Season 50, Episode 12, Timothée Chalamet

“Anyway it wouldn’t ring true, if not for you.”

During his Saturday Night Live monologue, Timothée Chalamet joked about how he was/actually wasn’t the first moonlighting actor to appear as a musical guest on SNLand when this particular arrangement was announced, plenty of articles rattled off the handful of times this has actually happened before, most clearly Gary Busey (who also received Chamalet’s shout-out in the monologue) and Lily Tomlin. The broader category of SNL musical guests that are some kind of put-on or alternate guise, however, captures a few more similar instances. One of the show’s most famous bits in the first five seasons was the Blues Brothers, the John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd double act that served as musical guest on two occasions in 1978, one of which is purported to be the show’s best episode ever.

Obviously, booking the show-and-audience-beloved Chalamet to sing some Bob Dylan songs to help promote A Complete Unknown and his own Best Actor awards bid doesn’t generate quite the same electricity as Aykroyd and Belushi playing so-deadpan-it’s-serious tribute to Chicago blues music, not least because the latter helped illustrate a moment where SNL was becoming bigger than plenty of their celebrity guests. Actually, li’l Timmy Dylan almost reverses the Blues Brothers ratio. The Blues Brothers act is done so straight-faced that it becomes funny, even though it’s not really traditionally jokey; Chalamet as Dylan in that particular slot is an idea so silly—so potentially unintentionally funny—that his dedication becomes sincerely sweet, even though it should be laughably self-indulgent. Or anyway, it worked for me. It may not ring true for you.

In fact, it was just that self-indulgence that made Chalamet’s musical-guesting so much fun; when he announced in his monologue that he’d be playing some Bob Dylan songs, and then noted that they would be some personal favorites of his, it was a moment, like Dave Chappelle being allowed to monologue for 16 minutes last week, that felt genuinely akin to something from those first five seasons (though there probably wouldn’t have been any preamble in those days). I don’t “prefer” the first five seasons in any real sense, but they were undoubtedly looser and weirder in their treatment of the (non-parodic) musical aspects of the show. Today, you can usually more or less figure out what one or both of the musical guest’s songs would be ahead of time (usually some combination of “the new single,” “the old single,” and/or “the next single”). Tonight, you couldn’t.

Those songs turned out to be a medley of “Outlaw Blues” (from Bringing It Al All Back Home) and “Three Angels” (from New Morning), and then “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” (which doesn’t appear on a proper studio album; there’s a live take on Greatest Hits Volume II and a demo version on one of the Bootleg Series). I don’t have these yearly bingo cards everyone talks about on social media, so I’ll just say if you had asked me which Dylan song from New Morning I’d hear someone do on SNL this year, I would have asked for clarification on that question several times before shrugging and saying “’If Not For You,’ I guess? Now stop wasting my time with idiotic hypotheticals!”

It isn’t all just Dylan fandom that made this a season highlight, though. Chalamet seems increasingly comfortable as an SNL host, to the point where his episode can include my delightful classmate Lin-Manuel Miranda (yeah Wesleyan ’02!) and new-golden-period Adam Sandler, and basically just use them as one-off gags: Miranda frozen mid-Hamilton parody by his/everyone’s nemesis Donald Trump, and Sandler introducing Chalamet’s music, presumably as a nod to Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes bit about how Chalamet’s name sounds like a bit of vintage Sandler-speak. That live sketches that worked on this episode—and that was just about every one before Update, in an old-fashioned bit of frontloading—were all enhanced by Chalamet’s ability to toggle between recessive (a quality that’s sometimes lead to questions over his mainstream leading-man viability) and ostentatious. That pivot from absolutely straight-faced young-barista sincerity to ludicrous white-boy imitation of Def Jam? Honestly better than anything he did in Dune. His fluent command of AI nonsense alongside Bowen Yang in a sketch that had, charitably, a lot going on? Terrific grace under pressure. The farting doctor thing? I mean, he tried. The sketch may not have been great, but just about everything he did on the comedy side boosted his credibility on the music side, assuring the audience that he wasn’t doing this show to look cool. I almost liked watching him do Dylan covers on SNL more than in A Complete Unknown; it looked like a purer tribute, even if he can’t fake the same inscrutability.

