For the current cast of Saturday Night Live, going weird has resulted in some of the show’s best sketches. From Beck Bennett’s pompadoured accent coach to the idea of a decrepit oil baron addressing his son’s career day, many of the highlights of recent seasons have involved starting with a bizarre idea and embracing it wholeheartedly. For the show’s 3 episodes produced remotely, this tendency has only been magnified — often to hilarious effect.
Among the season’s best sketches were one in which Melissa Villaseñor had a romantic evening with an unseen man with overlong toenails and scars from a wolf attack and one where Chloe Fineman played both an Airbnb host and her eccentric (and possibly criminal) guest. Both aired two weeks ago, and last night’s episode brought some of the same surreal, madcap energy.
Alternately: Kate McKinnon played a lighthouse keeper who’s been alone on an isolated island for 50 years. The premise of the sketch: McKinnon’s lighthouse keeper is offering advice on how best to live in isolation, despite not exactly providing a model of calm and stability.
The last remote episode of Saturday Night Live shows that McKinnon can make lists of absurd groceries and terrible cat puns hilarious. Here, she turns nautical isolation — previously the stuff of psychological horror — into something hilarious. You may never look at clams the same way again.
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