Watch an Actor’s Would-Be Viral Video Go Badly on “SNL”

There are echoes of the "At Home" episodes with this one

Beck Bennett
Beck Bennett in "Enough is Enough."
NBCUniversal

In retrospect, Beck Bennett’s hair might be the first cue that something’s off. Bennett is Saturday Night Live‘s go-to cast member to play pompous alpha-male types — though the show has found a rich vein of humor in the moments when he’s played against type. So a sketch that opens with Bennett playing a floppy-haired actor warming himself up to make a big declaration on social media is going to have an element of cognitive dissonance in it from the outset.

That’s the case with the sketch “Enough Is Enough,” where Bennett’s actor psychs himself up to deliver a host of broad criticisms of the Donald Trump presidency. The joke here is that Bennett’s character thinks he’s speaking truth to power; in reality, he’s making critiques that were already obvious during the last presidential election.

Alternately? Plenty of people deliver impassioned political diatribes; most of them are not conspicuously shirtless when they do so. Nor do they end by asking their followers to tag various A-list celebrities. Bennett’s character might have more in common with the “Threw It On the Ground” guy than he thinks.

The bulk of the sketch involves the actor dealing with the escalating fallout from the video — which mostly involves people telling him to take it down. With one memorable exception, Bennett is alone on screen; the sketch feels like a descendent of one of the “At Home” sketches which aired earlier this year.

Like last week’s “Future Ghost,” “Enough Is Enough” takes a solid (if unspectacular) premise and ends on a high note. The less said about the conclusion of this one, the better — but the saga of Bennett’s hapless actor takes an unexpected and hilarious turn before the sketch winds down.

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