I have a confession.
I am a huge fan of Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader. When he joined the SNL cast with Andy Samberg some 10 years ago, a friend of mine and I predicted Hader would be the show’s next big breakout, largely based on his brilliant impersonations. His Al Pacino sealed the deal for me in the way he completely nailed the tone of Pacino’s voice – its seemingly uncontrolled peaks and valleys – and Pacino’s tendency to pontificate aimlessly.
Of course, Samberg immediately overshadowed Hader with his enormously popular, celebrity-filled digital shorts. Samberg was the first of the two to win an Emmy award for the digital short “Dick in a Box,” an admittedly hilarious take on 90s era R&B.
But Hader continued to toil away in the cast, eventually receiving two Emmy nominations of his own for Best Supporting Actor shortly before he left in 2013.
Hader returned to SNL last night to host for the first time since his departure. Based on this performance and his fascinating recent work in the independent film The Skeleton Twins (also starring SNL alum Kristen Wiig who joined Hader during his monologue), I stand by my original proclamation – Hader is an enormous talent. He may play too low-key to be a true breakout star, but I will hold him over Andy Samberg any day. No offense to Mr. Samberg, of course.
Hader’s presence seemed to have helped SNL regain some much-needed mojo after last week’s disastrous Sarah Silverman outing. Admittedly, the episode started a little slowly with a humor-free Kim Jong-un parody that relied too heavily on lead Bobby Moynihan’s physical comedy. This was followed by Hader’s first real skit, a revisit of one of Hader’s old SNL characters. Based on a real-life telejournalist, the recurring character of Herb Welch is a cantankerous old man who frequently gets the facts wrong, insults his achor and/or his interview subjects, and lapses into dementia. This character isn’t one of my personal favorites of Haders, but this outing was cleaner, shorter, and, accordingly, better than previous versions I’d seen.
The show took a welcome break from live sketches and gave us another movie trailer parody. Personally, I love the recent parodies SNL has been offering up, starting with the Marvel trailer from Chris Pratt’s episode and continuing with last week’s “The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything.” This week, they offered up “The Group Hopper,” a visually dead-on skewering of films based on dystopian YA (young adult) novels. Centrally a parody of The Maze Runner, the skit perfectly satirized the core of most YA fiction: sexless narratives, social stratification of youth, and bizarrely outlandish authority figures.
One of the best skits of the night was the celebrity impersonation-driven Hollywood Game Night parody. Admittedly, I’m a huge sucker for a great impersonation, and this one hit the jackpot. Kate McKinnon’s dead-on Jane Lynch (“America’s number two lesbian”) lead a group that included Taran Killiam’s fantastic Christolph Waltz, Cecily Strong’s reasonably good Sofia Vergara, Beck Bennett’s shockingly great Nick Offerman, Hader’s Pacino, and Wiig’s Kathie Lee Gifford (who had too many lines for my taste). The central gimmick is not too far off from SNL’s own Celebrity Jeopardy pieces from the Will Ferrell era: offering a world in which celebrities are self-centered idiots who fail at even the simplest of tasks.
The best of the night ironically happened during the Weekend Update segment, which is normally ruined by the smug pairing of Colin Jost and Michael Che. Hader gave the audience what they really wanted by returning as his arguably most popular character, new wave club reviewer Stefon. Now, for those of you who don’t find the character funny, you need to realize that Hader does not write these bits himself. He developed the persona and allowed himself to be subject to the weirdest whims of the writers. When he describes a particularly outrageous club (this week’s running theme was MTV’s Dan Cortez but also offered a club that contained the back room of the Foot Locker where employees disappear), he’s largely seeing the descriptions for the first time on the teleprompter. It’s why he frequently covers his mouth and, that failing, breaks down into good-natured laughter as he did last night.
The rest of the evening was as good to average. The show closed with three original skits Hader playing a deranged vet attending puppet class, Hader playing the Cat in the Hat in a love triangle with Thing 2 and Cecily Strong, and Hader and company replicating a low-budget news show hosted by two Southern California boys called “Inside So Cal.” Edited like an early 90s episode of MTV’s The Real World, the skit brilliantly skewered the dead-eyed and emotionally stunted skater dudes of the same era.
It’s nice to see Hader shine so consistently through the episode when he so often took a back seat in skits during his tenure. If SNL is your only exposure to him, then I suggest you seek out his film The Skeleton Twins in which he gives a fully realized performance and proves that his talents extend beyond mere celebrity impersonations.
Welcome back, Mr. Hader. I’m glad you stopped by.
Side note: the show did recognize the untimely passing of comedy great Jan Hooks who died on Thursday from an undisclosed illness. Hooks created many memorable characters and impersonations during her multi-year stint on SNL, but the show chose to remember her with a sweet bit of fantasy, “Love is but a Dream,” also featuring the late Phil Hartman. She will be missed.
