Ariana Grande Hosted A Mighty Musical Saturday Night Live And Pretty Much Crushed It – SlashFilm

Charades with Mom – If you had forgotten about Ariana Grande’s theater kid energy, this sketch will certainly remind you. Maybe the most impressive thing about Grande, other than her outstanding voice, is how precise she is when it comes to line readings. Even when she briefly flubs a line in this sketch, she manages to recover quickly and with such clear enunciation so as not to lose the line. Furthermore, she has moments of such rapid fire, melodramatic dialogue, that you can’t help but appreciate how good she is at doing this. When you think about it, “SNL” is just like a Broadway show that’s merely broadcast to millions around the world. With all her concert and stage experience, Grande has all the skills she needs, including more than satisfactory comedic presence and timing. The escalation of the charades conflict between Ariana as a competitive mother and Bowen Yang as her son’s new boyfriend is delightfully absurd, and the result is a great live sketch.

Castrati – Just the sight of Ariana Grande as a tiny boy from the Italian renaissance period is enough to earn a big laugh. That massive bowl cut with on her tiny frame is inherently funny, but the sketch around it makes it even better. Andy Samberg and Maya Rudolph get in on the fun as the parents of this young boy, whom they’ve turned into a beautifully high-pitched singer with the magic of, how you say, castration. Listening to Grande deliver a traumatized, high-pitched singing voice is rather amusing, but even funnier are the close-up cuts to her forever-terrified face. James Austin Johnson and Kenan Thompson add even more as they react to the unsettling revelations, and this one even manages to have a solid ending too.

Maybelline – If you thought Ariana Grande was only good at musical impressions, think again. Here, Grande goes toe-to-toe with Chloe Fineman’s fantastic impersonation of “White Lotus” and “Legally Blonde” co-star Jennifer Coolidge, and she proves that she’s really got the goods. Grande and Fineman even make each other break slightly as they fumble with the mirroring in the sketch, which is very clearly taking cues from Jimmy Fallon’s famous Mick Jagger sketch from so many years ago. But the real treat is the surprise addition of a third Jennifer Coolidge played by Dana Carvey. While Carvey isn’t as good as Grande or Fineman, it’s moreso the effort and the sight that makes the gag land firmly. Part of me wonders if they really wanted to do this with Coolidge, who was meant to host last year before the Writers Guild of America strikes resulted in the last episodes of season 49 being canceled.

As for the less remarkable sketches, a Celine Dion sports ad for UFC featured an impressive impression of the singer by Ariana Grande, but the sketch overall wasn’t a home run. Hotel Detective was a fine “Twilight Zone” riff but felt like it was missing something. But if there was one sketch that felt like a bit of a dud, it was the Bridesmaids Speech. It was a rather clumsy use of Sabrina Carpenter’s hit song “Espresso,” and while that’s kind of the point of the sketch, with Ariana Grande even dumbing down her incredible voice to seem like a normal bridesmaid singing with friends of the bride, it never quite felt like it fell into a good rhythm. The timing was frequently off, especially when it came to cutting to the right camera on several occasions, and it made everything feel stilted. 

Meanwhile, this was the worst cold open we’ve had so far this season, even though it wasn’t downright terrible. While I appreciated the fact that they tried to shake things up with a “Family Feud” framework, the actual content and punchlines felt rather forced. Though, Kenan Thompson is always great as Steve Harvey, this just didn’t work well for this moment in political satire. But there was one other missing ingredient, and we’ll get to that a bit later.