Heidi’s Food Challenge Breaks Cast, Digital Short Return

Nate Bargatze proved immediately why he was such a quick return to host the show, coming in less than a year from his first time hosting last October. His easy, dry delivery brings a unique energy and cadence to the show, that actually worked far more effectively than Jean Smart’s similar approach last week.

While it’s a different energy than a typical episode of SNL, Nate delivers on laughs so well that he carried many of the night’s best moments all by himself — though not the best moment of the night!

He also brought back one of his breakout characters from last year with another diatribe from his General George Washington about how America will take ownership of the English language and turn it into the nonsensical monstrosity it has become in the past 250 years or so.

The night also featured the returns of all the previous players from last week’s political cold open as they skewered the congenial vice presidential debate, with Bowen Yang’s smarmy J.D. Vance taking on the affable Jim Gaffigan’s Tim Walz while Mamala Harris (Maya Rudolph), Doug Emhoff (Andy Samberg), and Joe Biden (Dana Carvey) tuned in.

Speaking of Andy Samberg, he reunited with Akiva Schaffer for the first proper Lonely Island “Digital Short” in many years, proving that no matter how many years pass, they can still make us deeply uncomfortable as we laugh with their material so funky fresh pushing the envelope of good taste (and the censors) to the very limit!

Plus, newcomer Jane Wickline was the first of the three featured players to get a big showcase night on the show — which may have come a bit early as she whiffed pretty badly, while still managing to salvage something from it. It usually gets better, kid, so hang in there!

As usual, we’re ranking all the sketches from worst to first, including the Monologue, Cold Open, “Weekend Update” and any sketches that were cut for time but made their way online. We’ll skip the musical guests, because they’re not usually funny — unless Ashlee Simpson shows up. We wrap up with a look at the cast-member who had the strongest week.

The last sketch of the night was a little light on laughs, but we did enjoy the premise of Nate’s coach being way more concerned about getting reimbursed for the player’s jerseys than the sad state of the game. That landed him in stark contract to Andrew Diskumkes’ fired-up coach trying to motivate his team … while Nate just wanted to get paid. Once again, Nate’s dry, static delivery adds to the comedy, with this material clearly either being developed with him, or tailored to his delivery style. This wasn’t a hilarious piece by any means, but it had a silliness to it that brought a smile.

We’ve seen variations of this concept before, but it was still charming seeing Nate completely lost as he’s picked for a Spanish-language game show while sitting at a taping in Miami. All of the humor comes from him — and presumably most of the audience — not quite following what’s going on because of the language barrier. Marcello Hernandez brings a lot of fun energy as the host, but we almost wanted even more zaniness than we got. Everyone was fully committed to what we did experience, making for a high-energy few moments of pure zaniness, balanced well by Nate’s typically subdued delivery.

Jane gets a prominent role, where she relies heavily on the cue cards but otherwise comports herself well enough — if a bit stiffly — opposite basically everyone in a sketch about how best to get a deceased man’s body down a waterslide. Michael Longfellow proves himself the perfect partner to Nate, with both sharing a similar dry approach to comedy (honestly, we were picturing a very funny buddy comedy movie as they were bantering back and forth). It may have been an inevitable decline of good taste to the end, but man, we sure enjoyed the ride.

The boys piled both of their usual segments into one long stretch filled with lots of laughs, and even some audience applause that they were apparently keeping track of. The seeming rivalry between this pairing continues to bring as much delight as their barrage of jokes. Those were particularly strong this week, with several eliciting literal lol moments with takes on the debate, Diddy, the hurricane, and more.

Jane’s delivery of her lines before the song was borderline atrocious, which we can hopefully chalk up to nerves. She has a unique delivery normally, but this was definitely off from even that. Her song itself was clever enough, singing about a “party” she attended as the plus one of someone who left. Once the premise was established, it became pretty obvious what was coming, but it was still charming in its own way. This was clearly just a way to introduce her and what she does to the audience, but we’re not completely convinced it was a winning moment for her.

