Maya Rudolph scored the cover of this week’s New York Times Magazine, with a story about her storied career, including her new show Forever, which hit Amazon this week. And like most women who’ve made their way through Saturday Night Live, she had stories. In the candid profile, Rudolph opened up about how being bi-racial has affected her career, especially during her seven year SNL stint.
A lot of it had to do with her hair. Rudolph — the daughter of the late soul singer Minnie Riperton and the producer and songwriter Richard Rudolph — referred to her hair as “super, super, superthick and supercurly,” saying it was often the subject of fun as a kid.
Things didn’t get better when she grew up. It was a sore point when she got to SNL. Her hair was so thick it had trouble getting under the copious wigs she had to wear.
Every Friday night, Rudolph would have her weekly blowouts in the hair department, right by various men’s dressing rooms.
“And every [expletive] Friday night, we’d hear some [expletive] white guy walking down the hall going, ‘Is something burning in here? What’s burning?’” she recalled.
When she was hired in 2000, Rudolph was the first black female cast member since the show’s 1975 debut. She didn’t see it that way, though.
“When I did SNL, I didn’t feel like I was hired to be the black lady, which can happen a lot,” Rudolph explained. “Who knows? Maybe I was and no one told me.”
Rudolph said her experience there was overall “positive,” but she had her share of disappointments. Those tended to come when she wasn’t writing her own material.
“There were times I was frustrated, like, ‘Why can’t I [expletive] just play that role?’”, she said. “But obviously the person next to me that’s white is going to play that white character.”
Everyone knows that Maya Rudolph’s Hormone Monstress Connie is the undisputed VIP of Netflix’s Big Mouth. Heck, her pronunciation of the phrase “bubble bath” alone won a very specific TV award on this very website. Connie is so popular, in fact, that she’s recently become the inspiration for Miami-based drag queen Miss Toto, who worked the hormone monstress into her act complete with a bubble bath remix.
Toto even set out a well-deserved thirst trap for Big Mouth co-creator Nick Kroll, who enthusiastically responded, “You got it. Love the whole thing!!” and tagged the show’s official account as well as Maya Rudolph.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her under the furry suit, Miss Toto (birth name, name William Evans) is actually a nationally qualified bodybuilder who stands over six feet tall and a personal trainer who goes by “Rock.” In addition, Toto is a postgraduate marine-science researcher whose day job involves tagging sharks with University of Miami scientists — a real Renaissance queen, if you will!
“When I go to the gym with nail polish on, guys look at me weird, until they realize I lift more than they do, and then they leave me alone,” Miss Toto told the Miami New Times in an interview last year. “I have a body, but it’s just not a woman’s body. People are like, ‘You’re so pretty, and you’re so big!’ Straight boys are, like, intimidated because I’m bigger than they are.”
Like many pop culture writers, I force-fed myself the Golden Globes telecast last night. And like most awards shows, it was largely interminable, punctuated with occasional moments of genuine joy and spontaneity. Do we even need to bring up the pointlessness of the Globes themselves? That they’ve long been accused of being a corrupt organization with an obscure membership and the only time they made news this past year outside of the awards ceremony was with a bizarre/offensive profile of Drew Barrymore that they ended up apologizing for?
…Probably not.
For the most part, we assume that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is corrupt and no one cares because they throw a good party. It’s like Scientology; every time it comes up, you feel a duty to bring up Shelly Miscavige not being seen in public since 2007, but there’s only so many times you can do that before becoming the “well, actually” guy. Better to assume everyone already knows the Golden Globes are dumb. Better to just pretend that this small group of foreign film junketeers just genuinely did think BOHEMIAN F*CKING RHAPSODY was the best movie of the year and go on with your day.
Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh hosted last night’s telecast, and they were… fine. Not that I blame them, they’re both likable and talented, but to be an awards show host is to risk career suicide. Everything about the awards process is thoroughly ridicule-worthy — think Jared Leto winning an Oscar for playing a trans woman and then dedicating his victory to the people of Ukraine — but to make fun of some of the tools in the audience is to risk one of those tools not hiring you. That’s a lot to ask of two people with already thriving careers. Sandra Oh won an acting award on her own telecast! Better to just make the inoffensive, maybe slightly lame jokes and live to act another day, I get that. No one really expects these shows to be entertaining anyway.
The speeches ranged from delightful and touching — Regina Hall, Glenn Close, Christian Bale — to Chuck Lorre, collecting best TV comedy for The Kominsky Method (I know there’s a lot of TV out there now but has anyone actually seen this show?), who managed to combine the fewest actual words spoken with the longest on-stage time. “I’d like to thank… um… wow… my wife…. gosh… okay… uh, my pal, Dave… wow… um… my kids… our make up guy… um … wow…”
Hey, aren’t you a sitcom writer? Maybe trying saying more than one word every seven seconds.
The most unfortunate aspect of the telecast was that seemingly every moment of genuine spontaneity got bleeped. Can we go back to a simple bleep over the swear word instead of the thing where you drop out the entire audio for five seconds? I think Patricia Arquette said something about having “f*cked up teeth” and Escape from Dannemora‘s make up people not having to work so hard, and that Steve Carell said Carol Burnett “makes Tom Hanks look like an asshole,” but the excessive bleeping ruined both of those jokes. Alas.
Which brings us to the real highlight of the evening: Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph presenting the awards for best-supporting actor and best original screenplay. Up until that point, I’d assumed that the only two options for a host were a gleeful prick like Ricky Gervais or someone sweet and charming but safe like Samberg and Oh. It’s hard to poke even gentle fun at Hollywood liberals without sounding like a MAGAtroll these days, and Ricky Gervais stopped being funny years ago. And so, I assumed, we’d just have to accept always being a little bored.
I didn’t realize that maybe there was another option. Not until Rudolph and Poehler introduced the best supporting actor award, beginning with a bit about the types of lines supporting actors get to say. They returned after Mahershala Ali collected his award to stage a fake proposal. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing this, are we stealing focus away from the next award?”
“Don’t worry, it’s just screenplay.”
It gave me genuine giggles, and I was so thankful for it. It wasn’t even about anything they said so much as the perfect combination of natural chemistry, impeccable timing, and genuine silliness. Silliness! That’s the ticket, I thought, chomping my imaginary cigar. I’d forgotten how much I’d missed silliness for silliness’s sake — jokes without a timely peg or a moral.
The Golden Globes are essentially the Iowa caucus of entertainment. A seemingly meaningless little contest decided by a tiny cabal of esoteric weirdos that nonetheless gains outsize importance as a harbinger for future contests.
So as long as we’re looking for Oscars takeaways, maybe I could suggest Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph as hosts? They took the world’s most contrived format and made it look breezy, spontaneous, silly, and fun.
Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.
Netflix wants you to cancel all your plans this month.
That’s the only explanation for why the streaming platform is loading us down with so many stellar original series and films for May. There are serial killer dramas, comedies from SNL icons, political docs, tragically true miniseries, and an animated show from a BoJack Horseman alumn. So let’s skip the niceties and dive right in. Here’s everything coming to (and leaving) Netflix in May.
Wine Country (Netflix film streaming 5/10)
Amy Poehler rounds up some of her funniest gal-pals from Saturday Night Live for this boozy comedy about a girls’ trip to Napa Valley. The film is packed with comedy legends like Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Paula Pell, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, and Emily Spivey and marks Poehler’s directing debut. It’s an ode to female friendships and how they change as we age — think Bridesmaids but with more wine.
Knock Down The House (Netflix film streaming 5/1)
This political doc makes its way from Sundance to Netflix this month. It follows the grassroots campaign of the right’s favorite punching bag, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, showcasing her charisma and approachability while also diving into more intimate parts of her life, like her relationship with her late father.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (Netflix film streaming 5/3)
The buzzed-about biopic of serial killer Ted Bundy lands on the streaming platform this month. After the trailer of the film dropped, some were worried this Joe Berlinger-directed story would idolize the man who murdered so many women years ago but that controversy should help it play well here, as should Zac Efron’s frighteningly-magnetic turn as Bundy.
Tuca & Bertie (Netflix series streaming 5/3)
Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish voice the stars of this animated comedy from BoJack Horseman artist Lisa Hanawalt. Wong plays Bertie, a 30-something song thrush with debilitating anxiety, a knack for baking, and a truly toxic work environment. Haddish plays her best friend Tuca, a loud-mouthed Tucan who loves to party and hates the thought of settling down. The friends try to hold onto their single days, even as Bertie takes the next step in her long-term relationship and Tuca struggles to find her place in the world.
When They See Us (Netflix Original)
Director Ava DuVernay’s limited series about the wrongfully accused men in the Central Park Five case makes its way to Netflix this May. The series sheds light on racial profiling and corruption in the NYPD as a group of young Black men are targeted for a heinous crime, and put on trial with little evidence. It’s a gripping, heartbreaking retelling, but one that feels sadly relevant.
Here’s the full list of titles coming to Netflix in May:
Avail. 5/1/19 Angels & Demons
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Casper
Chasing Liberty
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion Part 1 & 2 Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat
Dumb and Dumber
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Gosford Park
Gremlins
Hairspray (1988) Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Her Only Choice
Hoosiers
Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer: Season 2 John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky
Just Friends
Knock Down The House
Revolutionary Road
Roswell, New Mexico: Season 1 Scarface
Scream
Snowpiercer
Taking Lives
The Da Vinci Code
The Dark Crystal (1982) The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
To Rome With Love
Wedding Crashers
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Zombieland
Avail. 5/2/19 Colony: Season 3 Olympus Has Fallen
Avail. 5/3/19 A Pesar De Todo All In My Family Alles ist gut Cupcake & Dino – General Services: Season 2 Dead to Me Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile Flinch The Last Summer Mr. Mom
Supernatural: Season 14 True and the Rainbow Kingdom: Mushroom Town
Tuca & Bertie
Undercover
Avail. 5/4/19 Like Arrows
Avail. 5/6/19 Abyss
Avail. 5/7/19 The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution
Queen of the South: Season 3
Avail. 5/8/19 Lucifer: Season 4
Avail. 5/9/19 Bathtubs Over Broadway
Insidious
Avail. 5/10/19 Dry Martina
Easy: Season 3 Gente que viene y bah Harvey Girls Forever!: Season 2 Jailbirds Pose: Season 1 ReMastered: The Lion’s Share
Shéhérazade
The Society
Wine Country
Avail. 5/12/19 Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj: Volume 3
Avail. 5/13/19 Malibu Rescue
Avail. 5/14/19 Revisions
Still ‘Laugh-In’: The Stars Celebrate
Weed the People
Avail. 5/15/19 Dennis & Gnasher: Unleashed!
Avail. 5/16/19 Good Sam Take Me Home Tonight
Avail. 5/17/19 1994: Limited Series Chip & Potato
It’s Bruno
Maria .
