Steve Carell Puts Together An ‘Office’ Reunion On ‘Saturday Night Live’

Saturday Night Live opened last night’s episode by returning to the Laura Ingraham well, with Kate McKinnon playing the Fox News host and Cecily Strong joining her as network commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro.

McKinnon’s Ingraham reported on “rampant voter fraud,” telling her audience that claims of suburban women abandoning the GOP are false. “Doesn’t it feel more true that all Hispanics voted twice? You can’t dismiss that idea simply because it isn’t true and sounds insane,” she says. She adds that to her list of “feel facts,” things that feel true, such as “Santa is Jesus’s Dad,” and, “Blackface is a compliment.”

Pirro begins her segment screaming, “I hate them, Laura,” explaining that this is just her vocal warm-up. Pirro, with Strong punching every syllable, presents “proof” of voter fraud such as Tyler Perry voting as her Madea character and kids piling on each other’s shoulders to vote in trench coats, Vincent Adultman-style. Ingraham then goes on to promote what few remaining sponsors still tolerate her, including Fashion Catheters – “Now with genuine Swarovski crystals – ouch!” – and Undersea Airlines, “the only planes that start on fire.”

She then interviews Mark Zuckerberg, played by Alex Moffat as a nerd who can only position his arms the way he had them in rehearsal, and says out loud to himself, “blink twice to moisten eyeballs.” It’s a solid mocking impression, as Zuckerberg noted that the real problem with Facebook is that, “when I do bad things, I get money.” Leslie Jones played Rep. Marcia Fudge, who’s considering challenging Nancy Pelosi for the House speakership, turning her into an insult comic mocking Pelosi’s age. The final guest was Pete Davidson’s “Vape God,” a parody of an actual ridiculous human being that Ingraham had on her show this week.

While Ingraham is as solid an over-the-top target as any for the show’s mockery, I’m not sure she’s personally interesting enough for two segments in one month. I’m glad we’re getting less of Alec Baldwin’s POTUS this season, but now would be great time to see the writers find a new way to open the show besides mocking the 24-hour news media. At this point, it too often feels like a rote handling, especially when there’s no one story to center on.

Host Steve Carell, hosting for the third time and the first in 10 years, played off the Internet buzz calling for an Office reboot by taking audience questions, and finding his former The Office co-stars Ellie Kemper, Ed Helms, and Jenna Fischer in the crowd, begging him to get the reboot going so they can all make that crazy network reboot money. By the end, his wife, former SNL and The Office cast member Nancy Carell, and his kids are there to reinforce the sentiment, assuring him they’ll be fine with whatever time he needs to spend away from them. Not much more to this, though there is something appealing about Fischer saying, “Steve, don’t be a dick. Do the reboot!”

Carell played a man who wakes his kids at 5:00 am for a surprise trip to Disneyworld. The kids response is, it’s OK dad – we know Mom’s leaving you. The thing is, Carell didn’t know. He also didn’t know that his wife was cheating on him with his boss, and that he’s not really the father of all his kids. As the sketch proceeds, it turns out that Carell’s character is an idiot who, for reasons unclear, has no idea his wife’s been gone for a month. There was a worthwhile premise in here somewhere, but it required a slow reveal. Just blurting out how this man didn’t know anything going on around him made this more confusing than funny.

The host played Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, delivering a message to viewers that positioned the company’s announcement this week about its new headquarters as a direct, personal “sick burn” on the president, who has made no secret of his animosity toward Bezos and Amazon. Carell’s Bezos claims he chose Queens and Northern Virginia as the company’s new headquarters to be in the president’s current and childhood homes, forever in his face as a constant reminder that Bezos is 100x wealthier than he is. In the sketch, Bezos recalls the many times and ways he’s humiliated the president, including some of the more incendiary headlines from his newspaper, The Washington Post. By the end, he’s announcing Amazon Caravan, which provides for immigrants to deliver packages to Trump buildings, and drones now with Trump-like toupees, which look “so silly that everyone knew it was fake.” He even says he’s opening an office across from Arlington National Cemetery so they can pay their respect to fallen veterans, “even when it’s raining outside.”

