'SNL' Recap: Bill Burr is The Right Man for the Moment

By Joe Berkowitz, an entertainment reporter and cultural commentator.

We are so back. Well, back to the 1980s, anyway.

On Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris badly lost an election to a man who bragged about overturning Roe v Wade and was later found liable in a court of law for sexual abuse. What perfect table setting for a famous comedian, just a few days later, to serve up anachronistic jokes on live TV aimed at dizzy broads and their hooters.

Saturday Night Live has a vaunted tradition of handing over the keys of its first post-election episode to a comedian whose fan base spans the entire political spectrum. Dave Chappelle had the honors both in 2016 and 2020, though he may have since fallen so deep down the anti-trans rabbit hole that he has restricted his appeal to only one-half of that spectrum. Bill Burr makes for an obvious alternative. He’s similarly a consummate shit-stirrer whose command of the craft often elevates material that would otherwise alienate left-leaning comedy lovers.

However, given a moment that called for either a stab at unity or slingshotting rocks at Goliath, Burr chose instead to kick liberal women while they’re down. Worse, he did so with the kind of “feminists are ugly” jokes that peaked in an era when the hottest thing in comedy was Jay Leno.

When Burr previously hosted SNL back in 2020, he also stoked controversy by taking swipes at women, but in a much different way. During that show’s monologue, he called out white women specifically for hijacking the woke movement and making it about themselves. Whether those jokes were valid or funny is debatable, but they inarguably offered trenchant cultural analysis and a point of view. His latest monologue, in contrast, is submerged in the swamp of vintage misogyny. There’s no political commentary lurking in material about how women might win more elections if they dress like they’re trying to get free drinks at a bar. All that’s there is an artless effort to provoke outrage — Tony Hinchcliffe with the world’s strongest Boston accent.

Ordinarily, getting offended by a Bill Burr joke is a sucker’s game. White women who were up in arms about his previous monologue, for instance, risked being informed by roughly one million Burr bros that they were merely “proving his point,” whether that logic tracks or not. They counter that getting offended by jokes designed with the express purpose of offending your looks means you have lost, and the comedian has won. But what exactly is the proper response to a series of jokes notable only for their calculated cruelty toward women at a time when many of them are already despairing? Is it “wocka wocka”?

Personally, my response is one of pure disappointment. As a respected comedy statesman given a massive platform so soon after the election, Burr had the first crack at modeling what stand-up might look like in the era of Donald Trump’s second coming. His monologue suggests it could look a lot like Trump himself. Wocka wocka.

Although the monologue cast a pall over the rest of the show, the sketches that followed made for a loose, rip-roaring episode. It may not have been the tonic that bummed-out Harris supporters wanted this weekend, but it probably had something for everybody, which is about as close as any comedy show could come to “unifying” an audience right now.

Here are the highlights from the rest of the episode:

What an incredible fake-out. During the first 45 seconds of the cold open, half of the cast soberly rattles off some of the president-elect’s many glaring deficits. Uh-oh, “Hallelujah” alert! Then, the turn: everyone actually loves Trump and has supported him all along and would very much appreciate it if he didn’t take away NBC’s broadcasting license or whatever. It’s a smart bit, well executed. The most telling part, however, comes after James Austin Johnson debuts his new Hot Jacked Trump, only to break character by rolling his eyes as he walks off stage. It’s as if he’s pre-exhausted by how much longer he’ll now have to continue portraying the world’s most well-known person. Us too, James. Us too.

Burr’s delivery here should make newcomers turned off by his monologue immediately understand his high status in the comedy world. As a firefighter who inexplicably sees pornographic cartoon images in a Rorschach test, he really sells the character’s matter-of-fact descriptions of the wild visions he’s seeing. (“But she’s not offended, though,” he says about a picture of Elsa from Frozen after Olaf the Snowman has run away with her top. “If anything, she’s delighted by the horny game of cat and mouse.”)

Snake Skin, the fake band at the center of this sketch, is a mishmash of old-school hair metal groups like Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and Whitesnake — styled so precisely, you can practically smell the Aqua Net. While Andrew Dismukes gives it his all as the band’s singer, Sarah Sherman steals the scene with her imperial guitar face during a song about “boobie sweat.”

The overwhelming Boston vibes of this episode peak with a riff on Good Will Hunting. It’s another strong turn for Dismukes, who captures exactly how it feels to discover a barf so foul it makes you cry, but in Boston.

Apparently, last week’s Mulaney-assisted musical number left the cast wanting more. This sketch finds them staging an ode to bald guys. Hats off (pun intended, sadly) to the makeup team for capturing every flavor of the bald guy rainbow and to the writers for highlighting so many bald-guy details, like the pain of having a lone glaring freckle on the top of one’s crown.

• Dana Carvey debuted an Elon Musk impersonation during the cold open, and while it felt a bit shoehorned into that moment, there’s definitely potential here.

• Burr’s toxic Patriots fan in the Buffalo Wild Wings sketch would probably have landed better if Burr hadn’t acted just five minutes earlier, like the kind of guy who would indeed have on his phone a selfie with Barstool president Dave Portnoy.

• By the way, is Portnoy broadly famous enough for that subtle phone joke to even work? I have no idea how famous anyone is anymore.

• Weird to see sports fanaticism depicted as both a feature and bug in strained father-son relationships a second time in such a short span, but the Calling Dad sketch is about bottled-up feelings rather than explosive rage.

• This is the first time I can recall Michael Che drinking a tumbler of brown liquid on the rocks during Weekend Update, and what an appropriate week for it.

• Kenan Thompson brought back his Update character, Michael Che’s neighbor Willie, for the first time in ages. How long has it been? So long that the last time he appeared, Willie was talking about a Covid vaccine in hypothetical terms.

• Burr is lucky his exploding-wife monologue in the Trauma Support Group sketch is so funny that viewers might not even notice him going in and out of a woo-woo man-bun accent during.

• Burr’s “You think you’re arm candy?” line in the dinner jokes sketch would definitely have landed better if Burr hadn’t, just an hour and twenty minutes earlier, cracked jokes about rating women based on their appearance. That monologue really did cast a pall over the entire episode.

• New cast member Ashley Padilla is very funny in that same sketch, though, while playing a deeply unfunny person.