Morir para contar
Nailed It!: Season 3 See You Yesterday
The Rain: Season 2 Well Intended Love White Gold: Season 2
Avail. 5/18/19 The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Avail. 5/20/19 Rosario Tijeras (Mexico Version): Season 2 Prince of Peoria: Part 2
Avail. 5/21/19 Arrow: Season 7 Moonlight Wanda Sykes: Not Normal
Avail. 5/22/19 A Tale of Two Kitchens
One Night in Spring
The Flash: Season 5
Avail. 5/23/19 Slasher: Solstice
Riverdale: Season 3
Avail. 5/24/19 After Maria
Alta Mar
Joy
Rim of the World
She’s Gotta Have It: Season 2 The Perfection
What/If
Avail. 5/28/19 Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
Avail. 5/30/19 Chopsticks
My Week with Marilyn
The One I Love
Avail. 5/31/19 Always Be My Maybe Bad Blood: Season 2 Black Spot: Season 2 How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)
Killer Ratings
When They See Us
Here’s the full list of titles leaving Netflix in May:
May 1 8 Mile
Chocolat
Cold Justice: Collection 3 Dances with Wolves
Disney High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dr. No
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
For Your Eyes Only
From Dusk Till Dawn
From Russia with Love
Godzilla
GoldenEye
Hostel
Jaws
Jaws 2
Jaws 3
Jaws: The Revenge
License to Kill
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Sixteen Candles
Sliding Doors
Somm
Somm: Into the Bottle
The Birdcage
The Dirty Dozen
The English Patient
The Lovely Bones
The Notebook
The Other Boleyn Girl
Tomorrow Never Dies
Watchmen
May 11 Switched at Birth: Seasons 1-5
May 15 Bill Nye, the Science Guy: Collection 1
May 19 Disney’s Bridge to Terabithia
May 22 The Boss Baby
May 24 Southpaw
May 31 I Know What You Did Last Summer
West Side Story (1961)
Netflix wants you to have a hell of a good time this week which is why the streaming platform is piling on the original content designed to speak to our guiltiest of pleasures.
First up is Amy Poehler’s SNL-heavy Wine Country, which sees the comedian reuniting with her famous friends for a wine-tasting trip to Napa Valley. The ladies have a wild, boozy romp through the vineyards as they hash out relationship drama and make complete fools of themselves. The final season of Netflix’s anthology romance series Easy also premieres this week, so if stories of open marriages and dating woes sound appealing, tune in. And if you’re looking for a truly devilish good time, check out the fourth season of Lucifer, the buddy-cop dramedy starring Satan himself, that Netflix resurrected from its cancellation ashes.
Here’s a rundown of what’s new and what’s leaving Netflix the week of May 10th.
Wine Country (Netflix film streaming 5/10)
Amy Poehler rounds up some of her funniest gal-pals from Saturday Night Live for this boozy comedy about a girls’ trip to Napa Valley. The film is packed with comedy legends like Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Paula Pell, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, and Emily Spivey, and it marks Poehler’s directing debut. It’s an ode to female friendships and how they change as we age — think Bridesmaids but with more wine.
Joe Swanberg’s romance-heavy anthology series ends its run on Netflix this week. The show’s final season features returning players Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Marc Maron, Jake Johnson, and Zazie Beetz plus a crop of newcomers including Castle Rock’s Melanie Lynskey and The Newsroom’s John Gallagher Jr. The series continues to explore the love lives of this group of Chicago residents who are focusing on the trials of an open marriage, career slumps, backyard brewing, and playing the dating game.
Netflix resurrects this canceled Fox series, bringing the Devil himself back to life for a fourth season. Tom Ellis returns as the hellishly-handsome Lucifer who’s having to reckon with some big changes in his life after finally convincing his girlfriend/partner Chloe of his demonic origins. Meanwhile, new characters including a priest and the first woman herself, Eve, join the fray, complicating Lucifer’s carefully-crafted persona in a big way.
Aside from the typically political cold open sketch, Saturday Night Live went hard on political material with its 45th season premiere this weekend. One of the most blatant examples of this was the “DNC Town Hall” sketch, in which many of the Democratic Party’s presidential hopefuls turned up to “handle the impeachment the only way they know how: with a muddled, 10-person town hall debate.” Between new cast members Bowen Yang (and Andrew Yang) and Chloe Fineman (as Marianne Williamson), and returning Bernie Sanders impersonator Larry David, it was great.
But it was returning SNL alum Maya Rudolph’s performance as Kamala Harris that won the sketch. Not only did Rudolph’s debut earn the biggest cheer break throughout the bit, but practically everything she did throughout the 10-minute sketch had the audience laughing its loudest. Like when, following audience question about the possibility of Vice President Joe Biden’s being “implicated in this Ukraine scandal in some way,” Rudolph’s Harris replied, “Oh no, that would be terrible! Not Joe Biden!”
Drink in hand notwithstanding, Rudolph’s impression of Harris — from her general cadence to the oft-repeated “that girl” anecdote — was perfect. Everyone watching the SNL premiere at home took notice — including the senator from California herself.
These are all incredibly talented voice actors who’ve given us iconic animated characters on film, and yet, they live in the shadow of an even greater, sonically gifted prodigy; a woman bestowed by the gods with the power to make so many sounds with her mouth, she’s voiced hormone monsters, presidential candidates, emojis, pop icons, damp bathmats, and the ghosts of both Whitney Houston and Elizabeth Taylor.
It’s Maya Rudolph, guys. We’re talking about Maya Rudolph. Really, the title alone should’ve given that away.
Rudolph, who spent her formative years, comedically-speaking, honing eccentric characters on Saturday Night Live, has always had a set of pipes. Her mother, the late Minnie Riperton, sported a five-octave coloratura soprano range and was known for her ability to sing in what’s called “the whistle register,” a frequency so high, holding it for an extended period of time could, theoretically, break glass. She was called “The Nightingale,” and why Marvel hasn’t swooped in to craft an original superhero after her legacy, we’ll never know. The costumes and amount of exploding glass alone justify it.
All that to say, Rudolph was genetically blessed, nay, destined, to carve out a career for herself in entertainment and while she enjoyed some success on SNL, it’s her time in the recording booth that may come to define her career, which is only fair because while her predecessors and contemporaries may be what we call “voice actors,” Maya Rudolph is a goddamn voice artist.
We will now move forward with the presentation of evidence.
Exhibit A: The SNL Years
Rudolph spent seven years voicing an eclectic array of characters on NBC’s late-night comedy sketch show. Some of those were original creations – Glenda Goodwin, the attorney at law who would represent you in personal injury claims involving wooly mammoths, shape shifters, and mermen – and some were impressions of big-name celebrities – Mariah Carey, Maya Angelou, and Michelle Obama. Still, Rudolph’s greatest hits from the show are a line-up of skits containing memorable characters with even more recognizable vocal inflections. Like Nuni Schoener, the off-beat art dealer with furniture made from gorilla hair who enjoyed liquid ice cream only when blown through a tube from her childish manservant. Or Jodi Dietz, the thickly accented, fast-talking co-host of The Bronx Beat who regularly became verklempt while interviewing guests and talking about her dead-beat husband. And then there’s Rudolph’s impersonation of Beyonce Knowles, a characterization so lived-in, so over-the-top yet so nuanced, one might easily confuse Rudolph with the real thing. She’s softly-toned, rhythmic, and often drops her vowels in a nod to her Southern upbringing.
Each of these characters became legend on the show thanks to Rudolph’s ability to craft their unique identifiers using her comprehensive vocal range, whether it was through the rich, full-bodied mispronunciations of Shonda, a Super Showcase Spokesmodel or the commanding, confidently timed diction of Senator Kamala Harris. No one’s been able to voice quite as many comedy gems as Rudolph did on her original run, and it’s that thought that keeps Lorne Michaels up at night.
Exhibit B: Big Mouth
Arguably Rudolph’s greatest contribution to the competitive world of voice acting, her turn on Nick Kroll’s pre-pubescent coming of age animated series is – and this is in no way an exaggeration – a creative masterpiece that rivals Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and any of that drivel Shakespeare put out. Rudolph voices a variety of characters on the show – the aforementioned bath mat, a couple of ghosts, Diane Birch – but her piece-de-resistance is Connie, the Hormone Monstrous, a deliciously lush personification of a pre-teen girl’s hormonal angst, rage, and desire.
In Connie, Rudolph gleefully indulges her octave range, flitting between high-pitched directives screamed with emotional gravitas – as when she demands her ward Jessi shoplift lipstick, listen to Lana Del Rey on repeat, cut up her t-shirts, scream at her mother and then laugh at her tears – and sultry, syrupy intonations that elevate even the most mundane words into works of auditory art. It’s not “bubble bath” but “bwubble bath.” It’s not “pharmacy” but “phwaaarmacy.” Terms of endearment are mouthwatering delicacies like “Hush, Puppy” and “My Little Ravioli.” Connie encourages us to break free of the aural chains society has heaped upon us, to delight in the chaos of lower-octave seductions and register-rising outbursts. She transforms three-syllable phrases into club bangers and Beethoven sonatas. Your fave could never.
Exhibit C: The Sh*t You Didn’t Even Know About
Rapunzel in Shrek. Precious in The Nut Job. Aunt Cass in Big Hero 6.
This is the portion of the broadcast where we confirm the lingering suspicion you’ve always had when watching an animated show or movie: Is Maya Rudolph in this?
Yes, yes she is. She’s in Turbo, and Family Guy, The Simpsons, The Awesomes, she’s Matilda in those Angry Birds movies and Smiler in The Emoji Movie (we know … we know). She’s in Star Wars video games and Lego movies … she’s even the motivational speaker Beanie Feldstein’s character hypes up to every morning in Booksmart. She’s in everything you’ve ever loved or will love and so, she is everything you’ve ever loved or will love.
Few comedians, hell, few thespians, have the vocal range of Maya Rudolph, but hardly anyone can inject the kind of personality and chutzpah she brings to every character she inhabits on screen. We’re just saying what you’re all thinking: Maya Rudolph could do Stewie, Peter, and Brian on Family Guy, but Seth McFarlane could never do Connie the Hormone Monstress and the Ghost of Elizabeth Taylor on Big Mouth.
Netflix rings in the spookiest month of the year with some real treats for binge-watching fans. The third season of Big Mouth arrives for even more cringe-worthy comedy about puberty and porn and all the things that go along with growing up. Peaky Blinders also makes its way back to Netflix, following as the Shelby clan take on new enemies with even deeper pockets. And the sci-fi drama Raising Dion, featuring Michael B. Jordan, drops its first season.
Here’s everything coming to (and leaving) Netflix this week of October 4th.
