Saturday Night Live Season 11 Reviews - Episode 5 - Tom Hanks / Sade

 

"I Sometimes Have This Fantasy That You Die"

Cold Open: Entertainment Tonight

4 Stars

Run Down On Hollywood's Top Stories

Nora Dunn plays Mary Hart and Tom Hanks plays Rob Weller and they dish about some celebs, all interviewed by Terry Sweeney in a dress who nods when they cut to him.  Hanks is hilarious here as he sings along to the theme song with "boops" accumulating in a story about a man dying and he lets out a sad boop.  We also get an Entertainment Tonight poll asking people what their favorite Hogan's Heroes character is, Schultz got 95% of the vote.  Then we get a parade of celebrity impressions, Cusack plays Brooke Shiels, Downey is George Michael, Vance as Lola Falana, Lovitz as Ringo Starr, Quaid as Gregory Peck and Sweeney as Joan Collins.  None of these are particularly funny, they're not really saying anything funny, it reminds me of the celebrity roll call sketches the show does now like Star Wars Auditions and Back To The Future Auditions.  At one point we go on the set of Out Of Bounds where teen sensation Anthony Michael Hall is filming his new movie.  Apparently he missed last week's show (I hadn't noticed) and it was because his parents found out that he was on SNL and they grounded him.  Quick side note, you need to see Out Of Bounds, it's hard to track down because it was never released on DVD but it's worth it.  The movie is insanely terrible in that "so bad it's good" way.  They close with a story about GE buying RCA which owns NBC and now SNL will have a new sign on, "We bring good things to life" will replace the old tired sign on, "Live from New York...".  It was fun but at 7 minutes was a little long for a cold open.

Tom Hanks Monologue

3 Stars

Tom really wishes he was watching the show at home rather than hosting

Back when SNL started, Hanks had big dreams, some day I'm gonna watch that show on my own TV.  Then he bought a TV and he started to dream about sitting in the studio audience, unfortunately he wasn't allowed to leave the state because there was a murder investigation going on, but that's a different story.  Now he's hosting and it just doesn't feel the same.  It's just not the same as watching the show at home.  He sees a television monitor and starts watching the show from there.  He grabs a lady's purse and steals her compact so he can host the show while watching it on TV at the same time.  It's a silly way to start the show, nothing terrific but it's effective.

Re-run of Trojans commercial

I still don't get this.

Liars

4 Stars

Tommy Flanagan goes home for the holidays and chats with his brother, Earl

Tommy shows up at his mom's house and is proud to tell her that he is a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous.  His mom is confused because he never lied when he was a kid, he did have a dog that used to eat his homework and convicts who hid girly magazines under his bed and they held him back a year in school to help the other kids.  Get it?  He lies a lot.  It's fine though that this is his 3rd appearance in 5 episodes because I'm not sick of him yet and just like in the Pee-Wee Herman episode he has another liar to bounce off of when his brother played by Tom Hanks shows up.  Lovitz is going to Harvard, Hanks wrote the textbook.  Lovitz won the Nobel Prize but turned it down, Hanks left his at home.  Hanks isn't really hungry because he just had lunch in Brazil with the Prime Minister, Lovitz spent some time in Brazil where they made him a God.  Lovitz also played 3rd base and catcher for the Kansas City Royals during the World Series while blind.  It's a fun sketch with fun performances.

The Pat Stevens Show

3 Stars

Pat Stevens interviews Louis Farrakhan

Pat reads some fan letters before bringing out Wayans as Farrakhan.  This part of the sketch is only here to confuse me as to who the hell Pat Stevens is.  When she brings out Wayans the sketch gets a little bit of life.  She points out the coincidence that he's here today and her guest tomorrow is Chaka Khan.  Farrakhan explains that Muslims change their names to get away from their slave names.  Pat knows what he's talking about, she's familiar with Mr. T.  I think I may be starting to get this character, she's retarded.  We're getting closer to understanding this Pat Stevens riddle but we're not quite there yet.  Farrakhan is upset about how he's treated in the press.  He's tired of everyone calling him a racist and he blames the Jews the most.  Much like the last outings, the guest gets all the laughs which makes me wonder why Pat Stevens needs to exist at all.

Sade

"Is It A Crime"

Hanks introduces her a "Shar-day", I always thought it was "Shah-day".  Either way you pronounce it, she's got a hell of a voice.  This is a soulful slow jam and in the immortal words of Jackie Rogers, Jr., "I think Jackie's getting a chubby".

Weekend Update

"Just a reminder, tonight's the night you don't do anything to your clock"

Dennis Miller had a much better delivery this week and no guests.  The jokes were also landing a lot better for me and after last week's dismal outing, I think I may start liking this segment finally.  He gives a personal commentary about labeling albums when they should be labeling parents instead and then goes to another remote piece for Dennis Miller's Sports Fantasies.  He interviews an old guy who always dreamed about being a boxing referee.  The guy gets in the ring and is immediately knocked unconscious when he gets punched in the face.  A few more outings like this and I may join the Dennis Miller fan club.

