Shia LaBeouf/Avril Lavigne (04.14.2007)

The following blog entry is meant to be a companion piece to the newest episode of the We Heart Hader Podcast. Give it a listen, won't you?

Wings Of Hope

Rev. Jesse Jackson (Hammond) and Rev. Al Sharpton (Thompson), reveling in their renewed cultural relevance in the face of the Don Imus scandal, announce the opening of their new “Wings Of Hope” Racist Rehab Center where those who have publicly made racist remarks will be educated on the literary works of Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou as well as the films of Oprah Winfrey. Then, they will be made to atone for their misdeeds by parking cars at Jay-Zs’ party during NBA All-Star Weekend and go on Jackson and Sharptons’ apology tour…also known as “Apolopalooza”.

• Hoo boy, this is gonna be awkward.

• This is one of a few segments throughout the night that comment directly on former radio host Don Imus’ scandal stemming from his referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as “hard-core hoes” and “nappy headed hoes” which led to his firing from his radio shows. Hell, if you're my age…this was probably the first time you ever found out who Don Imus was or even thought about him.

• Well, at least this feels different enough from the typical cold opens of the era to be interesting in a good way.

• Darrells’ Jesse Jackson…yeah, a white man in even a light amount of blackface in a sketch satirizing a white man for real life racist comments that demeaned a specific group of black women is…not the best look for the show, but hey…2007 was a different time.

• Thankfully, Darrell himself wasn't bad enough to detract from this sketch. Unfortunately, he didn't add much to it, either. 

• Fortunately, Kenan added enough to keep this sketch afloat. In fact, this might have been the best use of his Al Sharpton impression. 

• Kenan also had the better lines in this such as “you've lost your damn job”, “nothing sends a wave of fear through the hip hop world like the firing of a 66 year old white man” and “you will apologize to the Harlem Globetrotters and both Kool AND the gang”.

• The photoshopped pictures of Don Imus going through racist rehab could've been cut as they just looked awkward and…visually off.

• After Darrell's joke about Al & Jesse still being relevant, Kenan's next line is “you hear that, Barack? How you like us now?” I genuinely have to wonder if that was an actual reference to something Obama said about the real Al & Jesse that week? C-

Monologue 

20 year old Shia LaBeouf, fresh off his success from the film “Disturbia” and preparing for “Indiana Jones 4” is disappointed to learn that none of the cast (Sudeikis, Hammond, Thompson) or crew (Wally Feresten, Phil Hymes, Tom Broecker) share in his sheer youthful excitement in doing this show after Amy Poehler sets him straight. Suddenly, Kristen Wiig gives him a Glenda the Good Witch style pep talk just before Lorne tells her that the Wizard of Oz sketch had been cut.

• Well, I had seen enough “Even Stevens” and was familiar enough with the movie “Holes” to vaguely know who Shia was at this time. I remember my own father being confused but I think he knew who Shia was by the next time he hosted and he was actually promoting “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull”.

• Speaking of “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull”, hoo boy…the sight of him being excited about that one has aged like milk.

• Anyway, there didn't seem to be much to this monologue concept-wise to grab on to, but there was fun to be had.

• I liked Sudekis’ blasé reaction to Shia and Hymes and Hammonds’ appearances drinking tumblers full of Gas-X and Metamucil.

• I especially liked Kenan's appearance trying to hide the fact that he was smoking a blunt backstage when Shia accosted him for his “Disney/Nickelodeon/we DO make it rant” and Poehler dressing down Shia.

• Normally, Wiig as Glenda the Good Witch is something that would grate on me a bit but I did suddenly like her dropping the character to react to Lorne telling her the sketch was cut. C+

Hathaway Mustache Ride Company 

In 1887, ladies hair tonic magnate Leonidas Hathaway (Alec Baldwin) proposed to his board of directors (Hader, Hammond) that his company not only branch out into mustache rides but offer them to women for free. The company continues to expand, thrive and flourish to this very day.
Seeing as Alec Baldwin appears in only this and no other segments in this episode, this must've been a dress rehearsal cut from his previous episode this season.