Big Mouth: Season 3 (Netflix series streaming 10/4)
Nick Kroll’s coming-of-age animated comedy has been picked up for a couple more seasons, so the good news is that we’ll get even more opportunities to laugh at the awkwardness of puberty. The even better news? Season three makes its way to Netflix this week, and it’s filled with masturbation game shows, incest, toxic masculinity, and a Queer Eye makeover for Coach Steve. Oh, and Maya Rudolph‘s absolutely killing it as Connie the Hormone Monstress.
Peaky Blinders: Season 5 (Netflix series streaming 10/4)
Series five of the Cillian Murphy-starring gangster drama comes to Netflix this week, by order of the Peaky Blinders. We pick up a few years down the road as Tommy Shelby’s embedded himself in British politics, serving as an MP and still raising hell in the in-between. He’s faced with threats close to home in the form of Michael Gray, who returns from American with a mysterious new wife in tow, and in Parliament as Sam Claflin pops up to play the infamous fascist Oswald Mosley.
Michael B. Jordan appears in this new sci-fi series for Netflix that follows the journey of a young kid named Dion, who must grow up in a world where he’s persecuted, not just because of the color of his skin, but because he has superhuman abilities that make him both a danger and a weapon to those around him. Jordan’s part in this is pretty small — he plays the mysteriously-deceased dad of young Dion that we only see in flashbacks — the real focus here is on the bond between Dion and his single mom, Nicole, and how that is magnified once he begins testing the limits of his powers.
Between a rather disgusting, but heartfelt, message about Thanksgiving and yet another Trump-focused cold open, this weekend’s Will Ferrell-hosted Saturday Night Live had plenty of sketches for all kinds of tastes. Yet one of the more entertaining and enjoyable aspects of the 45th season’s seventh episode was the fact that Lorne Michaels and company enlisted the help of so many other SNL alums to pop in here and there to give Ferrell a helping hand.
As Entertainment Weekly noticed in a running tally the outlet kept for the evening, Ferrell, who served as a regular SNL cast member for seven years, shared the stage with the likes of Tracy Morgan, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Fred Armisen.
#SNL alum count tonight: Will Ferrell (1995–2002) Tracy Morgan (1996–2003) Maya Rudolph (2000–2007) Rachel Dratch (1999–2006) Fred Armisen (2002–2013) pic.twitter.com/d2K96Yzw7L
The first of these occurred during the oddly Ryan Reynolds-themed monologue, in which Ferrell noticed the Deadpool actor in the crowd and bantered with him throughout it. “I just wanted to enjoy the show,” Reynolds declared at one point. “Can you just please stop addressing me?” At that point, the crowd erupted as Morgan walked onto the stage to join Ferrell for the final minute. “Now you listen to me! The prophecy must be fulfilled. This is Will Ferrell,” the comedian exclaimed. “He can do what he wants to do.”
As for Rudolph, Dratch, and Armisen, they joined Ferrell in the evening’s “2020 Democratic Debate” sketch for a round of political satire. Rudolph reprised her audience-pleasing impression of Sen. Kamala Harris, while Dratch played Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Armisen performed as former New York mayor turned presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. “I tipped the doorman $30 million,” he said when asked how he was able to enter the debate stage.
As is often the case, the SNL alums’ presence was more geared toward garnering plenty of “clapter” from the audience instead of telling jokes, but it was still fun to see so many of Ferrell’s peers on stage with him again.
Eddie Murphy spent most of his first SNL stint in 35 years playing the hits: Mr. Robinson, Buckwheat, Gumby, even Velvet Jones. He still found room for some originals. The night only had one pre-taped segment, but it mirrored the one from last year’s holiday episode, in which host Matt Damon ruined Christmas dinner by starting a fight over…Weezer.
The family in this sketch at least keep up the pleasant façade. Murphy’s patriarch stands up to toast the family hunkering together for the holidays, offering sentimental platitudes and tributes to each member — from wife Maya Rudolph (who’d swung by for the cold open to play Kamala Harris) to aging gramps Keenan Thompson to soon-to-be (white) son-in-law Mikey Day.
Flashbacks tell a different story. As Murphy waxes poetic about each person, we cut to scenes of fighting, irritation, and general tension. His picture perfect marriage to Rudolph? Definitely not picture perfect. They tell grandpa his medical issues aren’t a nuisance. But they really are. And maybe dad’s not as chill about his daughter marrying a white man than his warm toast lets on.
So, as some of us embark on extended holiday jaunts, spending time with relatives who may not 100% agree with our takes on, let’s say, the sitting president’s recent impeachment, take cold comfort in this sketch. We, too, may have to grin through a toast riddled with lies, but at least we’re all going through it together.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — A position without a flaw
There are some things that are just true, always and forever. Examples include:
The ocean is big and wet
Lasagna is good
Doctors offices should put on the Food Network or HGTV in the waiting room instead of 24-hour news channels
Another one you can add to that list is “Adding Maya Rudolph to your television show will make it better.” There’s plenty of evidence to back it up at this point. We can start with the most recent and fresh example, which is her role as the judge on The Good Place. She’s so good in that little role. Goofy and stern and serious and silly all at once. I would watch a whole show about that character even though that character is very thinly drawn by design. The dialogue she has isn’t even that funny on the page. She just Rudolphs it up and, blammo, comedy. It’s almost like a magic trick.
Or take Big Mouth. Maya Rudolph plays Connie the Hormone Monstress on Big Mouth. It’s just a voice role on an animated show, which can be hard to bring personality to because you’re just talking into a microphone by yourself in a recording studio. She does, though. Lord Almighty, does she ever. The performance is as big and bright as the sun, peppered with brassy pronunciations of words and phrases that become instantly funny and memorable. Pharmacy becomes “pha-warm-acy.” Google becomes “joojle.” My favorite is her work with “bubble bath.” She adds letters and syllables and passion to the phrase in a way that makes it sound luxurious and almost salacious. I’ve tried many times to write it out phonetically — I’m normal, leave me alone — and the closest I’ve come is “bawubba bay-ettthhh,” but even that doesn’t capture the percussive breathiness of her version. She hits all the b’s so hard that the rest of the letters just kind of tumble out and hang on for dear life. I wish there were Emmys just for pronouncing things. It would be her and Andre Braugher (as Captain Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Catherine O’Hara (as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek) in a battle royale every year.
And then there’s this, too.
Netflix
That’s her appearing in one song from Lonely Island’s Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience and setting the world on fire. This screencap is good because there are not many sentences in this or any language funnier than “shake four halves of butt” but you really do need to watch the video to grasp what’s happening. The song takes a turn about halfway in and her eyes go almost black with power. She does that better than anyone. Maya Rudolph is the best.
The lingering question here is, “Yes, this is all true, so why doesn’t Maya Rudolph have her own big star vehicle yet?” And that’s fair. She should have one or more of those by now, probably, like how her SNL colleagues Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Andy Samberg all have or had beloved long-running network sitcoms. And I would love for that to happen someday. But I also love the idea of her as a comedy mercenary, just parachuting into a few shows a year and spraying comedy bullets around for a bit before hopping on a chopper and disappearing. As a greedy man, I think I even prefer it. More Maya in more places. Put her in everything. You can’t go wrong.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — Cats on drugs
Universal
In the early 1970s, two young Washington Post reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made history with their reporting on Richard Nixon and the Watergate coverup. Even today, almost 50 years later, it remains one of the proudest moments for journalism in this country, and something the Post remains justifiably proud of. There’s a movie about it and everything, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford’s immaculate hair. It was and is a big deal, and I mention it here for two reasons:
In New York, a 26-year-old man named Ryan, who messaged The Post while still high on the edibles he took for that evening’s screening, expressed his lust for “a particular cat I would love to do bad things to me.” (It was Munkustrap, played by chiseled ballet dancer Robbie Fairchild).
And look at this, too.
In Los Angeles, a 23-year-old actor named Davis, who went to the movie with some friends, took a huge hit of amyl nitrite (i.e. “poppers”) at a key moment. “It was literally as Jennifer [Hudson] screams out, ‘Touch meeeeee, it’s so easy to leave meeeeeee,’ the poppers for all three of us kicked in,” he says. “I felt myself hit the Heaviside Layer like Grizabella, the glamour cat.”
I love this. I love this so much. I love that people are getting blasted to see Cats and I love that they are ripping off extremely horny emails about it to reporters as they leave the theater and I love that one of our nation’s finest newspapers is documenting it for the ages. I’m not joking or being sarcastic at all here. This is a lot of fun. Read the whole thing if you haven’t already. Cats may be a historic flop and a disturbing mess of fur and chaos, but if this ends up being its legacy… well, things could have been worse.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — Alex Trebek
The Jeopardy GOAT tournament is taking place this week and it is fabulous television. The show’s three greatest champions — James Holzhauer, Ken Jennings, and Brad Rutter — are doing battle in a primetime free-for-all for $1 million and I can’t and won’t stop watching. It’s always fun to watch people at the tippy top of their field push each other in competition. It’s also fun to sit and home and play along and watch them wipe out an entire board while you struggle to answer the $400 questions. My favorite was the time I knew an answer that none of them got and I started mentally strutting around my apartment like a peacock. Big day for me.
It’s also a nice way to recognize Alex Trebek and give him a big deal showcase before he steps away. There’s no word when exactly that will happen (Trebek says he hasn’t even told producers), but it will, sooner than later, and it will be a huge bummer. Alex Trebek is the best. For a lot of reasons. Look at the video at the top of this section. And look at this video.
Fact: When Trebek shaved off his moustache in 2001, he did it in the middle of the day, himself, without warning the “Jeopardy!” producers. Renee was alarmed to come in and find him mid-shearing. He just felt like it, he says now. “And it got so much press, I couldn’t believe it. The wars with Iraq or whatever at that time, and people are all in a stew over my moustache. I have one response: Get a life.”
I bring up this quote anytime I mention Alex Trebek. In my defense, it’s a really good quote. It’s got a “the wars with Iraq or whatever” and an “all in a stew over my mustache.” That’s range. I am going to miss him tremendously when he leaves the show. The man is a legend and an icon and the real Jeopardy GOAT, results of this tournament be damned.
– I must know everything about this
– Who sat next to whom? Who set it up? When did Guy Fieri become friends with Sylvester Stallone? Why is Jay Glazer there? What did Guy cook? What did they talk about? Did Al Pacino say the word “Flavortown” at any point?
– I am absolutely livid that this video cuts off after 30 seconds
– I would have watched this entire meal
– Imagine overhearing a conversation between Stallone and Pacino, all the mumbling and shouting
– [Al Pacino voice] “These PORK BELLY quesaDILLAS are OUT OF BOUNDS”
– Now I’m wondering how many other weird celebrity pairings I’ve missed over the years
This is the best thing Sly Stallone has ever posted on Twitter, which is saying something because he’s also posted these:
The difference between cockroaches and HATERS? The Roaches are survivors and have prettier legs. You have one life nobody should wreak it..