Fantasy

4 Stars

A man describes his morbid fantasy to his wife

Joan Cusack and Tom Hanks are having their anniversary and acting very lovey-dovey.  Cusack remarks that she knows him so well that there isn't anything he could say to shock her.  Hanks then describes a fantasy he sometimes has where she dies.  Sometimes it is a slow painful death, sometimes she gets hit by a bus but afterwards everyone comes to the funeral and consoles him, he gets an 18 year old au pair to help with the kids, they fight the temptation of a physical relationship as long as they can before finally giving in, she gets a modeling job and introduces him to all her modeling friends.  Cusack eventually gets up to leave and is stabbed in the gut by a waiter bringing a fresh steak knife, it's his first day.  So she's dead and a woman comes to console Tom Hanks.  This was dark, twisted and very funny.  Hanks was great and Cusack made a great straight person.  This is a sketch where the real star is the writer.  I feel like a lot of the sketches this season were written first rather than pitched with an idea and then written late at night.  It doesn't seem rushed at all, it's almost a mini play with two great performances and a beginning, middle and end.

Stand-Ups

4 Stars

A group of comics fraternize back stage

This was a few years before Hanks and Wayans appeared in the dismally unfunny Punchline and this sketch is infinitely more entertaining than anything in that movie.  A couple of hack stand up comedians chat about minuscule things and give their observations in that 80s stand up delivery.  Every sentence starts with, "I mean, hey..." and ends with "I wanna know".  When you fly across time zones, where does the time go?  What happens to that missing sock in the dryer?  99% fat free?  What happened to the other 1%?  The performances are all really funny, there's really no point to the sketch but it's really fun. 

Steven Wright

3 Stars

Right after the Stand Ups sketch we get a guest performance from stand up Steven Wright, who is the exact opposite from the stand ups we saw before.  If you're not familiar with Wright he is the deadpan comic whose act consists almost entirely of clever one liners.  What's another word for thesaurus?  I have a collection of all the erasers from all the mini golf pencils in the world.  He ends by singing a song entitled "They'll find her when the leaves blow away because I'm not raking until spring".  While I thought this was funny I wasn't quite digging the low energy while I was on such a high. 

Sade returns to sing Sweetest Taboo which is another beautiful and soulful slow jam.

Fishermen

2 Stars

Two fishermen of some vague ethnicity curse the sea

I'm not really sure what this was but Hanks and Quaid are two fishermen with accents.  They can't seem to catch any fish, at one point Hanks catches a guitar which he finds as useless and then they catch a big box of jewels which they also think are worthless because they were looking for fish.  The only part of this sketch that was fun at all was when Quaid's moustache started falling off.  They keep getting splashed with water every time they catch something which caused the glue to come loose.  Quaid fights breaking as he delivers his last speech with his mustache hanging from his upper lip.  That part was fun, the sketch was not.

According to SNL Archives, I'm missing a sketch with Nora Dunn and Joan Cusack called Holiday Moms.

FINAL ANALYSIS

"Why Don't They Call It Kitchen Toast?"

Average

3.4 Stars

MVP

Jon Lovitz
Entertainment Tonight, Liars, Stand Ups

Best Sketch

Fantasy

Worst Sketch

Fishermen

How I Would Have Lorne Michaels-ed It

Everything was pretty spot on here.  All the sketches were good up until the last one and that one was more forgettable than awful.  I've been enjoying the short and sweet cold opens over the sketch length cold opens.  Entertainment Tonight would have made a good lead off sketch and you could have just made the cold open something like Tom Hanks jumping out of the Hudson River and screaming "Live From New York".

Host Analysis

Hanks is just a notch below Lithgow as my favorite host of the season so far.  You can definitely tell that he had fun with the cast and got along with everyone.  He also seemed like a very generous actor, he worked well with his cast mates and let them get laughs without trying to overshadow anyone.  He's one of those guys that could have been an SNL cast member had he taken a different path.

Final Thoughts

I probably rank Lithgow a little higher as a host just based on acting ability and how he threw himself into his sketches and the Pee-Wee Herman episode was overall the most enjoyable episode but this is the best typical episode so far.  Pee-Wee's episode was a bizarre experiment that worked this felt like a classic SNL episode, something that would hold up with the best of the best.  Weekend Update was enjoyable and I even gave Pat Stevens a pass this week.

Up Next

The incredibly beautiful Teri Garr hosts with musical guests Dream Academy and The Cult.  I'm expecting a bit of a let down from the past 3 episodes, there's always a valley after a peak and I'm just guessing this will be a valley.  I love Teri Garr though, her performance in Young Frankenstein made her one of my first celebrity crushes and she was gorgeous for 4 decades, from Star Trek to Tootsie to Mom And Dad Save The World.  She's also a very funny lady so maybe my hopes should be high.