• Yes, it's a very cheap, raunchy, tawdry gag that borrows a bit from the previous season's mustache talk show sketch with Jason “My Name Was Earl” Lee, but I admire its strong commitment to turning what's essentially a white trash t-shirt slogan into a faux-refined big corporate puff piece commercial.

• I got a kick out of Haders’ tearful expression at the end of the meeting as well as Seth's consultation with Wiig as she meets Forte with his vibrating mustache.

• I also liked seeing Sudeikis, Armisen, Samberg and a heavily dreaded rastafarian Kenan modeling their absurdly elaborate mustaches. C+

Prince Show

Prince (Armisen) and Beyoncé (Rudolph) welcome a too allergy conscious Toby Maguire (LaBeouf) and Nancy Grace (Poehler)

• This, I believe, is the last of these Prince talk show sketches that Maya and Fred would do as cast members. It may also be the last time Maya played Beyonce as a cast member, but the same thing CAN'T be said for Fred and his Prince impression.

• This definitely has a played out feel to it, in that by this point, the audience may have forgotten why the show thought it made sense why pair Prince and Beyoncé together as co hosts of a talk show. Didn't these start right after Prince and Beyoncé performed a duet at the Grammys or something? This would've been, like, three years after that, right? 

• I know they did a couple of these when the real Prince and Beyonce/Destiny's Child were in the building as musical guests (in fact, me and Deej covered one of those on the podcast a little while ago) but…what was going on with the real Prince and Beyoncé in pop culture at this time that warranted another one of these? I think Beyoncé might have had some new music out around this time, but was this the year Prince performed at the Super Bowl Halftime Show or something?

• Anyway, the other impressions in this sketch were likely the bigger problem here. Shia didn't really look or sound anything like Tobey Maguire and while I can see why he gets criticism for not exactly being an electrifying choice to play a helm a big summer popcorn comic book Superhero franchise, Shia didn't exactly need to play him as THIS big of a Milhouse-like allergy obsessed dweeb here. Seth Meyers actually did a decent Toby Maguire impression a few years before this that worked better for what they were going for here. I did like how his hands swelled up from sitting on that cupcake.

• Normally, I run pretty hot and cold on Amys’ Nancy Grace impression and it didn't really make a ton of sense here either but I did get a kick out of her mangling the words to Sheena Eastons’ “You've Got The Look”. C-

Buying Beer

A convenience store cashier (Thompson) isn't persuaded by two obvious underage teens (LaBeouf and Samberg) to let them purchase two six packs without seeing their IDs despite their exaggerated talk of their adult ages, work histories, number of children or the other times they previously bought beer and cigarettes at other stores. He is then given a “certificate of responsibility” by an “official” ATF agent (Hader) whose wallet is taken by a “robber” (Forte) who assures everyone that the ATF agent's ID is very much real. 

• This Lonely Island written sketch was definitely my favorite live sketch of the night.

• Every purposely stilted beat of this hit perfectly for me from Sambergs’ slightly too big suit and fake obviously fake mustache to Bill entering with the phrase “good work, guy” with every other word out of his mouth being delivered as if he were narrating a 1950s’ school filmstrip.

• Fortes’ chipper, matter-of-fact entrance prompting an ever so wooden “Oh no! A robbery!” was the icing on the cake here. 

• Yeah, the ending seemed a bit cheap and forced but Kenans’ line “see you guys back at the dorm” really sold it (as long as you don't consider any darker implications that could be behind that one). A-

Dakota Fanning Show

Dakota (Poehler) continues to insult her band leader Reggie Hudson (Thompson), alienates Disney's “Suite Life” stars Dylan and Cole Sprouse (LaBeouf & Samberg) and belittles the career of her own little sister Elle Fanning (Avril Lavigne) until their mom/PA Catherine (Wiig) steps in.

