You knew things weren’t going well on “Saturday Night Live” when the most promising comic bit for Jamie Foxx was one about a slave uprising film with Leonardo DiCaprio as plantation chief that turned out to be an actual ad for his upcoming movie.
One would expect Foxx, an Academy Award winner who had his start in sketch comedy, would have this kind of stuff down cold. But from his monologue where he expected people to cheer for whatever he was doing, he didn’t invest much in what he was doing, relying instead on the assurance that people would love him no matter what, even if he wasn’t trying.
Desperate to show his versatility from the outset, he did a whole thing about “How black is that?” that I kept thinking might have worked for Chris Rock, but maybe not. Then he had to go to the piano and croon because he thought ladies would love that, and if he was doing a love song version of a Two Chains rap, well wouldn’t it slay people if the rapper himself came out as well? (Well, not if you only gave him ten seconds).
As a writer Foxx’s contribution was to get the show to use the word “bitch” a whole lot more. Because you can’t use it too much when you’re trying to get laughs. So they tried that most tired of sketch formats, the fake game show, to use it incessantly. Guaranteed laughs, right?
It was one of two game shows, the other being one in which contestants had to discern between Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney, in which the latter strolls out at the end. That the three clueless contestants were black probably wasn’t meant as a commentary, but it showed how little they were doing on a week when three black men were in the cast, reverting to lousy bits like “Christmas Tree Pimp.”
Game shows aren’t the lowest form on “SNL” though. There is also something called “J-Pop America Fun Time Now.”
The fussiest filmed piece all night was “Tyler Perry’s Alex Cross 2: Madea Special Ops” in which Foxx is dressed as half Madea, half Cross. But making fun of Tyler Perry is hardly cutting edge.
His best sketch was as a Ding Dong, ignored in the recent (and apparently overturned) decision to end Twinkie production. That kind of stale story pointed to how flat the topical humor was that night, with its flat opening bit on Obama talking about the fiscal cliff negotiations and how John Boehner has been bullied by Republicans.