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — Brockmire, you beautiful bastard
IFC
Brockmire is a very good show. It stars Hank Azaria as a baseball announcer and trainwreck of a person and it is very funny and very wild. The first two seasons were a delight to watch, which makes the fact that the third season slipped through my fingers all the more confusing. What was I doing that I was so busy that I couldn’t watch Brockmire? Nothing important, I can guarantee that. I know myself pretty well. I know what I do with most of my time. I could have watched season three of Brockmire.
TV’s orneriest sitcom makes a hard right turn in its fourth and final season, jumping ahead to a dystopian, climate-changed 2030 when Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) — clean-and-sober but still eloquently nasty — is named commissioner of baseball.
My favorite part of this is that the dystopian, climate ravaged hellscape of a future they’re taking us to is… 10 years from now. It took me a second to wrap my head around that. I still see 2030 and picture, like, flying cars and condos on the moon. The future is here already, though, and it kind of stinks. Thank God for Brockmire, though.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Twitter user Sarcasm Detector:
Elton John is only an Emmy away from the full EGOT. Instead of the easy way and have him just write a song or host a one time variety show, can you pitch characters played by Elton John as a special recurring guest that could win him an Emmy? Elton John as a in over his head zookeeper on 911: Lonestar? Elton as a sad piano bar player in The Mandalorian?
This is a wonderful question. Let’s get Elton John an Emmy. Let’s get Elton John an Emmy. If we want to do it the right way, we’ll need to think about this. We’ll need to get him a role in an Emmy-bait kind of show. The obvious answer is for him to appear on Fleabag — British, critically-beloved, I would like it — but Phoebe Waller-Bridge swears that’s over. Okay, fine. I wanted him to play Hot Priest’s uncle. But as himself. The real Elton John as Hot Priest’s uncle. But fine.
Other options:
– A crime boss who gets assassinated on Killing Eve
– Some royal-adjacent so-and-so on The Crown
– New Mexico weed kingpin Rex Jackalope on Better Call Saul
– Murderous robot Elton John on Westworld
– Rival media titan on Succession
– Voice of a new hormone monster on Big Mouth
– Guest host of Last Week Tonight
I’m open to more suggestions but this feels like a solid start.
When a neighbor heard those chilling cries, the logical next step was to call 911. Four Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies pulled up and confronted a man who had his wife’s car on blocks in his driveway.
Uhhhhh this is starting out pretty dark. I’m not sure I like where it’s headed. It’s like the opening to one of those murder shows on the ID channel. If the phrase “scrubbed down with bleach to destroy the evidence” shows up anywhere soon, I’m going to be very upset.
Hopefully, it takes a fun and whimsical turn. Soon. I don’t know what I’m looking for, exactly, but I’ll know it when I see it.
“I was changing the brakes on my wife’s car and had my 40-year-old parrot, Rambo, on his outside perch where he sings and talks. Sometime later four police officers showed up saying a neighbor called because she heard a woman screaming for help. I promptly introduced the officers to Rambo and we all had a good laugh. Afterward, I also introduced Rambo to the neighbor who called in the screaming. She too had a good laugh.”
Yup, I do believe “the cries for help came from a 40-year-old rascal bird named Rambo” will qualify as fun and whimsical. Great job, everyone. Really pulled us out of a dicey situation. I appreciate it.
The person added, “Sometimes Rambo yells ‘help, help, let me out’. Something I taught him when I was a kid and Rambo lived in a cage.”
At Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony, the lack of a host didn’t matter much (or at all) since a lot of wonderful presenters were on hand. In fact, a strong lead-in from Steve Martin and Chris Rock led to Keanu Reeves and Diane Keaton being whoa-tastic. Then Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig took the audience in the palm of their hands with an offbeat and (possibly too) quirky presentation that was slightly passive aggressive (but very funny) while introducing Production Design and Costume Design categories.
Naturally, they joined Natalie Portman in roasting the Academy for its lack of female representation in the Best Director nominee pool. Then things got super weird and sort-of musical and honestly, a little confusing. It was still a pretty effective comedic turn from the two SNL alums (with a little bit of everything), but Grammy VIP Billie Eilish’s puzzled face said a lot. Some might say that it even set a mood.
Well, not everyone felt that way. A lot of people actually enjoyed Kristen and Maya’s turn on the stage! Maybe they should even host next year. They couldn’t possibly pull a Kevin Hart on everyone.
— Be under 2 hours — Have Laura Dern win at least one award — Have some combination of Tina Fey/Maya Rudolph/Kristen Wiig/Amy Poehler host — Have Lady Gaga sing a Sound of Music medley
We’re living in the Age of COVID-19, with much of the world quarantining, perhaps for a good long while. One upshot of living in a brave new technological world is performers, used to performing, have had a natural outlet to combat cabin fever. Some late night show hosts have brought their furloughed shows back, thanks to webcams; musicians have dropped performances over social media, and actors, like Patrick Stewart, have released videos of them reading Shakespeare aloud — a balm to our souls and our ears.
Some are going even further. On Friday, March 27, starting at 5pm PST, the cast of Big Mouth, everyone’s favorite cartoon about hormones, will get together virally for a live table-read. The reading, from one of the show’s instant classic Season 3 episodes, isn’t held because the actors are antsy. It’s to help out a charity, namely Feeding America.
As per the press release, Feeding America is “the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States,” with a “network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs” which “provide meals to more than 40 million people each year.”
Here’s some more about them:
Feeding America also supports programs that prevent food waste and improve food security among the people we serve; educates the public about the problem of hunger; and advocates for legislation that protects people from going hungry. Individuals, charities, businesses and government all have a role in ending hunger. Donate. Volunteer. Advocate. Educate. Together we can solve hunger.
The participating cast is epic and complete, with Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Jessi Klein, Jason Mantzoukas, Jenny Slate, Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Jessica Chaffin, Jon Daly, Mark Duplass, Richard Kind, Paula Pell, Paul Scheer, Emily Altman, and Brandon Kyle Goodman.
The live-read can be streamed on the YouTube channel for Netflix is a Joke. What else are you doing with your Friday night now that you’re a shut-in with (maybe) some un-spent cash. Do the right thing, and help some people out while watching adults pretend to be hormonal tweens. That time again is Friday, March 27, 5pm PST/8pm EST.
Sen. Kamala Harris of California was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate for the 2020 presidential election on Tuesday, becoming the first Black woman and first person of Indian descent ever to be tapped as the vice presidential nominee by a major party.
“I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate,” the former-Vice President tweeted. “Back when Kamala was Attorney General, she worked closely with Beau [Biden’s son who passed away in 2015]. I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign.”
There was much rejoicing for the historic selection, including in the Maya Rudolph household, because it means she has a steady gig until at least November. And maybe four years after that. The Big Mouth star has portrayed Harris multiple times on SNL, including the season 45 premiere, earning praise from the senator. “That girl being played by @MayaRudolph on @nbcsnl? That girl was me,” Harris tweeted. And now “that girl” is going to see herself a lot on SNL (either in studio or virtually).
On Tuesday, after days of promising he would reveal his running mate, Joe Biden finally delivered, revealing that the other half of his ticket would be California senator Kamala Harris. The news was met with much joy; she’s both the first African-American and the first Asian-American to be chosen as a vice presidential hopeful on a major party ticket, to name two things. Many people, though, couldn’t help but think of something a touch less serious: What does Maya Rudolph, the SNL vet who’s memorably played her on her former program, think about the news?
Well, now we know. The actress and performer was on a group Zoom call for Entertainment Weekly, alongside Angela Bassett, Wanda Sykes, Dan Levy, Ramy Youssef, and Giancarlo Esposito, when she learned the news. And here was her initial response: “Oh sh*t!”
Granted, she didn’t have much time to prepare for a response, much less fully wrap around her head that she may not only have to reprise the role but do so during a pandemic. Still, she was able to respond to that possibility.
“I love going to the show. Any excuse I can get, I love,” Rudolph told everyone. “I just didn’t really anticipate traveling during a pandemic, but if there’s anyone that can work it out I’m sure Lorne [Michaels] has some sort of invisible helicopter that can get me there.”
She continued:
“Ever since I was a kid, truly, I wanted to be on any kind of SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and I can’t believe that I got to work there, and I can’t believe that it’s my family still … I’m so thrilled to even be associated with the show and that I got to go back. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving. Honestly, it’s my favorite place to play.”
Still, she couldn’t hide how flabbergasted she was by the news. “I’m as surprised as you are, guys,” Rudolph said. “That’s spicy.”
You can watch the full video of the moment during the Zoom call when Rudolph heard the news over at EW.
Within seconds of Joe Biden naming Kamala Harris as his vice president came the Maya Rudolph jokes. “Maya Rudolph up your fee.” “Maya Rudolph bout to eat eat.” “I, for one, am also thrilled about 4 years of Maya Rudolph SNL appearances.” SNL‘s season premiere isn’t usually until late September or early October — whether it will be in-studio or virtual has yet to be determined — so there’s still time for any official decisions to be made, but having Rudolph playing Harris in season 46 (!) is on Lorne Michaels’ mind.
When asked by the Hollywood Reporter whether she’s heard from the SNL head honcho, Rudolph answered, “He sent me a GIF of myself, as Kamala, in sunglasses, sipping a cocktail and saying, ‘Oh no.’ That really made me laugh.” The Big Mouth star (one of her three Emmy-nominated roles this year) also said that after the announcement, her phone “blew up… I think there’s a collective excitement about this. It’s a spot of positivity and hope and some good news, so it feels nice to be associated with that. But I also feel like such a lazy cheater, because I didn’t do anything. I’m not running. I don’t have to do anything but be the same fool I was. She’s doing all the hard work.”
The most surprising thing about all this isn’t people being excited for Rudolph over Harris’ historic selection — it’s Lorne Michaels owning a smartphone. And that he sends people GIFs. That man has strong “rotary phone only” energy. I am, to quote a GIF that Michaels probably sent to Kristen Wiig once, shooketh.
Maya Rudolph might be fielding some interesting employment opportunities thanks to Joe Biden picking Kamala Harris as his running mate on the Democratic ticket, but one of her other notable roles is providing news these days as well. Rudolph is excellent as the female hormone monstress Connie on the adult animation show Big Mouth streaming on Netflix. As the show has evolved, her role has grown and changed, and now we know where one of her most infamous lines from the show came from.
Big Mouth is an adult animated show on Netflix known for a variety of things, first of which might be that you can say “bubble bath” in a variety of ways thanks to Rudolph. One of the first things we learn about Connie, in fact, is that she smells so good because she doesn’t use deodorant and she only takes bubble baths.
But it was the way she said that bathing method that so instantly stuck, and it seems the writers have intentionally inserted the phrase “bubble bath” into the script as many times as possible so she had to keep saying it. The line has become something of a running joke online, as it’s basically impossible to say it like Rudolph no matter how hard we try. And even she struggles to get it down on the fly.
