Nikki Glaser’s ‘SNL‘ Hosting Debut Was a Solid Hit
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As her breakout into teh mainstream last year for her scorched-Earth set on “The Roast of Tom Brady” and a top-notch comedy special “Someday You’ll Die,” Nikki Glaser has become an A-lister in the stand-up comedy world. But did that success translate for her first time as “Saturday Night Live” host?
Not too surprisingly, Glaser did well given that her best qualifications for the gig are that she’s very good at delivering jokes for a living and that she’s not shy about pushing the boundaries of taste in her comedy. That’s a good fit for the current incarnation of “SNL,” which tends to have at least one gross-out scatological sketch per episode and lots of “Weekend Update” segments and jokes that either land in the “just dirty enough” or “way over the line” camp.
Apart from her go-for-broke monologue, Glaser’s sensibility locked in on sketches including one about family members performing karaoke who seem way too intimate with each other, a commercial about grown men obsessed with life-sized american Girl dolls and a bizarre musical number about a mechanical bull that rides away with Glaser and Sarah Sherman. These, along with a funny ad for a Jennifer Hudson spirit tunnel drug and one about characters in a children’s book were pieces that aligned well with what Glaser does and that she performed exceptionally well.
A sketch about a stalled plane and a chatty pilot (james Austin Johnson) was good,but only as of johnson’s perfect impression of flight intercom chatter.
Less successful were a half-baked mashup, “Beauty and Mr. Beast,” about the popular YouTuber, and a sorority sketch with Mikey Day as an interloping man wearing a bad facial disguise.
Glaser’s lengthy monologue may not have been as perfect a fit as it should have been, but her sketch performances were spot-on.
Musical guest Shadow performed “Barely Know Her.”