• This is the second one of these they did. They would only do three. Honestly, the first one of these was the only one that worked and hit the right beats for me.

• I'm not even sure where this slightly off putting portrayal of Dakota Fanning as this impossibly cultured and well read child actress came from. I just remember reading that she agreed to stop doing it after learning that the real Dakota and her family were apparently deeply offended by a reference to one of her real life movies from the third one.

• Basically, Amy portrays Dakota as a real life Lisa Simpson with a very low, Sheldon Cooper level of self awareness. That last part really makes this something you can only take so much of so really it IS amazing that they ended up making three of these sketches.

• Amy playfully insulting Kenan's character can be a little much but thankfully Kenan's good natured reactions are funny enough to balance this out (up to and including his line “yeah, I'll put a cap somewhere all right”)

• Andy and Shia tried their damndest to put this over with their energy but what worked more for me was when Amy led them into an existential crisis asking them why they were “just playing” with their orange blimps culminating in Andy's quietly delivered “you're scaring us”.

• Having Avril play Elle Fanning was a good way to sneak her into this sketch. I don't know if having Dakotas’ sister being almost as absurdly intelligent and cultured as her worked but her performance sold it for me as did Wiigs’ underplayed delivery of her line “you can just call me ‘mom'”. C-

Digital Short: Dear Sister

As Keith (Hader) writes a letter to his sister (Wiig) he is shot by Dave (Samberg) and shoots back. They then both shoot Eric (LaBeouf) and Keith's sister as they walk into the room. Then, two cops (Armisen and Sudeikis) walk in, read the letter detailing the order of each of these shootings and then shoot each other.

• Ah, here it is, ladies and gentlemen. Peak millennial meme comedy. The perfect balance of silly 2000s “randomness” with even sillier 2000s “melodrama” that doesn't come across as too dark or tasteless. Doesn't get much better than this, folks.

• Anyone with a working knowledge of Lonely Island history knows that this short stemmed from the boys’ love of 2000s FOX teen soap opera “The O.C.” which led them to creating their own parody series called “The ‘Bu” which they made for Dan Harmons’ Channel 101. In fact, this sketch itself is a parody of the infamous shooting scene at the end of The O.Cs’ second season finale. 

• This is a sketch that Andy brought to the show pre-written from that time and used when the show was asking them for more short films.

• Like Lazy Sunday before it, this one was being put on and taken off of YouTube constantly. This was partially due to music rights and other copyright related reasons and particularly due to the fact that this episode aired right around the same time as the Virginia Tech shooting, which…yikes. Yeah, this short was just a victim of unfortunate timing which now we can look back and say THAT’S the worst thing about this one.

• This was at least The Lonely Island's third “viral” Digital Short from their time on the show and inspired a whole YouTube trend. In fact, on the Seth Meyers & Lonely Island Podcast Seth said he could see this blowing up on TikTok today. I'm not sure I can see that. See, this got me thinking…

• I think you can trace a devolution of viral video meme trends from the early YouTube era when The Lonely Islands’ stuff went viral to the current TikTok era when the newest SNL sketch to blow up and inspire new viral trends THERE is, well…Domingo.

• See, if you look at the Lazy Sunday and Dick In A Box YouTube “parodies” from when that went viral you'll see people actually taking the time to get an actual camera and film themselves “recreating” those videos (in some cases, even changing the words to the song itself and in a few cases with Lazy Sunday some people even wrote and produced an entirely new “diss track” of their own as a west coast/Midwest “response” to Lazy Sunday.

• When Dear Sister went viral, people still recreated the sketch word for word adding very little “twists” or variance of their own but you also got people just editing famous scenes of violence from popular movies and TV shows in slow motion to Imogen Heaps’ “Hide and Seek” (the song from the original short, you see) and calling it a “parody” (which is still valid, but…requires less effort).

