The day after his big “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” opened, Andrew Garfield was hosting “Saturday Night Live.” And with him for this adventure, too, was his movie co-star Emma Stone, who appeared in both the opening monologue and another Spidey sketch (in which they pretend not to know how to kiss).
As good as it was to see Stone, who should host “SNL” more often, Garfield was fine on his own — enthusiastic, up to the task and pretty good in his impersonations, particularly of another friend of the show, Justin Timberlake.
Garfield pulled out his camera seducing Timberlake during a celebrity edition of Family Feud that allowed the cast to show off its mostly visual impersonations of stars, from Kate McKinnon’s Shakira (“the lady talkin’ in yodel,” says Kenan Thompson’s Steve Harvey) to Aidy Bryant’s on-target Adele and Jay Pharoh’s devastating Drake.
Not much of a sketch though. Because Garfield is British, they brought in an “Oliver Twist” sketch, whose own twist was Cecily Strong’s Diedre (is this a recurring character?) emerging from the orphanage tables to ask for some more, please. This sketch didn’t quite gel either.
Garfield had another good showcase in a wedding reception sketch in which he appeared as a best man who chose the wrong time to declare his love to the just-married bride (again: no ending).
And his part in a digital short about being pursued for the crime of not liking ever Beyonce song was good enough, though it turned into a kind of promo for “24” when Keifer Sutherland and Mary Lynn Rajskub showed up in character as Jack Bauer and Chloe O’Brian as others on the run (mostly for Jack’s Rihanna tattoo).
The British takeover extended o the musical guest as Coldplay performed a pair of songs from their album due out this month — mid-tempo numbers that indicated nothing other than sleepytime at this hour. Lead singer Chris Martin also donned a wig to demonstrate kissing in that Spidey sketch, laying one on Andrew, as if to suggest that in 2014 men kissing each other is still comedy gold.
The week’s controversy over racist remarks by the owner of the L.A. Clippers of course made it to the show, both in “Weekend Update” and the cold open that was cause for a lot of imitations, none as strong as Kenan Thompson’s L.A. NAACP president Leon Jenkins — but who was watching this news so close to pick this out as accurate?
It’s not a healthy sign for SNL humor when the first commercial after he monologue is a fart joke — an ad for pants-expanding Stanx.
But there was one promising moment when a new voice was heard in “Weekend Update.” In a segment that also featured McKinnon as a Russian peasant woman Olya Povlatsky and Taran Killam’s soon to be tiresome Jebadiah Atkinson, out came comedian Leslie Jones to talk about the image of black women, with some observations that made the show suddenly edgy and funny again. It’s a good sign when the show makes room for such talent, even as the season prepares close.
Up next week in the penultimate show of the season: Charlize Theron and The Black Keys.