What was on

For about an hour, pretty much everything. That bounce-house exercise sketch was slightly alarming; funny enough, with a good disbelieving anchor in Michael Longfellow, but kind of thin material for a lead-off. But the sketch about new coffee-house employees asked to come up with cute chalkboard puns, with Chalamet using it as an opportunity to try out his Def Comedy Jam material, was beautifully written: Great premise, great side gags (Jane Wickline peacing out after providing instructions for Detroit-style pizza; Ashley Padilla’s inability to land a cute pun with her bosses), fantastic performance from Chalamet, great escalation with the customer crowd-work and the introduction of Kenan… a near-perfect comedy sketch.

The other big live sketch of the pre-Update zone, with Chalamet and Yang as AI-generated podcasters trying to make learning fun, was a much heavier lift: The second podcast-spoofing sketch of the night, and with much less conceptual clarity than the fake-podcast doctor appointments already depicted in the pre-tape; simultaneous jokes about the rhythms of bad podcasts and the soul-dead quality of AI; a combination of those two concepts that probably required too much explanation. And yet! The sketch had a mutating loopiness that made it all work.

What was off

For the night’s weaker sketches, the sketch with a chunk of the cast playing dog and the sketch where Chalamet plays a young doctor trained in a new flatulence-based form of CPR, weren’t terrible. I laughed at both, particularly the Weekend At Bernie’s punchline of the latter, which while not really my cup of tea as a sketch certainly knew what it wanted. The dog thing, though, went on a little long for a bunch of observations about how dogs act. Dogs have been acting that way for a long time. What’s the next level here?

What was on and off

In the wake of Trump’s return to office, he could no longer be ignored, and so the show shrugged itself into another elaborate-seeming historical sketch called off by Trump walking on and freezing it. (This was at least the third iteration of the format, albeit the first involving a Pulitzer winner.) It was a direct look at the dire situation SNL finds itself in: James Austin Johnson does an uncanny Trump, and that he can find any laughs at all in the man after all this time is near-miraculous, but what is there left to say or do with this guy besides introduce him and have him ramble? (To be fair to this structure, it isn’t especially realistic to have a scene where there’s dialogue between Trump and another person.) He’s a spot-on dead end. Weekend Update was in a similar place: Jost and Che felt like sharper and more on their game than they have in a few weeks, because of how bad everything is! But the jokes were largely good. Depressing stuff!

Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)

Give it up for Heidi Gardner, showing off her versatility by playing the podcast-doctor ad narrator, a coffee-shop boss, a woman who would rather burn her boyfriend than any calories, an incestuously lustful mother, and a cat.

Next time

No one knows! The big fiftieth anniversary special drops in mid-February, and it’s unlikely the host and music for (I assume) March 1st will be announced before then. But I can’t wait to see what they choose off of Planet Waves!

Stray observations

• • I don’t know how to go about measuring this kind of thing these days, but it seems to be that Chalamet has to be considered one of the few genuine movie stars (barely) under 30. Almost everything he’s starred in over the past five years has been a hit, with the exceptions of smaller-scale, well-regarded movies from Wes Anderson and Luca Guadagnino. So is he going to be rare genuine movie star who doesn’t get too big for SNL? Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson still show up, but they married into it, didn’t they? Plenty of other stars seem to take a powder from doing the show when they reach the upper echelon. (Tom Hanks has appeared plenty of times. But not so much during that golden ’90s run.) Chalamet seems like he gets something out of it, though, so maybe he’ll remain a crown jewel for them.
• • It makes sense that they didn’t want the audience to get Dylan’d out, or have Chalamet do something to cheapen his recently Oscar-nominated performance, but it was still kind of a bummer that we didn’t get a Dylan bit with James Austin Johnson (not least because he’s in the damn movie!).
• • “Oedipal Arrangements”: Not sure that this one didn’t peak with the name.
• • I don’t have a whole lot to say about the Ego Nwodim and Andrew Dismukes bits on Weekend Update except that they were both very funny and played to exactly what I love about each of those two performers.
• • Lin, if you’re still reading the SNL reviews this deep into the season: Congrats on getting the “live from New York,” buddy!