• Nowadays, “Domingo” gets an absurd amount of views on TikTok and pretty much all the “memes” in response to it are either people filming themselves on their phones dancing and lip syncing to it or just placing a green screen template of Marcellos’ singing from the first sketch over an background image with a caption about different situations where something delicate has to be explained.

• See where I'm going with this? 

• Look, all I'm saying is that as we condensed more and more of our online media consumption to our smartphones and smart TVs rather than actual computers and started looking to these phones of ours for more and more “instant gratification” and quick dopamine hits our attention spans have shortened and our work ethics has been somewhat diminished along the way. 

• We're consuming shorter and more “bite size” content on our phones and now the most effort it takes to follow a meme trend seems to be just placing two images on top of each other and pairing a song or a soundbite over that before posting.

• I don't even want to think about the effect this is having on the next generations coming up after mine.

• I'm not saying this as an old boomer or anything who's completely against smartphones or the internet or anything, I'm just saying we would do well to recognize this as the most immediate everyday danger of TikTok and smartphones in relation to the other wide reaching societal problems with them and adjust our viewing and consumption habits accordingly for our own mental health and wellbeing. That's all.

• …and of course, I say this as a guy who wrote and researched most of this blog post ON a smartphone ON TikTok (and no, the irony is not lost on me there, either).

• Anyway, Dear Sister is a fun Digital Short that I will fondly remember as something that has always hit for me the same way since high school. B+

Sofa King 

Local furniture sales couple Katir (Armisen) and Hasar Mutar (Rudolph) along with their sons Nasir (LaBeouf), Onan (Samberg) and Nasir II (Hader) sell us on their own unique deals that are “Sofa King” great!

• This may be the shortest “naughty word play” sketch SNL has done in history. Compared to the likes of “Schweddy Balls” and “Cork Soakers” this feels like a real blackout.

• The main thing that drags this down just a bit for me is the “been there, done that” feeling I get because I believe the “sofa king/so fucking” joke may have already been passed around as an early online meme mere months before this sketch even aired.

• I wasn't crazy about their need to have everyone in this play uniformly unibrowed middle easterners in order to make this work, but they ended up having the exact right energy to put this over.

• Maya peering out from behind the graphic placed directly over her face Mike Wazowski style felt a little cheap, but I did get a kick out of Shias’ wide eyed thousand yard stare, Hader’s goofy grin and shoulder shaking as well as Andy playing his character as just a slick slightly sleazy looking smoker. C+

Avril Lavigne Performs “Girlfriend” And “I Can Do Better”

• Eh, typical cute, fluffy 2000s girl power pop punk. Not much else to say here.

• My sister was a fan but I think I was kind of “over” Avril by this point.

• Also, isn't it more believable that the “real” Avril just got some cosmetic surgery at some point after her first album did well than her being replaced “Paul Is Dead” style by a sound-alike hanger on? Maybe that's a story for another time.

Weekend Update w/Poehler & Meyers

Maya Rudolph (Herself) interviews Attorney Howard K. Stern (Samberg) on his second place finish in the Anna Nicole Smith Paternity Case

A Gay Couple From Connecticut (Armisen & Hader) discuss same sex marriage being allowed in their state

Don Imus (Hammond) issues a sincere apology for his racist remarks, but brutally puts down any guests on his former radio show who didn't rush to his defense

• Yeah, not a lot stood out to me joke-wise from either Seth or Amy tonight. I did get a slight kick out of Amys’ “Spongebob Squarebeer” and “Herbie Goes To Paris” jokes and Seth's “house I grew up in” (but what the hell was with that Duke LaCrosse players joke, Seth?)