And on an episode of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, Rudolph explained where the voice and that line came from. The conversation starts at about the 44 minute mark. O’Brien rightfully praises Rudolph’s voice acting performance on the show — and the former Simpsons writer would certainly know a thing or two about animation. As Rudolph explained, she was originally hired to play Nick’s mom but the role was thrown to her as “kind of a one-off” thing. O’Brien then got right to it: he’s obsessed with the way she says “bubble bath” as Connie.
“Sometimes I’ll see something in print that reminds me that I’m not insane. But I got obsessed with the way your character said this certain word,” O’Brien said. “And then I saw online that people were talking about it.”
He tried, and failed, to recreate it himself, which made her say it and cause everyone on the episode to start laughing. She then recalled how the line evolved into what it is today.
“I remember sort of doing it and I remember sort of being egged on to… can you find more? Can you actually find more?” she said. “And we were trying to make — I think maybe initially because she’s meant to be a hormone monsters we were trying to make her voice a roller coaster. Just like a roller coaster of emotions. So it was sort of that low, high, low dipping stuff.”
O’Brien continued to fail at pronouncing “bubble bath” anywhere close to Rudolph, so she had some advice.
“It should slowly bubble out of the back of your throat,” she said, noting that O’Brien’s was sort of “revving up” like a car.
It’s a very funny moment on the podcast and Rudolph ends it with a great My Pillow joke. O’Brien strongly suggests that Rudolph should get an Emmy for the role, if not on those two words alone. If her inevitable time on SNL this fall doesn’t do the trick, this is a hell of a fallback plan.
All eyes may be on Maya Rudolph’s widely expected appearances as Kamala Harris on an unprecedented five consecutive Saturday Night Live episodes ahead of the presidential election this fall, but another outstanding Rudolph performance has won her an Emmy this week.
Thursday brought word that Rudolph won the 2020 Emmy for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for her role as Connie the Hormone Monstress on the Netflix adult animation show Big Mouth. In a muted year for the Emmys, and buried in the mid-week Creative Arts ceremony, it wasn’t as widely celebrated as it should have been, but still, at least the Netflix and Big Mouth Twitter accounts were thrilled.
It’s certainly well-deserved, as her pronunciation of “bubble bath” alone is worth approximately a developing nation’s gross domestic product. But it’s also a pretty spectacular run for a character that, according to Rudolph, was supposed to be a one-off until she blew the creators of the show away with Connie’s unique vocal abilities and characterization.
And as many pointed out, it seems surprising that it took this long for Rudolph to win an award like that.
Rudolph had actually been nominated for three Emmys for her work on Saturday Night Live as a guest, The Judge on the final season of The Good Place, and, of course, Connie. But it seems the Hormone Monstress is the role that stuck.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump certainly had a debate of sorts on Tuesday night, and now we know what Jim Carrey will look like when Saturday Night Live inevitably rehashes said debate on NBC. Ahead of the first episode of Season 46 of SNL, which will run new episodes until November’s presidential election, SNL teased how Jim Carrey has prepared for his Joe Biden impression, and the result is… interesting.
Rather than have someone from the SNL cast play Biden, the show has opted to hire Carey to portray the former vice president, taking the part from a string of other former show hosts like Woody Harrelson, who continued to appear in cameo roles. And the video officially gave us a look at what Carey will look like on Saturday.
Carrey, no stranger to prosthesis and other effects to morph himself into roles, somehow looks more like his role as Count Olaf in the Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events movie, though this brief 18 second clip only really shows him scowling and doesn’t feature any of the Biden mannerisms and his voice, which might further sell him in the role.
Joining Carrey in the video was Maya Rudolph, though we already know how she will look at vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, as she’s pretty consistently played her on the show since she herself was running for president. That portrayal actually won Rudolph one of two Emmy nods this year, the other coming for her spectacular voice acting on Big Mouth.
We’ll have to wait and see if Carrey earns similar praise for his role as Biden, but at least we have a few days to square with this image before we see it in motion on Saturday when Chris Rock takes the stage as the show’s first host of the new season.
The second episode of Saturday Night Live’s return brought with it a sendup of the Vice Presidential Debate, which was held on Tuesday and was largely overtaken by a fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head for more than two minutes. That gave SNL plenty of material to spoof, and it did so by explaining just what that fly was doing up there in the first place.
The opening sketch featured Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris and hit all the notes people seem to remember from “the thing that will change everyone’s minds,” as the intro put it. There was inexplicable talk of fracking, Pence getting shut down for interrupting Harris, and the fly landing on Pence’s head. But that’s when things got weird. Jim Carrey, playing Joe Biden watching the debate at home, decided he needed to get in there to rescue Harris for some reason.
“I need to do something,” Carrey said. “I need to teleport to that debate and save the soul of this nation.”
It was all a bit confusing, but it did allow the show to use Carrey and also reference something that went viral in the wake of the Fly debate. There was no Jeff Goldblum sighting, mind you, but Carrey did his best to play Joe Biden slowly turning into a fly version of the actor while paraphrasing his infamous line from Jurassic Park. The sketch also included Kenan Thompson, who appeared as a dead Herman Cain reincarnated as a fly also trapped on Mike Pence’s head.
It may not have been the Fly sketch that many fans wanted but it at least referenced what many were thinking the show would do, anyway.
Saturday Night Live‘s string of new episodes until the general election continued on Saturday night, and another televised presidential event gave the show an obvious entry with its cold open. This time, though, with dueling town halls on different networks, the sketch was an attempt to highlight what politically active Americans may have seen by flipping between the two events, which played out very differently on each network.
Jim Carrey was back as his energetic, aviator shades-wearing Joe Biden and Alec Baldwin was back as Trump. Maya Rudolph returned to crash Trump’s town hall as Kamala Harris, too. SNL‘s framing of the Biden town hall was that of a long-winded old man who struggled to know where people in the socially-distanced hall in Philadelphia were even asking questions from. It was a far goofier take than his policy-focused event actually was on Thursday, but the juxtaposition to Trump was an important part of the bit.
For the second week in a row, Carrey’s Biden transformed into a pop culture reference. First, he donned a sweater and pretended to be Mr. Rogers, a reference to a Trump surrogate’s tweet about the Biden event in its aftermath. The next time viewers saw him, however, he was Bob Ross, paintbrush and canvas on screen and suddenly talking about happy little trees. Trump, meanwhile, saw his back and forth with Savannah Guthrie literally turn into WrestleMania. At this rate seems clear that SNL will keep making debates and town halls its cold open until the president and vice president stop holding them. Which means we almost certainly know what the topic of next week’s cold open will be, too.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — Listen to me
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Big Mouth is back for another season this weekend and it is just as funny and foul and occasionally sweet as ever. This should not be a huge surprise because Big Mouth is always funny and foul and occasionally sweet. All your favorites are back, and some new ones show up to join the fun. Seth Rogen pops up early on to show his cartoon testicles to you. Paul Giamatti appears as a piece of crap, and yes, I mean that literally, Paul Giamatti voices an animated chunk of feces. Big Mouth remains Big Mouth, in all the important ways.
And guess what: I don’t actually have any bad news. Just more good news. At one point in this season, Maya Rudolph, in character as Connie the Hormone Monstress, says Alec Baldwin’s name, which is not in itself newsworthy, but what makes it newsworthy is the pronunciation she throws on it. The closest I can get in text form is “Alec Bwalt-twin,” with an extra W and a big extra oomph on the T that does not appear anywhere in his name. It’s the best. Just a delight.
What better than Maya Rudolph in Big Mouth? I mean that rhetorically, yes, of course, but also literally. Name me ten things better. Any things. I’ll give you pizza and maybe “sitting outside on a 75-degree day with a big glass of iced tea,” but the list gets dicey after that, real quick. She’s just so good, all the time, delivering a voiceover performance for the ages. It’s great because she goes so huge with everything and it still fits perfectly because of the context. She’s a hormone monstress. She has no filter, no voice in her head telling her to dial it back. On a show filled with great voice work — I would love to see live-action footage of everyone recording their lines in the booth, especially John Mulaney, because he has such a sweet little boy face and his character is a perverted little creep who is practically glowing from hormones ravaging his body — she laps the field. I mean, who can forget this?
Netflix
It’s the extra syllables she tosses into the stew that makes it. “Bawabbuh bay-eth.” It’s so sultry and luxurious. It almost sounds the way taking a nice hot bubble bath feels. And that’s far from her only notable pronunciation. One of my personal favorites was when Jessie was struggling and rebelling and Connie gassed her up about shoplifting from the pharmacy and turned that last simple word into something entirely different. “Phwaaaarmacy.” It even made me want to steal something from a pharmacy and I’m a reasonably well-adjusted adult who has not shoplifted in decades, as far as the police know.
Rudolph won an Emmy for the role this year, in the recently created category of Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance. (The original Outstanding Voice-Over Performance category was split after 2013 so narrators and characters could be honored separately.) This was good for a few reasons. Three big ones, mainly. The first is that she deserved it, obviously, and it’s good when deserving people win stuff. The second is that the award had gone to a cast member from either Family Guy or The Simpsons every year since the new category was created (Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, Seth MacFarlane, Seth MacFarlane, Alex Borstein, Seth MacFarlane), and it’s nice that the voters started watching a new show. The third is that she hadn’t even been nominated before 2020 despite dropping the aforementioned bubble baths and pharmacies and the whole thing had me on the verge of throwing a tantrum in the street. Its good. The Emmys are silly and I do not care much about them, in general, but if we’re going to do them every year (and it sure looks like we are), we should at least try to get it right. Giving Maya Rudolph an Emmy for voicing this character counts as getting it right.
So take some time this weekend and watch a few Big Mouths and appreciate what Maya Rudolph is doing with it. Maybe watch with your headphones in, though. Even if you’re by yourself. Big Mouth remains a lot in only the best ways.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — Okay, fine, let’s talk about the thing
Warner Bros.
I’m mad. Not necessarily about the news I’m about to share, although that’s not super ideal, either. No, I’m mad because this section was originally going to be about Henry Winkler joining TikTok and posting a video of himself dancing like a loon, which kills me for about 10 different reasons. Henry Winkler is the best. I was hyped to discuss it. But then Warner Bros. had to go and set the entire movie industry on fire yesterday afternoon and I can’t really just ignore it. Ugh. Fine. Here’s the important chunk of the press release.
Today, the Warner Bros. Pictures Group announced that it has committed to releasing its 2021 film slate via a unique, consumer-focused distribution model in which Warner Bros. will continue to exhibit the films theatrically worldwide, while adding an exclusive one month access period on the HBO Max streaming platform in the U.S. concurrent with the film’s domestic release. The hybrid model was created as a strategic response to the impact of the ongoing global pandemic, particularly in the U.S. Following the one month HBO Max access period domestically, each film will leave the platform and continue theatrically in the U.S. and international territories, with all customary distribution windows applying to the title.