Carell and Strong played single stragglers invited to a neighbor’s Thanksgiving dinner. Dining with couples Jones and Thompson and McKinnon and Bennett, the topic turned to how there are no Thanksgiving songs, but Carell and Strong each, independently, remember one in particular, and wind up singing it together to their hosts’ consternation. Turns out it’s a song about a sexual encounter gone wrong. Carell pulls out a keyboard, and the two are performing a song that seems a demented spiritual relation of the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” a holiday tale of love gone gross. By the end, the pair are singing in horrible Scandinavian accents about Carell’s non-working dong. The rest join in before the violent end, but the real fun here was watching Carell and Strong get silly.

RBG Rap found Pete Davidson and Chris Redd playing rappers going off about their favorite Supreme Court justice, as McKinnon shows her Ruth Bader Ginsburg being a general badass in the background. McKinnon’s RBG dances to the music surrounded by her fellow justices. She lifts weights, practices boxing by punching a slab of raw beef, shakes up Justice Kavanaugh’s beer, and even shows off the Brooklyn tattoo on her rock hard abs. This could have used a bit more of Ginsburg joining in on the rap, but even without it, this was a quick funny hit that jolted the episode with some much needed energy.

Carell played an astronaut hosting a Q&A broadcast for American middle-schoolers from a space flight that goes horribly wrong. With Jones and Mikey Day, Carell takes questions from kids while monkeys, on board for experiments, are accidentally killed and frozen, leading to them floating around the chamber and cracking into pieces. A funny few moments of chaos here from Carell, who does comic agitation as good as anyone, as he tries to remain calm despite Day trying to bring dead and frozen crew mate McKinnon in from space with a crane without cracking her in two.

One bright spot in an underwhelming Weekend Update found Mikey Day at the desk as actual Republican congressman-elect Denver Riggleman, who is a supposed devotee of Bigfoot Erotica, having posted pictures online of Bigfoot’s penis – welcome to American politics, 2018-style. Day read aloud from a book of Bigfoot porn supposedly authored by Riggleman, and got a bit too overheated during the read, providing some funny moments (especially given the romantic Bigfoot illustrations accompanying him). Kenan Thompson also brought back famed basketball dad LaVar Ball, trying to convince Michael Che that he and LeBron James are besties. Also, he just signed a deal to promote PlayStation 2, so he’s got that going for him.

In an inexplicable parody of “Beauty School Dropout” from Grease, Bryant and Gardner are high school girls having a sleepover, and Carell plays a crooner who appears to them out of nowhere surrounded by four dancing women. He’s singing at Gardner to not drop out of school, when suddenly Bryant realizes that the singer is her dad, who left his family six weeks prior. Carell tries to keep his song going as Bryant alternatively presses him for his recent whereabouts and derides him for being a permed-out creep who now sings to teenage girls. A few laughs from this one, as Carell, playing a man trying to deny his obvious patheticness, finds a character directly in his comedic wheelhouse. ()

Carell and Gardner played a retired couple who ditched their successful lives to move into an RV, and now try to convince their kids, Day and Bryant, that they made the right move. Carell truly believes it; Gardner is clearly miserable. By the end, Gardner finally admits she hates it, and then the sketch ends. If there was a joke here, I missed it.

Also in space, but in the future, Carell, Jones, Strong and Beck Bennett plays space travelers having Space Thanksgiving with pointy-eared aliens Thompson and Melissa Villasenor. The aliens share a purple corn on the cob, which they call kern, but the kernels seem to be alive, screaming in pain every time someone takes a bite. This sketch was a mess that completely fell apart before a plot could assemble. Carell’s character said something about saving the corn, but then the entire cast cracked up and ate it anyway. I can’t tell what the intent was here, but this was a massive and confusing failure.

The fake ad GP Yass is for a GPS device that includes an option for Drag Entertainers as the voice guiding you. Thompson plays the voice as Carell and Heidi Gardner enliven a long drive. The voices are festive, but so much is happening on screen that you can’t see the map. Running under two minutes, this was a one-joke sketch that kept it almost too simple, failing to stretch for even laugh number two.

SNL takes a Thanksgiving break, returning on December 1 with host Claire Foy and musical guest Anderson .Paak.

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.