• I will give credit for this PGA style post game interview between Maya and Andy for being…surprisingly pleasant and a decent format break for Update, but…really, what the hell was this? A joke about a dead celebrities' paternity trial being treated like a Golf tournament? (I only say Golf because Andy and Maya were speaking in very low, whispery tones here). I'd say it must be a grim commentary on the state of America's 24 hour news cycle and overall celebrity obsession but much like the rest of this Update, it feels too lost to the time fog to make much sense out of now.

• I really wasn't crazy about Armisen and Haders “Two Gay Guys From Connecticut’. It's basically the same shtick as the “Two Gay Guys From New Jersey” bit, except changing them from Tony Soprano type mobbed thugs to rich, stuffy Thurston Howell type WASP preppies made them LESS appealing. I will say Hader’s still a better actor than Armisen when it comes to these and I got a little bit of a kick out of their lines about intentionally crashing their 40 million dollar yachts into each other.

• Hammond as Don Imus may have genuinely been the funniest part of this. I liked the slow, sincere sounding buildup and how Darrell's delivery of his blunt insults was funny enough that you didn't even have to know or remember who Don Imus was to at least get a chuckle out of it. C-

Knife Salesman

Door to Door Knife Salesman Blade P. Cutsworth (Forte) and his protégé Bernard Throttlehunt (LaBeouf) come very close to selling a knife to Melanie Ginsu (Wiig) after she sees them cut through frozen carrots, reams of paper and Blade P. Cutsworths’ own thumb. 

• Ha! Typical Forte goofiness leading into the most low key blood spurting ever employed in an SNL sketch.

• I got a kick out of Wiig specifying she wanted to see the guys cut through a thicker finger bone than a pinky and that 13.00 for two knives was too expensive for her.

• I also liked how this ended with a cutaway to a dog attacking the most obvious mannequin dummy you've ever seen. B-

An Intimate Moment Between Jessica Simpson and John Mayer

Jessica Simpson (Wiig) and John Mayer (Hader) struggle to make small talk before deciding to have sex.

• Gee, was Tina Fey a guest writer this week?

• …but seriously, I do admire this era giving us the occasional blackout sketch near the end of the show.

• While this one wasn't my favorite (I never would've picked Wiig to play Jessica Simpson but she did a fine job), it was well done enough for what it was and I was okay with it. You could tell what she was going for facially and vocally.

• I liked the brief bursts of absurd disconnected one liners such as “I love the blues” being followed by “my highlights are too shiny”.

• I liked Bill imitating John's intense guitar mugging…and the more I think about it, the more I suspect that all of John Mayers’ relationships with famous women were actually like this to some degree. C+

Shia & Maya

Maya Rudolph aggressively seduces Shia LaBeouf in her dressing room…because their first names rhyme. Shia is…somehow used to this sort of treatment from older women and…welcomes her advances.

• Maya was actually great in this. It seemed like a sketch written solely for one performer to get another performer to break (Shia came close once), but it was a fun little low-key absurd thing that didn't take itself too seriously.

• Yeah, Maya was a little over the top but this was a pretty self contained sketch and she was self aware here.

• This was really one of the most “we made an absolute meal out of a threadbare premise" sketches ever produced. C+

Overall Thoughts 

• Hmm…not AS consistently solid of a season 32 episode as the last one I reviewed (mostly since it seems to have built its reputation on one or two singular sketches, tops)

• Still, not a bad episode outside of the specific standout moments I chose it for.

• Not everything in this episode stands up to scrutiny (but hey, it's 2007, that comes with the territory, I was just impressed by what held up THAT well from this time) but still there's fun to be had.

Closing Thoughts 

• Well, I'm honestly not really sure what I'll be doing next for this blog right now or my own podcast for that matter.

• I have a feeling I may end up making myself write up a few more SNL reviews real soon for a different era of the show. 

• Of course, those won't be for my own podcast, but rather another SNL related podcast that I might (hopefully) be making a guest appearance on soon.

• Naturally, I have no idea what those episodes will be or if let alone when I may get to do them, but I hope to be able to find out and let you guys in on it real soon.

• See you then!