This week, Gladiator II star Paul Mescal made his debut hosting Saturday Night Live – and, not surprisingly, there were plenty of jokes to be had about Mescal’s ubiquitous pop-cultural presence and good looks. But one of this episode’s most memorable sketches addressed something else that seemed to be everywhere this week: Spotify’s Wrapped lists, which lets people who use the service share the artists they’ve listened to the most in the past year.
For Spotify, it’s a good way to get people talking about the service. But it can also lead to some surprising moments when you discover that a friend or acquaintance has surprising tastes in music. Hence the plot of this sketch, in which Mescal plays one of a group of friends who discovers some surprising things about him when he shares his own information.
If you’re looking for a critique of the whole Wrapped phenomenon, you’ll need to look elsewhere for that. Instead, the sketch turns out to be built around a simple concept that has largely paid off for SNL: letting Bowen Yang play an absurd, larger-than-life character. (See also: his appearance as Doctor Please earlier this year.) Add some very specific references to a location outside of Baltimore and you have one of the show’s more memorably surreal sketches in a while.
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Yes, the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight came upArguably, though, the most gleefully bizarre moment in the sketch comes in its opening moments, as a character played by Andrew Dismukes concludes a story about getting into a fight with Ira Glass. It’s a tossed-off line that suggests a very different sketch — and another memorably weird concept.
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