Anyone doubting the comic chops of Lena Dunham need only witness her first hosting job at “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.
She added verve and pizazz like no other host since Melissa McCarthy, enlivening skits where writing is still a problem, shining even in an episode full of guest stars and returnees.
The first guest was Liam Neeson, enlisted into a cold open Obama speech about the Ukraine crisis as a way to warn Putin in a manner he can understand. Even with these tools, though, the piece didn’t quite deliver. Later Jon Hamm made his umpteenth cameo on the show as an unexpected guest on a middle school talk show.
And finally Fred Armisen, who now works in the building as Seth Meyers’ bandleader on “Late Night” made what’s likely to be the first of a regular series of comeback roles, this time in that marvelous bit with Vanessa Bayer in which they are best friends of a person in the news, only to raise questions about him in tones that are familiar, and more whispery as they go on.
Good stuff, but is Cicely Strong a strong enough straight person to help the two pull off the sketch? She did OK, but it was a reminder of how much Meyers brought to those pieces when he was at the Weekend Update desk. Certainly the new guy Colin Jost, who is about as ready to be a Weekend Update anchor as a high school thespian couldn’t quite pull off his first interview with a guest — Taran Killam as Matthew McConaughey: Looking straight at the camera instead of his interview subject; exaggerating reactions and so forth.
Can we also blame the general thinness of the writing to Meyers’ departure? Maybe as head writer he brought more rigor than those who are left (and maybe he raided that team as well). After last week’s absolutely limp episode and parts of this week’s, there are some real holes here — or lack of inspiration.
But that’s also where Dunham comes in. Guests always are free to pitch their own ideas and I have no doubt she wrote the whole bit making fun of the speed at which “Scandal” characters do their jobs by playing a new recruit who is wowed by it, and mostly talks in Dunham’s rapid-fire patter.
It was even closer to “Girls” though when there was a clip about a film about “Adam and Eve” starring the cast of “Girls” almost entirely based on the fact that they wouldn’t have to change Adam’s name — and Dunham’s character would eschew fig leafs so she could go naked all the time.
Immediately after that, she was a teen with the criminally underused Nasim Pedrad doing their 14-year old flirty talk show. Pedrad’s so good (and so routinely overshadowed by the women who have joined in the last couple of years) but Dunham was right there with her; she could fit easily into the cast if her “Girls” gig ends.
Later, she was having fun doing a twirl as Liza — her only celebrity impersonation — in a Katt Williams post-Oscar bit, and she kept up as part of a bad rap group on a MTV2 rap program sendup.
And when she helmed a sketch about a woman’s jewelry party in which a men’s rights advocate has slipped in, “SNL” shifted back into sharp social commentary for the first time in forever, and it felt so good.