Zach Galifianakis is so funny, the “Saturday Night Live” audience was laughing even before he started his monologue of non-sequitirs and odd observations (“one sign you never see in braille: ‘If you see something, say something'”).
“I haven’t done anything yet,” he complained.
Doesn’t matter. His sad sack look and full beard make him funny even before he opens his mouth. So that’s how the show has started to use him in his third time hosting: Just standing there during the skits, just about all of them Saturday.
He still managed to be funny, but at some point the creativity started to flag.
The show started with another great “Fox and Friends” parody that covered most of the topical news the rest of the show did not. Then the first big skit after the monologue was a “Game of Game of Thrones” game show parody, in which deep nerds of the show are asked complicated plot questions, except for the character played by Galifianakis, who is so into the show, he’s dressed as one of the dragons.
Instead of “Thrones” trivia, he’s given questions about the real world — the capitol of Wisconsin, the name of his Congressman, the identity of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg — as if to show that nerds of the show are a little too concerned with Winterfell and not their own world. Even that show’s Jaime Lannister, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, shows up.
Another skit based on a competition was a little more strange: A Jennifer Anniston impersonation contest, in which low rated Galifianakis, with blonde hair, beard and “Friends” T shirt, fumed that he didn’t do better than the others, including his “Hangover 3” co-stars making a cameo in their own Anniston getups, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms.
They weren’t the only guest stars of the night. Jon Hamm did eventually show up, in the post-production version of a crude local talk show in which Galifianakis’ host said Hamm would be added in post.
Zach wasn’t done there. He was in a sketch as a racist guy at an M&M store and an even worse sketch about being jugglers at Michael Jordan’s wedding (what?).
And he could have even sat in with the musical guests Of Monsters and Men, if he put on a hat strummed an acoustic guitar and said “Hey!” to their tunes that sound exactly like Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers (stop booking these bands! or the same one over and over with different names!).