Warner Bros. Pictures Group’s 2021 expected release slate currently includes The Little Things, Judas and the Black Messiah, Tom & Jerry, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, Those Who Wish Me Dead, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, In The Heights, Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, Reminiscence, Malignant, Dune, The Many Saints of Newark, King Richard, Cry Macho and Matrix 4.
There are a few things happening here, with varying degrees of importance. The biggie is what this means for movie theaters going forward, because movie theaters were already struggling and Warner Bros. basically giving these movies away to anyone with an HBO subscription ain’t gonna help that. (Remember when Disney charged Disney+ subscribers like $30 extra to watch one kind of mediocre Mulan movie? I do!) Some big theater chains might not make it through the next 6-12 months, especially if this proves to be the first domino to fall of many: F9 on Peacock, No Time to Die somewhere else, and all the way down, blockbuster after blockbuster streamed directly into our living rooms. It’s sad and exciting and weird and about four other things at once. I miss movie theaters tremendously. I can’t wait to see a movie in one again someday. I don’t think this will be the end of the entire industry, but I do wonder how much different it will look this time next year. My gut says it’ll be more of a luxury experience, with food and drink and a whole atmosphere about it, a big special Night Out feel. But I don’t know. No one does.
I also respect that Warner Bros. has their hands tied a bit. They can’t really be expected to sit on a whole slate of films just waiting for a green light that might not come for over half a year. And they have this big fancy new streaming service that they want to roundup new subscribers for, one that still has to negotiate deals with the big providers like Amazon and Roku. To whatever degree this stinks (I do not especially want to watch the fourth Matrix for the first time on a screen small enough to fit in my living room, which is another bummer), I can at least rationalize it. A lot of things are going to look really different when we come out of this, not just the movie-viewing experience, and it’s probably good if we all start coming to terms with that sooner rather than later, just so the shock doesn’t send us all on a roller coaster ride of emotions when it’s safe to go do things again.
Uggghhhh. See what I mean? What a downer that became. I regret doing any of it. I should have just stuck to my guns and posted the TikTok of Henry Winkler dancing. Here it is. Go watch that and chill out. There’s no point in worrying about Monday stuff on a Friday, and “will I ever be able to see a movie in a theater again should I survive the global pandemic?” is some extremely Monday stuff. Forget I said anything.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — Hmm… yes, this counts
DISNEY+
Here’s the thing: I am bad at Star Wars. Just terrible at it. I am not a big sci-fi guy and I’m not even really a big “space” guy, in general, unless you count watching The Martian 600 times on basic cable and finding it 11 kinds of funny that the Fast & Furious franchise is allegedly headed there in the very near future. It’s just not my thing, which is fine, as I’m sure I like lots of things you don’t. It does make it awkward when a show like The Mandalorian comes along, though, especially when it starts catering directly to me. Look at what it’s done in the last few weeks alone. We’ve had a Timothy Olyphant sighting (Raylan!), a Titus Welliver sighting (Bosch!), and a mix-up where some dude in jeans was just hanging around in the background of a shot. I love all those things.
And then last week the show really went and did it, dropping a slightly modified “we’re not so different” scene right in the middle of a climactic battle. I love when that happens. It’s one of my favorite things. I don’t know why I like it so much. But I do. I talk about it all the time. I talk about it so much that now my Twitter mentions light up any time it happens in a show or a movie, because so many people know how much I love it. This is not a complaint. Far from it. I hope it never stops. Let me put it this way: a reasonable argument can be made that the only reason I’m still watching Westworld — a confusing show I barely like — is because it has at least one “not so different” scene every year, and that makes me happy.
So between that and the thing where this is the actual, adorable, borderline-manipulative-but-whatever subtitle they use when Baby Yoda makes his little sounds…
D
… the show has won me over despite how terrible I am at Star Wars. I still think they should have made Baby Yoda’s name, like, Randy Yoda instead of Grogu, but that’s an issue for another column. Which I almost wrote this week. I was not lying about being bad at Star Wars.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Nathan Fielder is a maniac
How to With John Wilson was a good show. I think it would be good to get that out of the way first. I did not expect to be moved close to tears while watching an episode about scaffolding, or to be moved to actual tears while watching an episode about making risotto. And yet, there I was, feeling things, often like 90 seconds after laughing very hard at something very dumb. A real ride, that show. Highly recommended.
If you watched it too and found yourself thinking “hmm, this feels kind of like a Nathan Fielder production,” there was a good reason for that: it was a Nathan Fielder production. Like, he was an actual producer on it. Which he explains in this video. Briefly. Before everything takes a hard and progressively dark turn. I did not see where this was heading until it was most of the way there, and then I was kind of laughing and cringing and remembering that Nathan Fielder is a genius. He’s a maniac, for sure, and I’m a little terrified of him and the way his brain works, but he’s also a genius. I guess I’m trying to make two points here:
How to With John Wilson was an incredible slice of television and not entirely like anything I’ve ever seen
It is good to have Nathan Fielder making television and weirdo disturbing YouTube videos
Yeah, that about sums it up.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — Being famous seems awful
Getty Image
It is the position of this column that the ideal situation in life is being rich and anonymous. It’s the best of both worlds. All the money you could ever want and none of the hassle. My colleague Josh Kurp pointed out that the bassist for U2 is worth like $300 million and I wouldn’t know who he was if he walked into my kitchen and introduced himself by name. That’s a nice gig. After Rich But Not Famous, I suppose we go Rich And Famous, then Not Rich Or Famous, then Famous But Not Rich, but things start getting dicey there really fast. Being famous does not seem very fun.
Take, for example, Millie Bobby Brown, star of Stranger Things and Enola Holmes, who recently deleted her TikTok and posted a tearful Instagram story after a fan harangued her for a video while she was out minding her own business. We pick up the story after she had already told the fan once that she did not want to be filmed in that moment.
But the fan wouldn’t leave her alone. Millie continued her story, saying, “I was paying and she walked past me and began to video me again. And I said, ‘I’m a human being. Like, what more can I ask from you?'”
She began crying, telling fans through tears, “She said ‘So I can’t take a video of a human being?’ And I said, ‘No, not when I said no.’ It just makes me upset when people try to push the boundary, and I just wish people were more respectful.”
The actress then stood up for herself and demanded to be treated better. “I’m still trying to navigate this all and it’s still overwhelming… Where are my rights to say no?” Millie questioned.
This stinks! Leave people alone. At most, if you see a famous person you like out in public, and they aren’t eating dinner or trying to wrangle their children or are otherwise engaged in the type of activity you would not like to be bothered by some goofball during, maybe say like “Hey, sorry to bother you but your work means a lot to me” and then TURN AROUND AND LEAVE. Just walk away! It’ll be fine! You don’t need a picture or a video to document that you met someone, unless they offer or say yes if you ask very nicely. Sheesh. Don’t be a weirdo. Try not to be a weirdo. Try to be cool, for once. Come on.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Anne Marie:
I’m heeding your call for more hidden TV gems, though this one would probably require getting a hold of a Season 1 DVD. (It’s not on YouTube or AppleTV, last I checked.) Lo, the Ad-Rock ep of Edward Woodward’s The Equalizer is a true 1985 delight to behold.
Some highlights:
1. 19-year-old Ad Rock’s unapologetic Noo Yawk accent, though his parents are played by Christine Baranski and fricking Jim Dale, MBE.
2. Christine Baranski! Jim “All The Harry Potter Books” Dale! Alex Winter! Bob “The Last Thing That Went Through His Head” Gunton! Edward Woodward, OBE!
3. One of Ad Rock’s lines to Edward Woodward, OBE is “You just want to get next to Moms, that’s where it’s at.”
4. The ep is called “Mama’s Boy.” (Or as I like to think of it, Moms’s Boy.)
But the real hoot is Eugene Benton, the allegedly “dangerous drug dealer” who has Ad-Rock under his sway and prompts Christine Baranski to desperately seek some quality equalizing. Hahahahahahaha. Eugene would blow away if you pulled a Kleenex from a tissue box near him. He wears super short NBA throwback ‘80s shorts. He’s an Ivy League grad. He practices some type of martial arts involving swords, only the swords are accessories for awkward close-talking and it’s really just an excuse to wear half-open robes. His name is *Eugene*. He preens, he flashes his eyes, his idea of a threat is “… or I might have to change my orientation towards you.”
This last line is highly relevant, because I truly believe that whoever wrote the script* wanted to see how much gay subtext they could sneak onto a mid-eighties primetime network show. The piece de resistance is, of course, the alleyway fight scene; the dialogue could double as ADR for softcore porn. I defy you to watch it, with its “Harder! Harder!” and primal grunting, and tell me I’m wrong. Also, Mark Soper is perfect in the role, but I can’t help envisioning a Deadfall-era Nic Cage in it instead.
This is just a fantastic email. I know I say that about every email but this time I mean it. (I mean it the other times, too.) Look at everything we have here: Ad-Rock from Beastie Boys appearing in a network procedural just before breaking big as a rapper, Christine Baranski, swords, I mean, come on. The best part is that I found this episode on NBC’s website and watched it in chunks over the last week and can confirm everything Anne Marie said. Not that I assumed she was lying. It’s just… there’s a lot going on here.
Please consider this your reminder that the Beastie Boys Story documentary is still on Apple TV and is still great. As is this recent essay by comedian Josh Gondelman about listening to Paul’s Boutique a lot here in 2020. As is the song “Shadrach,” which I will now embed, driving home, once again, the fact that this was a very good email.
Police in California responded to a report of a suspected burglary in progress and arrived to find the cause of the ruckus actually was caused by about a dozen brawling raccoons.
Okay, first of all, I love it. The are few things in this world better than sentences that take a dramatic swerve at the end and few swerves are more dramatic than “the ruckus was actually caused by about a dozen brawling raccoons.”
The Richmond Police Department said two officers responded to the City Corporation Yard after an employee called authorities to report a banging on the administration office door that sounded like a burglar attempting to break in.
I’m sorry. I can’t focus yet. It’s going to take me at least one more paragraph to get past “about a dozen brawling raccoons.” Take a second and try to get a visual on that. It’s harder than you think. What does a dozen brawling raccoons even look like? I’ve been cranking away on it for days and the best I have is a cloud of dust and claws and screeching little beasts tumbling around an alley with one of them up on top of a trash can diving back into the fray. I think I’m close.
“Although mentally prepared to take action for an in-progress felony, the crime-fighting duo were surprised to find approximately one dozen raccoons in a physical altercation,” police said in a Facebook post. “When challenged, all but one fled westbound.”
