You can usually tell where an SNL sketch is going. I’m not saying you can see every joke coming in advance, but more often than not, you can understand the tone and the basic premise within thirty seconds. Now and again, however, the comedy staple still has the ability to surprise, as we saw last night when a cute little Weekend Update bit that seemed designed to work in fun Lady Gaga references suddenly turned into an extended dunk on Colin Jost.
The sketch in question stars veteran Mikey Day as Lord Gaga, a British Aristocrat and husband to Lady Gaga who is just happy his wife found a hobby she can enjoy. Throughout the bit, Colin Jost keeps trying to convince Lord Gaga that his wife is actually very popular and probably makes a lot of money from singing. After a few fun back and forths, Lord Gaga finally snaps and says whatever she makes certainly isn’t as much as his textile empire. He then launches into a rant about how emasculating it would be as a man to have a wife whose salary dwarfs your own.
Can you imagine, Colin, a man whose wife makes more money than he? Can you imagine? Oh, the shame he would feel. Imagine, Colin, if I were sitting here on television behind this desk, staring at that camera, the world staring back at me knowing that my wife’s income dwarfs my own. I would die. Oh, I would die. What a living nightmare. What a nightmare. Oh, I’m sorry. Now tell me, what does your wife do?
The subtext, of course, is that Jost’s wife Scarlett Johansson is one of the biggest movie stars in the world and makes significantly more money than he does. That’s not to say he doesn’t earn a nice living as Weekend Update host and one of the more famous stars on SNL, but there’s no way it’s anywhere close to Johansson who was a major star in multiple Marvel movies and has been nominated for multiple Oscars.
It takes the crowd a little bit to catch onto exactly what’s going on, but when they do, it’s obvious they cannot get enough of the premise. Every time Mikey Day digs into another “I would die” or “What a nightmare”, the crowd roars with approval. You can check out the full segment below…
Fortunately, Jost seems to have a great sense of humor about such things. He’s always a good sport about the infamous joke swaps with Michael Che, and a good number of those contain references to his relationship with Johansson. In the most recent joke swap, she even appeared on a split screen while he was forced to read jokes about her.
As for the rest of SNL, Lady Gaga crushed it as host and musical guest. Fans couldn’t get enough of Mother Monster’s artsy and chaotic song performances, and as always, she jumped in the deep end and wasn’t afraid to get weird in her sketches. I’m very confident she’ll be invited back to do double duty again at some point in the future. Exactly when that’ll be, however, is unclear. The show hasn’t announced any upcoming hosts or even dates it’ll return with new episodes. That typically means we’re in for a few week break, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
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