Saturday Night Live – Recap & Review – Zooey Deschanel

photo: nbc

Saturday Night Live
Zooey Deschanel

Original Air Date: Feb 11, 2012

Len – Senior Reviewer
len@thetwocentscorp.com

Sometimes you get a Valentine’s Day gift that absolutely floors you – like plane tickets to an exotic destination, or an engagement ring in your champagne, or having your sweetheart spray paint your name on an overpass (it’s a DIVERSE country, people).

Other times, you just get a very simple gift that, at second glance, turns out to be a really sweet gesture that puts a smile on your face. And that, to me, was tonight’s episode, hosted by actress, musician, and New Girl star Zooey Deschanel. I like Zooey Deschanel. At first, I felt underwhelmed by most of the show. But then when I thought back to every time she was in a sketch tonight, I smiled. I may not have LMFAO’d (more on that later), but I lit up a wee bit.

And that’s fine, because I only ask SNL to follow one simple maxim: Make me laugh. Or if you can’t make me laugh, at least make me smile. If you were looking for the huge belly laughs tonight, you probably didn’t find everything you were looking for. But I still thought it was a pretty good show overall, even though a few dead roses got lumped into the floral arrangement.

So click the link and read my Valentine’s gift to you. And if you didn’t get me anything, that’s cool. Just post your TwoCents in the comments at the end, and we’ll call it even!

Cold Open – Mitt Romney
Unfortunately, tonight’s episode started with this tame, ho-hum sketch. Romney (Jason Sudeikis) tries to downplay his recent losses to Rick Santorum while trying to convince people that Newt Gingrich came out of it worse. Not what you want to be starting off the night with, especially considering the only amusing thing was Romney’s dog, who barked on cue and wouldn’t stop. I like to think that his trainer was absent and that he was just bitching at whoever wrote this cold open. I can’t stress enough how much the writers need to knock these cold opens out of the park. Because then you follow with the host, who always gets a ton of applause, and if the monologue is at least relatively successful, you’ve got great momentum to start the show.

Grade: Give the dog a treat and let’s forget about this one.

Monologue – Zooey Deschanel
So you probably know that Zooey Deschanel can play ukulele and sing pretty well. And that she performs as part of a duo called She & Him (with M. Ward). Here, she sings a nice, cutesy little Valentine’s Day song about men who forget about Valentine’s Day. Not hilarious, but sweet and charming. And the style really suited her voice.

Grade: B+

Clint Eastwood for Chrysler
Clint Eastwood (Bill Hader) has a few words for all those people who hated his Super Bowl commercial because they thought it was too political. And while he’s sharing those words, he forgets that he’s hawking Chrysler. And get off his damn lawn while you’re at it.

Grade: C

Piers Morgan Tonight
CNN host Piers Morgan (Taran Killam) continues the Super Bowl theme with the fallout from the halftime show. MIA (Nasim Pedrad) defends her use of the middle finger and doesn’t understand why there wasn’t more outcry over the commercial where a dog murders a cat and bribes the owner with Doritos. LMFAO (Sudeikis, Fred Armisen) don’t understand why some people are such attention whores. Madonna (Kristen Wiig) spreads her legs and teaches MIA how to really shock people. And for a dose of the super sillies, Andy Samberg comes on as the enthusiastic tightrope guy from the halftime show.
But my favorite part of this sketch was Deschanel as a self-righteous Ohio woman who was appalled at the show and created a prototype for a “decency strap”, a rubber band that ties the middle three fingers together.

Grade: B+

Les Jeunes de Paris
Oh no! With Paul Brittain gone, who’s going to hit the jukebox for Taran Killam? Why, it’s none other than Golden Globe winner and star of The Artist, Jean Dujardin! Not only can he get the music to play, but he turns the picture to monochrome!

I constantly appreciate the preparation and production value that go into these Les Jeunes des Paris sketches. Some people hate them, but I think they’re great. And if you weren’t smiling through at least part of it, then don’t blame the world for you being alone on ANOTHER Valentine’s Day. It’s your own fault for being unlovable.

Grade: A

Clint Eastwood #2
We’ve gone from halftime, to the 3rd quarter, to the 4th quarter. Clint’s now super pissed off that the Chinese have surpassed our work ethic while we jerk it to GoDaddy commercials, and he’s now telling them how we’re going to run them down with our Chryslers. He even gets in a dig about Gingrich’s head not fitting in a Chrysler. Oh, and this commercial is for Little Caesars. It’s better than the first one, especially since we get to hear Clint say, “Pizza! Pizza!”

Grade: B

Daily Post
Deschanel plays the new girl (seriously, she basically plays her New Girl character, Jess) in a 1940’s newsroom where everyone speaks quickly and impossibly wittily. This sketch was set up for Deschanel’s character, as the outsider, to get all the laughs. She was fairly successful, but it became really apparent that she was staring hard at cue cards the whole time. I thought Kristen Wiig played this sketch REALLY well, in part because her diction was fast but understandable.

