Saturday Night Live recap and review: Charles Barkley with musical guest Migos

All your dreams are coming true because Saturday Night Live is back! This week, they have Charles Barkley with musical guest Migos!

Saturday Night Live’s return this week was fine. Not fantastic, but fine. Sure, there were some fun moments and it was worth it to see our favorites back on the show again. But over all, it wasn’t the best week for the comedy show. With host Charles Barkley, a lot of the jokes didn’t land and adding Alex Rodriguez made it worse.

Nevertheless, here are recaps of all the sketches for those who weren’t able to watch.

Cold Open

Anderson Cooper 360 started off the latest episode and it didn’t go easy on Donald Trump. Honestly, he always has it coming.  “At times likes this, we look to our leaders for guidance,” Cooper (Alex Moffat) says. “But instead, we’ll hear from Donald Trump.”

Trump, always effortlessly played by Alec Baldwin, discusses gun violence after the Parkland shooting to how his cabinet is falling apart.

“Wakanda is laughing at us” Trump said and honestly, I’m surprised the real Trump hasn’t said this as well. According to him, every country is laughing at us for different reasons. Trump also went on to describe how he’s running the country. “I said I was going to run this country like a business. That business is a Waffle House at 2 a.m.”

Monologue

Were you wondering why Charles Barkley was hosting? Don’t worry, there’s no reason. According to Barkley, he’s doing it because Lorne Michaels wanted someone to talk to about Black Panther. Honestly, it wasn’t exactly promising. He read off the prompter flatly, but then again, Barkley isn’t exactly the best at comedy. The monologue set what would be an average tone for the rest of the sketches.

The Grabbies

So, maybe this wasn’t the best sketch with the Oscars coming up and all the sexual harassment allegations out there. Basically it was an award ceremony by “The Academy of Sexual Harassment and Misconduct in Hollywood” for the bad actions in Hollywood that came out over the past year. The awards themselves? Aptly named “The Grabbies.”

SNL chose to go with pretend actors for this sketch, a weird choice because you could have just chosen literally anyone who had allegations this year. Overall, this sketch fell a little flat and I think that’s mainly because of the timing.

Ned’s Roach Away

In an interesting take on showing how insane the gun issue solution the NRA and Trump are proposing is (i.e. teachers having guns in school), SNL decided to show this by having roaches kill other roaches with guns. Ned trains a bunch of cockroaches how to hunt their own and sells it as a way to kill your bug problem.

This sketch essentially shows how insane a thought it is to give teachers guns to protect against guns. Just with a roach metaphor, which we’ll just move on from now.

Homework Hotline

When a homework hotline has a lot of fans who want the host to sleep with a puppet, things get weird. Basically, the hotline isn’t able to help a single child with their homework because all the call-in questions are about how they want Bobo the puppet to “be with” the host.

It gets to the point where he can’t even answer the phones anymore because of the question he’s getting and then, at the end, the puppet tries to pet his thigh. Again, we’ll just move on from this one.

The Champions

Don’t worry, ARod and Charles Barkley cannot read and say words in a comedy sketch. If you thought they could before, this sketch makes sure to show you that they cannot, in fact, do so. In this sketch, a host talks to the two sports legends about which sport they think is harder.

In the end, they all decide that playing football is the hardest due to concussions and that’s only because the Steelers linebacker present keeps calling everyone Greg and starts ordering food.

Migos

I feel like the shrugging emoji would come in handy to describe these performances. I’m sure they’re great. If you like Migos, then good for you! But for an SNL performance, this one didn’t really help to spike up energy. Personally, I’ve never listened to Migos and based on this SNL preview, I don’t think I’m going to.

Weekend Update

Like the entire episode, this week’s Weekend Update was just fine. But I’m only going to talk about Kyle Mooney getting sad about not being invited to Colin Jost’s Oscars party and Leslie Jones bringing out an Olympian. Overall, it was an average Weekend Update to watch. They talked about Trump, the White House, and Hope Hicks (Cecily Strong) even came out. But those topics were overshadowed by Mooney and Jones’ bits.

First, Mooney came out and was supposed to talk movies but instead he called out Jost for not inviting him to an Oscars party. Jones came out and called out the anchor for saying he could teach her some hockey. She then brought out a member of the USA women’s Olympic team for the ultimate win.

Hump or Dump

When a man keeps saying he’ll kill himself if a woman doesn’t chose him on a dating show, things get weird. Basically, it is poking fun at the abuse that comes along with threatening to take one’s own life because of the doings of someone else. Then again, do we really need to see that played out in a sketch?

Amanda, the woman looking for a guy on the show, definitely doesn’t go for the dark dramatics and picks someone else. As for the whole kill-myself-for-you joke, that tactic didn’t feel great or funny at all.

Construction Site

When women tell a construction site’s workers to stop catcalling them, the men decide to talk about how women have better fashion options and discuss what they would wear to the Oscars or in daily life. Beck Bennett’s character however wants to remain manly and refuses to play along.

Eventually, he realizes his standoffish behavior towards their conversation is because of toxic masculinity and they all grow from the experience on the street.

Bar Pick-Up

Kate McKinnon and Charles Barkley smash tongues together. Honestly, that’s the peak of this sketch. The two are just making out, but he keeps insulting her saying he’d never date her because she’s the last girl in the bar. Right.

Overall, this SNL episode was just fine, but nothing really memorable. If anything, we got to see Barkley make out with McKinnon and add another Trump/Baldwin scene to our memories?

Next: Saturday Night Live recap and review: Natalie Portman with musical guest Dua Lipa

Check back here on Culturess every week for more Saturday Night Live news, recaps, and more.