If an entire Oscar ceremony full Barbenheimer jokes and a killer performance by Ryan Gosling of “I’m Just Ken” didn’t give you enough of a chance to say goodbye to the pop culture phenomenon of “Barbie,” “Saturday Night Live” is here to make sure you had Kenough.
Gosling, who hosted “SNL” this weekend with musical guest Chris Stapleton, began his monologue by vowing he was there to promote his upcoming film “The Fall Guy.”
“So don’t worry, I’m not going to make any jokes about Ken,” he said. “Because it’s not funny. Ken and I, we had to break up. We got in too deep and it was over. So I won’t talk about it.”
Gosling paused and added, “I’m actually going to talk about that a little bit. You have to, because when you play a character that hard, that long, letting go feels like a breakup. And for processing a breakup, there’s really only one thing that can help: the music of the great Taylor Swift.”
Making way at a piano, Gosling began singing a variation on Swift’s “All Too Well” that began:
I broke Venice Beach, it’s true.
My clothes were tight,
But something about that spandex just felt so right.
I left my Rollerblades in that big pink house,
But I still have that fur coat and I’m going to wear it now.
As Gosling donned his famous furs, he was joined on stage by his “Fall Guy” co-star Emily Blunt, who scolded him for continuing to sing about “Barbie.” “You’re right Kenning and I hate that it’s even a verb,” he said.
Gosling reminded her that she had also starred in another blockbuster from the summer of 2023, Oppenheimer, in which she played the lead’s wife Kitty.
“I know it was an inferior movie…” Gosling began.
“It wasn’t,” Blunt said. “We won everything.”
“But did you win people’s hearts?” asked.
They finished the monologue by exchanging lines on a verse that read, in part:
[together] We were Kitty and Ken,
[Blunt] and I wish you could see us.
[Gosling] You were faithful to the end,
[Blunt] And your husband didn’t have a penis.
Country music video of the week
The song “The Woman Gets Revenges on Her Cheating Man” is a long-standing staple in country music that gets a welcome update here with assists from Stapleton and, especially, Chloe Troast.
The song’s title, “Get That Boy Back,” isn’t an expression of her desire to reunite with an apparently unfaithful boyfriend (Stapleton)—it’s a warning about her comically byzantine schemes for payback, such as camouflaging herself to join the bedroom. wallpaper to freak out his mother (Heidi Gardner). You’ll laugh and then check to make sure no one is hiding in your bedroom.
Self-amusing sketches of the week
Given the current state of, well, everyone, it’s understandable that “SNL” avoided a timely opening this week. Instead, he kicked off the show with a new installment of a long-running sketch franchise about alien abduction victims.
Gosling has appeared in this segment beforebut it’s really a highlight for “SNL” alum and “Barbie” co-star Kate McKinnon (who returned this week to appear in the sketch) to make her co-stars laugh on camera — a mild sketch comedy faux pas known for as a break.
For a fuller demonstration of the phenomenon, see this sketch than later in the evening, where Gardner pretty much loses it watching Gosling and Mikey Day play two audience members in a televised debate who happen to look like Beavis and Butt-Head. He might still be laughing about it now.
Weekend Update jokes of the week
In the Weekend Update office, anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che talked about restoring a 160-year-old abortion law in Arizona.
Jost began:
The Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 law barring doctors from performing abortions. Now, bringing back the laws from 1864 isn’t the worst thing for me, because I’m a white landowner. And a proud Mason. But it’s probably not great to adopt health care rules from a time when the only two things doctors prescribed were prayer and cocaine. Saturday and Sunday. Back then, if you didn’t want to keep your baby, your only option was to give it to Rumpelstiltskin. President Biden criticized the abortion law, calling it cruel, the same thing Biden said when he voted against it in 1864.
Che continued:
This week Donald Trump said he supports abortion laws being decided by the states instead of the federal government. But why stop there? Why not go even smaller and leave it to the counties or the city? Or better yet, take the government out of it altogether and leave the choice of what women can do with their bodies to the one who knows what they can do with them best: their husbands.
And where would Weekend Update be without a final farewell to OJ Simpson? As Che joked: “OJ Simpson died this week at the age of 76 after a battle with prostate cancer planted by the LAPD”
Weekend update, the focus of the week
Whatever other achievements await Caitlin Clark in her basketball career, she is now stuck with Michael Che.
After Che read a joke about Clark, the University of Iowa star entering this week’s WNBA draft — he said the school will “retire its jersey and replace it with an apron” — she appeared next to him in his office Weekend Update. After Jost played clips of old jokes Che had made about women’s basketball, Clark had Che read some new jokes about himself. (For example: “A reminder that the Indiana Fever is a WNBA team and not what Michael Che gave to dozens of women at Purdue University.”) Clark ended up giving Che an autographed memento: an apron.