The best thing about this current political lineup is how much fun they’re clearly having. We are definitely getting a kick out of these different eras of SNL coming together with Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, and Dana Carvey taking on Kamala Harris, Doug Emhoff, and Joe Biden. Carvey, in particular, was getting huge laughs from the other players, and even struggled a bit himself to keep it together. We’d have liked a little more focus on the VP debate, as both Jim Gaffigan and Bowen Yang were doing great as Tim Walz and J.D. Vance. The show managed to take apart the highlights of the event, but all the jokes were the obvious ones, leaving Carvey and his ice cream declarations to be the comedic highlights of the sketch. I know Lorne Michaels was happy to have this group cast, but maybe they don’t all need to show up in all the cold opens? How about just the relevant ones to the piece.

A charming standup monologue with some very gentle humor kicked off the night on a similar tone to his last appearance, with Nate making fun of his own pronunciation of “oil” in community college, his lack of raspberry awareness growing up — “I don’t come from money, I still swim with my eyes open” — and his unhealthy relationship with DoorDash. Nate has already proven himself as a capable repertory player on this show, so seeing him come out with this level of confidence and calm had us feeling pretty confident that maybe (just maybe) this week would prove funnier than last. Please?

Out of nowhere, Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer of The Lonely Island reunited for the first “SNL Digital Short” since Natalie Portman’s “Natalie’s Rap 2” back in 2018. This one revived their hip-hop comedy schtick for a rather disturbing concept of a glory hole for (hopefully) getting sushi fed to you in a bathroom stall. Perhaps funniest is the built-in “here us out” in the song, knowing how poorly it might be received. The bit is absolutely ridiculous from start to end, but slickly produced and performed, maintaining the usual high quality of the format.

Nate Bargate’s most delightful character from his first appearance, George Washington, returns to once again extoll the virtues of the nascent American variations of English, such as having a word fo 12 (and no other number), the multiple spellings of the donut, and even the importance of a good education, with the first year “kindergarten” and the second year … “first grade.” He teased how we’ll celebrate President’s Day, where we’ll “buy a mattress, of course,” and again deftly evaded all of Kenan Thompson’s questions about the fate of slaves. It was more of the same, but brought out laughs all the same. Nate’s dry, deadpan delivery — especially as he ignored Kenan — was perfect throughout.

A comedy of errors in this pre-taped sports segment as Nate’s golfer hits everything but the hole (at least at first), including a bird in flight, a bald eagle nest and more. Once again, Nate’s understated delivery fits so perfectly in the golf setting, as the more outlandish mishaps of his attempt to sink his shot bring bigger and bigger laughs — and anticipation of what could go wrong next. All of the little details between shot attempts certainly helped to elevate a near-perfect little filmed gem, including expert commentary from Mikey Day and Heidi Gardner.

We loved the left turn this one took as a family processed what to do with their dad’s developing dementia only for Heidi Gardner — the girlfriend of one of the siblings — to suddenly find herself facing a “mile high” food challenge. As always, Heidi goes all in with the physical comedy, creating one hilarious moment after the other, while Nate’s deadpan complements her zaniness perfectly. Even the rest of the cast at the table struggled to keep it together (including the usually unbreakable Mikey Day) when she reacted to the five-minute warning. We actually didn’t love the ending as much as everything that led up to it, but it was still almost nonstop laughs.

With Nate able to carry so many sketches himself, the cast was really pushed into supporting roles with a lot of their performances. In fact, newcomer Jane Wickline was arguably the only one with two lead positions on the night, if we want to give her a co-lead spot for the waterslide sketch.

Unfortunately for Jane, these were not standout moments, with her really relying on cue cards on the first sketch, and fumbling even more awkwardly trying to talk during that “Weekend Update” appearance. That leaves us standout solo performances, backed by great supporting roles.

The standout leads on the night outside of Nate were definitely Bowen’s J.D. Vance charm offensive, Michael’s dry delivery in that water slide piece, and the one that has to get the win. Heidi proved herself a great anchor figure in both the cold open and golf pieces, but blew us away with her commitment to the insanity as the girlfriend taking on a food challenge.

It was easily one of the funniest single performances of the night, and might be hard to top as this anniversary season continues. Jane has a little time yet to find her comedic voice on this show, but Heidi clearly knows exactly who she is as a performer and how to wring the most laughs out of every single moment.

Saturday Night Live’s 50th season celebration continues next week with host Ariana Grande and musical guest Stevie Nicks.