If an entire Oscars ceremony full of Barbenheimer jokes and a killer Ryan Gosling performance of “I’m Just Ken” didn’t give you sufficient opportunity to say goodbye to the pop cultural phenomenon of “Barbie,” “Saturday Night Live” is here to make sure that you’ve had Kenough.
Gosling, who hosted “S.N.L.” this weekend with the musical guest Chris Stapleton, began his monologue by vowing that he was there to promote his coming movie “The Fall Guy.”
“So don’t worry, I’m not going to make any jokes about Ken,” he said. “Because it’s not funny. Ken and I, we had to break up. We went too deep and it’s over. So I’m not going to talk about it.”
Gosling paused and added, “I actually am going to talk about it a little bit. I have to, because when you play a character that hard, that long, letting go just feels like a breakup. And for processing a breakup, there’s really only one thing that can help: the music of the great Taylor Swift.”
Taking a seat at a piano, Gosling began to sing a variation on Swift’s “All Too Well” that began like this:
I shredded Venice Beach, it’s true.
My clothes were tight,
But something about that spandex felt so right.
I left my Rollerblades in that big pink house,
But I’ve still got that fur coat and I’ll wear it right now.
As Gosling put on his famous furs, he was joined onstage by Emily Blunt, his “Fall Guy” co-star, who chided him for continuing to sing about “Barbie.” “You’re Kenning right, and I hate that it’s even a verb,” she said.
Gosling reminded her that, she, too, had starred in another hit movie from the summer of 2023, “Oppenheimer,” in which she played the title character’s wife Kitty.
“I know it was an inferior movie …” Gosling began to say.
“It wasn’t,” Blunt said. “We, like, won everything.”
“But did you win people’s hearts?” he asked.
They concluded the monologue by trading lines on a verse that ran, in part:
[together] We were Kitty and Ken,
[Blunt] and I wish you could have seen us.
[Gosling] You were loyal to the end,
[Blunt] And your guy had no penis.
Country music video of the week
The “woman gets revenge on her cheating man” song is a longstanding category in country music, one that gets a welcome update here with assists from Stapleton and, especially, from Chloe Troast.
The song’s title, “Get That Boy Back,” isn’t her expression of her desire to reunite with a seemingly unfaithful boyfriend (Stapleton) — it’s a warning about her comically byzantine schemes for payback, like camouflaging herself to blend in with the bedroom wallpaper so she can freak out his mother (Heidi Gardner). You’ll laugh and then you’ll check to make sure no one’s hiding in your bedroom either.
Self-amused sketches of the week
Given the current state of, well, everything, it’s understandable that “S.N.L.” avoided a topical opening this week. Instead it began the show with a new installment of a long-running sketch franchise about victims of alien abduction.
Gosling has appeared in this segment before, but it is really a spotlight for the “S.N.L.” alumnus and “Barbie” co-star Kate McKinnon (who returned this week to appear in the sketch) to get her fellow performers to laugh on camera — a mild sketch comedy faux pas known as breaking.
For a more fulsome demonstration of the phenomenon, you can refer to this sketch from later in the evening, in which Gardner pretty much loses it at the sight of Gosling and Mikey Day playing two audience members at a TV debate who just happen to look like Beavis and Butt-Head. She might still be laughing about it now.
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on the reinstatement of an 160-year-old abortion law in Arizona.
Jost began:
The Arizona Supreme Court has reinstated a law from 1864 banning doctors from performing abortions. Now, reinstating laws from 1864 isn’t the worst thing for me, because I’m a white landowner. And a proud Freemason. But it’s probably not great to adopt health care rules from a time where the only two things doctors prescribed were prayer and cocaine. Saturday and Sunday. Back then if you didn’t want to keep your baby, your only option was to give it to Rumpelstiltskin. President Biden criticized the abortion law, calling it cruel, which is the same thing Biden said when he voted against it in 1864.
Che continued:
This week Donald Trump said that he supports abortion laws being decided by the states instead of the federal government. But why stop there? Why not go even smaller and leave it up to the counties, or the city? Or even better, take the government out of it completely and leave the choice about what women can do with their bodies to the person who knows what they can do with them the best: their husbands.
And where would Weekend Update be without a final farewell to O.J. Simpson? As Che joked: “O.J. Simpson died this week at the age of 76 after a battle with prostate cancer that was planted on him by the L.A.P.D.”
Weekend Update cameo of the week
Whatever other accomplishments await Caitlin Clark in her basketball career, she has now gotten to dunk on Michael Che.
After Che read a joke about Clark, the University of Iowa star who is entering the W.N.B.A. draft this week — he said the school would have “her jersey retired and replaced with an apron” — she appeared alongside him at the Weekend Update desk. After Jost played clips of past jokes that Che had made about women’s basketball, Clark made Che read a couple of new jokes about himself. (For example: “A reminder that Indiana Fever is a W.N.B.A. team and not what Michael Che gave to dozens of women at Purdue University.”) Clark concluded by giving Che a souvenir that she had autographed for him: an apron.
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