Big shoutout to the one that stayed to take the fall for this. Very honorable. I’m proud of him.
Jack Harlow is about to be all over America’s televisions in the month of March. Not only will he be participating in the NBA’s All-Star Weekend coverage, playing in a 2×2 with 2 Chainz, Lil Baby, and Quavo, but he’s also ending the month with a performance as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, March 27. The episode will be hosted by none other than SNL alum, Maya Rudolph, who currently voices the hilarious hormone monster Connie on Big Mouth, as well as Betty Hart on Fox’s Bless The Harts.
Harlow posted a heartfelt message to Twitter with a screenshot of his post-it from the announcement wall, sharing exactly what it meant to him to perform on the show. “I grew up watching SNL with my family every weekend,” he recalled. “I vividly remember seeing Kanye perform ‘Love Lockdown’ and ‘Heartless’ in 2008. Thank you for making this happen. Another dream come true.”
Saturday Night Live. March 27th.
I grew up watching SNL with my family every weekend. I vividly remember seeing Kanye perform Love Lockdown and Heartless in 2008. Thank you for making this happen. Another dream come true. pic.twitter.com/kafxiNa6bx
More of Maya Rudolph is always a good thing. The comedy actress and Saturday Night Live alum will star in a new half hour comedy series for Apple TV that will re-team her with the Emmy-winning creators behind Forever Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard. While the title for the project has yet to be announced, it has already received a straight-to-series order from Apple as the streaming service seeks to aggressively boost its original content offerings. Via Deadline:
On the new Apple series, Rudolph will play Molly, a woman whose seemingly perfect life is upended after her husband leaves her with nothing but 87 billion dollars. Creators/writers Yang and Hubbard executive produce alongside Rudolph through her production company, Animal Pictures, with the company’s Natasha Lyonne and Danielle Renfrew Behrens also executive producing.
Yang and Hubbard aren’t the only ones with Emmys under their belts. Rudolph knocked out an impressive double Emmy win in 2020 thanks to her work as Kamala Harris on SNL and her voiceover work for Big Mouth where she plays the female hormone monstress Connie. Thanks to Rudolph’s impressive vocal talents and comedic wit, the role has been a breakout hit for fans who can’t over the way the character pronounces “bubble bath.” Conan O’Brien has even admitted to being impressed by the unusual pronunciation, which Rudolph revealed was a process to create.
“I remember sort of doing it and I remember sort of being egged on to… can you find more? Can you actually find more?” Rudolph told Conan on his podcast. “And we were trying to make — I think maybe initially because she’s meant to be a hormone monsters we were trying to make her voice a roller coaster. Just like a roller coaster of emotions. So it was sort of that low, high, low dipping stuff.”
Maya Rudolph returns to her Saturday Night Live roots this weekend but this time as the host, and she’s bringing along musical guest Jack Harlow. In a new preview for Saturday’s episode, Maya’s joined by Harlow and SNL cast member Chris Redd, who thought it was his own birthday until Rudolph reminded him that she’s the host, so therefore, it’s her birthday. The hilarious actress and comedienne then burst into eloquent tribute to spring, and it’s hard not to notice a little bit of Rudolph’s Emmy winning voice work as Big Mouth‘s Connie the Hormone Monster in there. Although, it wasn’t in the preview, SNL fans can probably expect more of Rudolph’s other Emmy winning performance as Kamala Harris when this week’s episode hits.
As for Harlow, he was mostly quiet during the preview, but he’s been pumped for his first time performing on SNL ever since the news dropped back in February. “I grew up watching SNL with my family every weekend,” Harlow tweeted at the time. “I vividly remember seeing Kanye perform Love Lockdown and Heartless in 2008. Thank you for making this happen. Another dream come true.”
Rudolph’s hosting gig also arrives on the heels of news that she’ll be starring in a new comedy series for Apple TV from creators Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard, who Rudolph worked with on Amazon’s Forever. The untitled show will feature Rudolph as Molly, “a woman whose seemingly perfect life is upended after her husband leaves her with nothing but 87 billion dollars.” Sounds rough.
Excessive partying despite a still-ongoing pandemic forced Miami Beach into a state of emergency last weekend, and this weekend Saturday Night Live used its cold open to address the wild spring break scene many fear will help contribute to a fourth wave of coronavirus cases.
The sketch itself was a parody of MTV Spring Break coverage. Called “Snatched! Vaxed! or Waxed!” a show “where the party don’t stop until the government-mandated curfew.” In it, three dopey men picked out of the party scene have to decide if the woman on the show has the vaccine or something else is going on in their backstory. Hosted by former SNL cast-member Maya Rudolph, as Cece Vuvezela, the sketch made light of the actually-alarming scene that’s unfolded in Florida as cheap flights and loose pandemic mitigation rules have caused wild scenes to unfold as people looking to party have flooded the region in recent weeks.
“We are so close to the end, let’s ruin it,” Vuvuzela said.
There’s a contestant who claimed they “can’t wear a mask because it irritates my cold sores,” and there are a lot of statements about the kind of people who decide to throw caution to the wind and potentially spark a fourth wave of cases for their own personal party goals. Hopefully the trip to the “Versace Murder Steps” was worth all the risk in the end.
Maya Rudolph warned during her opening monologue that she would be wearing lots of wigs and doing impressions on Saturday Night Live, and thankfully for us that meant bringing back her Beyonce impression. The former cast member had hosting duties in its latest episode, and thankfully for us that meant a throwback-feeling segment about a very modern concept: Beyonce appearing on the web show Hot Ones to eat some very spicy chicken wings.
The sketch is a throwback to the era in which Rudolph thrived. It’s an absurd concept to begin with: the most famous musician in the world showing up on a show where you eat spicy wings and promote something while answering softball questions. But it’s a sketch that actually critiques not just the thing it’s parodying — an incredibly popular YouTube show — but Beyonce’s notorious attempts to control her image in the media.
Seeing Beyonce struggle with absurdly-named hot wing sauces and curse out the host, played by Mikey Day, is a departure from anything we’ve seen from the actual singer in years. At one point, Rudolph’s Beyonce is so overcome by the heat of the wings that she asked her stylist to take her wig off, put ice cubes in it and put it back on. Her “publicist” then stepped in to refuse to let that happen on camera.
The joke here is, after years of carefully cultivating her image in the public eye, Beyonce would never do anything like this. Or at least we’d never find out about it. Later, realizing just how many more wings she still needs to endure, she has her manager step in to call the whole thing off, with non-disclosure agreements all around to make sure no evidence of it ever happening.
It was great to see Rudolph play a character that’s not Kamala Harris and be free of the political news cycle that brought her back to the SNL stage at various points over the last year. And it was a strong start to an episode that reminded many viewers of the kind of sketch that was more common when Rudolph was a more permanent member of the show’s cast.
It’s been 14 years since Maya Rudolph left SNL, but it’s not like she’s been gone. She’s been a frequent returnee, especially once they tapped her to play Vice President Kamala Harris. It almost feels like she’s always been there in some fashion, which was the idea of one pre-taped sketch on what was only her second-ever hosting gig.
It was called “The Maya-ing,” a spoof of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s The Shining, and it found the performer wandering the storied halls of Saturday Night Live, staring at old photos, from Derek Jeter to, well, Kevin Spacey. Memories were some replaced by ghosts, with Rudolph discovering a lavish bar suddenly occupying the main stage, tended by Alex Moffat doing a spin on Joe Turkel’s helpful bartender from the Kubrick.
Rudolph wasn’t alone. She was soon joined by other former colleagues. Tina Fey played “Gloria Zelwig,” billed as the first female on the writing staff (though a Google search only turns up other articles about this sketch). Kristen Wiig made a cameo as the two Shining twins, while Rachel Dratch popped up as the old, decaying woman in the bath tub, although she wasn’t dead — the water was just out in her apartment, so she swung by her old gig.
“The Maya-ing” wasn’t the first time that night that Rudolph addressed her lengthy stint at SNL. The opening monologue found her rallying together Season 46’s new cast, namely Punkie Johnson, Lauren Holt, and Andrew Dismukes. She tried to impart some wisdom but only wound up reciting the plot to The Breakfast Club, while Johnson struggled to contain her laughter. You can watch “The Maya-ing” above and Rudolph’s monologue below.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bridesmaids, the Paul Feig-directed comedy set to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year.
After all, it’s not every box office hit, even a Judd Apatow-produced one, that has a term coined after it to measure its influence on an entire genre of movie-making. “The Bridesmaids Effect,” as it was first called in aHollywood Reporter op-ed that ran shortly after the film’s surprisingly lucrative theatrical run, was intended to be an umbrella label that encompassed the scores of female-led comedies soaked in raunch and vomit and a very particular brand of feminism that would soon follow Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s brain-child.
The producer who penned it posited that entire genres might now be reimagined. “Chicks on horses. Women in space. Time-shifting gals.” All were now possible, and all were because Wiig — along with an insanely talented lineup of budding female comedians like Melissa McCarthy and Ellie Kemper, Wendi McLendon-Covey and SNL alum Maya Rudolph, hell, even Rose Byrne re-type-casting herself with a delightfully grounded turn — dared to imagine a group of women who retched, f*cked, and had explosive bouts of diarrhea in the middle of a traffic-laden street with the best of them. Them of course being the men — the John Belushis and Jeff Daniels, the Seth Rogens, Will Ferrells, and Seann William Scotts that defecated and ejaculated and projectile vomited on-screen to repulse and amuse audiences, a heady blend of nauseating buffoonery that people gladly tested their comfort-levels for.
That prediction — that Bridesmaids would revolutionize the world of comedy, making it possible for more women to step in front of and behind the camera — didn’t come to pass as quickly as most of us hoped. We had to slog through years of fairly formulaic remakes from studios who thought the success of Feig’s bridal escapades was because he’d taken the tenants of bro-comedy — the gross-out humor and heinous antics — and substituted the men who performed them for women.
In reality, what Bridesmaids did was much more difficult — it crafted a genuinely moving, achingly authentic story about the continual growing pains of female friendship. The hoagie-inspired sexual innuendos and Xanax-fueled in-flight meltdowns were just icing on top of the giant, stupid f*cking cookie.
The Apatow Effect
Universal Pictures
Judd Apatow is a prolific producer, a man responsible for most of the raucous, free-wheeling, drug-laden ridiculousness that lines the DVD shelves — or, more accurately, the virtual queues — of current and reformed frat-bro boyfriends around the world. Apatow’s male-centric comedic adventures guarantee a good time, normally at the expense of their schlubby, nerdy, every-man hero’s dignity. They often revolve around bearded, middle-aged Peter Pans who are confronted with the harsh realities of adulthood and attempt to conform (while suffering through a series of comedic mishaps), before trudging their own path that walks the fine line between acknowledging one’s own impending mortality and sampling from the hard-partying, pot-smoking fountain of youth when nostalgia demands.
