was fine. Just wish it was a little better.

Weekend Update

For a long portion of Weekend Update, Michael Che and Colin Jost commented on the women’s march. Surprisingly, it was actually really cool. Che talked about his mother and how she raised him and his siblings.

Then Leslie Jones came in with her rant on Hidden Figures and was inspirational as normal. Weekend Update has gotten a lot better and the season has progressed. Last year, it was almost unwatchable but this year, it is pretty great.

Sex Night

The sketch focuses on a couple trying to spice up their sex life with dirty talk. The problem? His girlfriend doesn’t know how to talk dirty to him and ends up being super weird about it. That’s pretty much the entire sketch.

It was funny, though. Just one of their dumb sketches that somehow work on the show and makes us laugh.

Five Stars

Uber ratings can drive us crazy and so these two men want to get a five-star ride out of their trip. The whole time they keep doing weird things to make the other happy and they give messages. They just want to have four stars and so they do whatever they can to get there.

In the end, Petros (Bobby Moynihan) accidentally hits Aziz with his car and now we don’t know what his rating is anymore!

Pizza Town

This Chuck E. Cheeses inspired sketch is just another dumb one that was pretty funny. It wasn’t anything spectacular but it worked for what it was. We got to see Aziz Ansari as Peppy and he was just trying to make everyone happy in Pizza Town.

Honestly, there wasn’t really anything to take away from it. If you had never been to a Chuck-e Cheese before, you probably would have no idea what that sketch was about.

Barack Obama

After this week, it was nice to have people just giving love to Barack Obama. And at the end, we got our message spread across the world. Thank you, President Obama.

New episodes of Saturday Night Live air every Saturday at 11:30 p.m. ET. Check back here on Culturess for the recap of each episode after they air!

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