Grade: C+

Clint Eastwood #3
Now Clint is ranting about Mexicans sneaking in our end zones, taking our jobs, and driving our Chryslers. And his pants are jacked up to his neck. This 3rd beat is more punchy compared to the other two commercials, and now Clint’s hawking The Dark Knight Rises and the Trojan Triphoria vibrator (yes, we see him with his hair blown back). I love how he’s still pissed off about the Chryslers.

Grade: B

Karmin – “Brokenhearted”, “I Told You So!”
Karmin is Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan, who got internet-famous doing a cover of a Chris Brown tune, and now they have a record deal and new album coming out. Ah, the age we live in.
Still, did anybody else like these guys? It sounded like good, danceable pop music, plus Amy can rap kinda fast. As best I can describe the style, it’s:

Amy: A heap of Jessie J + a dash of Katy Perry + a sprinkle of Nasim Pedrad’s face + a pinch of Les Jeunes des Paris.
Nick: I strongly believe that Nick Noonan was created when SNL/Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, Austrian music legend Falco, and Arsenal FC superstar Robin van Persie all ran into each other at full speed.

Weekend Update
Some really funny jokes about Obama’s birth control stance, the Patriots dropping a call from the President, and NBC spinning off SMASH’s success into “SMASH Criminal Intent” and “SMASH: SVU”.

Arianna Huffington (Pedrad) drops by and talks about the week’s news. Then we have a thoroughly entertaining installment of Get in the Cage with not one, but TWO Nic Cages (Samberg and the real Nicolas Cage)! The real Nic Cage was a good sport, as he shared two qualities of all Nic Cage movies: The dialogue is either whispered or shouted; and everything in the movie is on fire.

Grade: A’s all around.

Bein’ Quirky with Zooey Deschanel
Sketch of the night for me. Zooey Deschanel (Abby Elliott) hosts her own show where she and her pals talk about, y’know, hipster stuff and retro things. The real Zooey plays a sad little Mary-Kate Olsen. Kristen Wiig plays a giggly Bjork. And Taran Killam is Michael Cera, who’s just thrilled to be hanging out with the girls, including taking care of their shrine to Blossom star Mayim Bialik.

Elliott’s impersonation of Deschanel is practically flawless. In my opinion, it’s tied with Bill Hader’s Alan Alda impersonation for most scarily dead-on. The rest of the players in this sketch all brought something out in their characters, which made it so much fun. Deschanel’s Olsen is a solemn old soul, Wiig’s Bjork is magically bizarre, and Killam’s Cera is a human Mickey Mouse.

Grade: A+

Verizon 4G LTE
Tired of those Verizon 4G LTE ads that never actually explain what 4G LTE is or why it’s so much better? Exhausted by the glut of cell phones and plans that seem to be a mishmash of numbers and letters? Then you’ll be happy to see this commercial, where the Verizon employee (Hader) doesn’t seem to know much, either. SNL is often best when it’s saying what we’re all thinking. This is one of those times.

Grade: A

Crab Legs
Two Southern ladies (Wiig and Deschanel) are hosting a cookout where the main course is crab legs. With every trip from the patio back into the house, the two progressively hype up the sumptuous feast to come. Little by little, as the ladies come back with bibs and t-shirts instead of crab, the guests start to get impatient. In the end, the hosts both realize that neither of them actually bought the crab and shut off the patio and house lights, leaving their guests in the dark.

This went better than I thought it would at the start. Because it’s clear from the onset that it’s going to end with disappointed guests, the audience grows impatient along with them. So unless there’s some BIG payoff at the end, the sketch is going to fail. There is no big payoff, however, but the end is satisfactory. Why? I think it’s because the guests were allowed to vent a little bit in the middle. The biggest laugh in the whole sketch was Samberg’s first impatient outburst. Without that, I guess the sketch would have ended with the guests tearing the place apart?

Grade: C-

Whitney Houston
Not a sketch, but SNL put up a still of Whitney Houston in an old Mary Katherine Gallagher sketch. Was there something supposed to be superimposed? Because the still by itself felt weird. Either way, RIP Whitney. I guess that means no impersonation for Maya Rudolph next week.

We’re Going to Make Technology Hump
I think this is the first time we’ve seen this since the Emma Stone episode. It was pretty good, and I especially appreciated the weird-ass 80s one, which seemed built around the joke of having a pager display the word “Boobs” on it.

Grade: B-

English Pen Pals
Kind of a ‘meh’ way to end the night. Wiig and Deschanel are two English women in 1860 who write each other about changes in their love lives. Each one dates a guy more unrefined than the last. The sketch ends after Deschanel muses about how she and Wiig should get married in California many years into the future, and then we see them supposedly surfing. For me, the sketch ended once I saw Bobby Moynihan look like Tom Petty in the “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video. I knew it couldn’t get better than that.

Grade: D