His are the Knocked Ups, the Superbads, the Forgetting Sarah Marshalls, and 40-Year-Old Virgins. Judd Apatow makes movies that are hilarious and often endearing, but they are firmly rooted in the male gaze. Bridesmaids was something different — a chance to champion the bawdy, foul-mouthed humor that lurked inside so many of the female comedians his films had relegated to side-kick status, but its genesis was similar to other Apatow projects. Kristen Wiig had a bit part in another Apatow title and, as he did with Steve Carell during shooting for Anchorman, the producer hit her up for ideas.
“This was before people [knew] who Kristen was from SNL,” Apatow told The Daily Beast. “She would just get giant laughs right off the bat. So I just said to her, ‘Let me know if you have any ideas for a screenplay for yourself.’ That’s what happened on Anchorman when I worked with Steve Carell. He had the idea for The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
As it happened, Wiig and her writing partner Annie Mumolo did have an idea — a story about a woman hitting rock bottom as her best friend readied to begin the next phase of her life. It would take years of honing a script and bringing on the right director — a fairly green Paul Feig — before that journey took shape on the screen.
“I’d been wanting to make female-led comedies forever, but every time I would pitch something like that, I would be told, ‘Oh, they don’t make money,’” Feig told Uproxx. “I was green enough in the industry to go like, ‘Oh, they know something I don’t know. I’m so embarrassed that I pitched something like that.’ Then after a while, you start to go like, ‘Well, wait a minute. This is crazy. Why can’t women star in a comedy?’”
It’s a fairly quaint question to entertain now, but back then, it was probably revolutionary.
After all, Christopher Hitchens had just penned an op-ed for Vanity Fair titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in which he equated an entire gender’s lack of humor with the physiological and psychological demands of childbirth. Women aren’t funny, he wrote, because they’re consumed with more serious issues of propagating the human race — the sole reason for their existence — and because they know men suffer from a profound stupidity and inferiority complex that might be triggered by a woman with more wit. (His words, paraphrased, not mine.)
“It really looked like it was going to bomb in the lead up to coming out because the tracking wasn’t any good,” Feig says of the box-office pessimism the film faced early on. “But then it obviously took off. I was just thrilled as it proved that there is an audience for this kind of thing if you do it right.”
The New Kind Of Bathroom Humor
Universal Pictures
Doing it right, at least for Wiig, Mumolo, Feig, and the rest of the cast, meant finding organic ways of inserting gross-out humor into a story that dealt with everything from the ever-changing nature of female friendships to the financially draining wedding industrial complex. Wiig’s Annie, was a middle-aged woman who lost her business and her boyfriend, was rooming with a pair of weirdly-intimate twins (hello Rebel Wilson) and spending most of her time entertaining the sexual whims of a douchebag f*ck buddy — played with surprising comedic precision by none other than Jon Hamm. Her life, by definition, was messy. Juxtaposed with that was Rudolph’s character Lillian, Annie’s childhood best friend who’d found a fiance and a new, wealthier circle of acquaintances to hang out with. Lillian’s impending wedding — and all of the bridesmaid duties that came with it — only widened the divide forming between the two women.
The build-up to Lillian’s nuptials — and the competitive jockeying for Maid of Honor position between Annie and Rose Byrne’s Helen — set the stage for punchlines that took stereotypical humor and gender-swapped it. The bachelor party — a pinnacle of plenty of male comedic adventures — was given a twist. Instead of watching the women go wild on a Vegas vacay, with night-of mishaps forcing them to confront each other or work together, Bridesmaids accelerated the conflict timeline. The ladies never made it to Sin City, but Annie’s drug-fueled panic spiral mid-air served a similar purpose — alienating her from the rest of the group while driving home a larger theme of wealth, classism, and what happens when friends begin to operate in different circles.
The bridal shower — a puppy-peppered climax that tasks Wiig with doing some brilliant physical comedy as Annie finally voices her frustrations with Helen’s strange obsession with her friend — placed the unquestioned rituals involved in initiating single women into blissful matrimony under a spotlight and asked us to look at them more closely. Bleached a**holes? Chocolate fountains? A trip to Paris gifted from one woman to another? Were these really the things women wanted?
The engagement party, a set-up that introduces the film’s main players to one another, reworked the idea that women in competition must always resort to cattiness. Instead of trading jabs in their first meeting, Annie and Helen choose the infinitely funnier route of publicly embarrassing each other, and themselves, while we laugh along.
In each case, the key to subverting expected tropes and “feminizing” traditionally masculine comedic elements for Feig and company was, oddly enough, restraint.
“We shot for hours and hours all these passive-aggressive jokes from Helen going like, ‘Oh, did you come from work?’ making fun of her clothes,” Feig told us of that initial meeting scene. “They were really funny and I remember they all got giant laughs, but we all realized it was going to hurt the speech off because then you already know that they’re enemies.”
“Even the studio wanted us to keep all those jokes and we were like, ‘No, let’s just make that scene completely innocuous and pull all the jokes out of it.’ The joke is that Helen turns around in this gorgeous gown, she looks beautiful, she comes over, she’s really nice, and everybody in the audience hates her guts immediately. But then it makes that speech contest so much funnier because you don’t know at first, is she competing with Annie? Is she not? Then it just gets ridiculous. That’s the kind of restraint you have to have. You have to throw out some really good jokes, which a lot of people don’t want to do. But good jokes can wear out an audience if they’re not timed right.”
Restraint even came into play during the film’s scatological piece-de-resistance: the food poisoning scene.
After dining at a fairly suspicious Brazilian restaurant championed by the maid of honor, Annie, the group heads to a swanky bridal boutique where Helen is able to score them a last-minute booking. Annie’s empty bank account comes into conflict with Helen’s preference for impossible-to-pronounce couture, but before the women can brawl over price tags, Meghan (McCarthy), Rita (McLendon-Covey), and Becca (Kemper) race to the store’s only bathroom where they defile sinks, toilets, and designer dresses with their out-of-control bodily fluids.
That scene was not in the original script and it’s one even Wiig was concerned about during the filming process.
“Kristen had moments in the lead-up where she was a little worried about it because basically two dudes are directing and producing this movie,” Feig admitted. “Originally, it was just Annie trying to talk Helen into these cheap, shitty dresses. Then Kristen puts on the fancy dress in the dressing room and has this harlequin-romance-novel fantasy in her head about what her life would be like if she could afford this dress. It’s her running through the woods, and Matt Damon’s chopping wood, and then he’s like, ‘Run into my muscles,’ and all this. It was very funny. It just didn’t advance the plot in a way.”
Instead, Feig worked with Wiig and Mumolo to build a scene where Annie’s carefully crafted facade quickly falls apart.
“There’s a reason for it other than, ‘Let’s be outrageous,’” he explained. “In the funniest, most relatable way possible, we wanted to tell the story of somebody with no money who is trying to compete with somebody with a lot of money. To look good to their friend, they take them to a shitty restaurant and say it’s a great restaurant and then cannot look bad, cannot look like they made a mistake in front of the rich friend. That’s the setup and it’s a very relatable thing, but then the comedy of it’s going to come from the fact that once you realize you screwed up, you could not admit that you screwed up. You have to hold the line.”
So yes, there’s McCarthy simulating a detonating case of diarrhea in a sink and Kemper spewing vomit onto McClendon-Covey’s head, but Feig puts the horror of the situation into focus, crafting tension by constantly cutting to Wiig’s sweaty, Almond-Joy snacking stand-off with Byrne and having the only sound effects be the women shouting, apologizing, and pleading with each other to look away.
“In the face of overwhelming evidence, how is she going to still pretend this didn’t happen?” Feig questioned. “The fun is the overwhelming evidence, which is, ‘Oh my God, we’re all white-faced, we’re going to be sick, we’re either going to throw up or sh*t our pants.’ It wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t for cutting back to Kristen going like, ‘I’m fine. I feel fine. That restaurant was great.’ It’s always funny to me that the takeaway for a lot of people is just like, ‘Oh, let’s just do a gross-out scene.’ It’s like, ‘No, it’s got to have a reason for existing because then you feel empathy for everybody in it and you’re laughing because you feel so bad for everybody.’”
That scene’s most memorable shot might just be Rudolph’s dramatic finale, one that sees her running into traffic, desperately searching for a toilet before slowly sinking to the pavement, a resigned expression on her face, while quietly muttering “It’s happening” over and over again. It’s another example of how good writing and a woman’s perspective challenged the expected punchline, rewriting the film’s comedy DNA.
“We had two different ways we wanted to do it,” Feig says. “One was that her diarrhea was so explosive that it literally blew her off her feet and she slid across the street. When we were talking about it in the writer’s room, Annie Mumolo was like, ‘Or she would just slowly sink down in the street going, ‘It’s happening, it’s happening, it’s happening.’’ Clearly, we know which one was funniest.”
“Chick Flicks Don’t Have To Suck” – an actual slogan pulled from the film’s poster
Universal Pictures
But Bridesmaids did more than just prove that women could be as funny and disgusting and f*cked up as their male counterparts — it made money, which meant it opened the door for other films of its ilk. There were underappreciated successors like Bachelorette and For A Good Time Call … There were ensemble-focused hang-outs like Bad Moms — a movie that took the exploits of Feig’s film and placed them in a domestic setting. There was Girl’s Trip, a movie that made history with the amount of money it scored at the box office while telling the story of a group of Black women trying to reconnect despite the pull of real-world obligations, and the less-impressive Rough Night, another bachelorette-party gone wrong that was bold enough to flirt with murder, heavy-drug use, and the most disturbing way to hide a body even if it rarely hit the mark. Just the fact that these two female-centered comedies about women behaving badly hit theaters in the same year feels like a testament to Bridesmaid’s cinematic influence.
There’s also the less tangible effect the film probably had, the way it changed perceptions of women in comedy and inspired creators to champion their own ideas. Amy Schumer creditedBridesmaids when discussing her own unapologetically filthy rom-com Trainwreck. The writers of Pitch Perfectadmitted that their film wouldn’t have been greenlit without Wiig and Mumolo’s success. More than changing stubbornly archaic attitudes about women’s ability to tell a joke, Bridesmaids challenged an entire industry to weigh the desires of audiences it too often ignored, and it gave others a blueprint for bold experimentation within the world of comedy. It wasn’t the most radical, intersectionality-feminist piece of filmmaking possible, but it was revolutionary all the same.
So yes, I’ve been thinking about Bridesmaids a lot recently because I’ve been watching films and TV shows that clearly benefited from the trailblazing that Wiig and company unknowingly did in that movie. I see interesting, shameless meditations on the joys and tribulations of female friendship in films like Booksmart and Ibiza. I see the authenticity of women pursuing non-traditional paths in Someone Great and How To Be Single. With Shrill and PEN15, I see stories of messy, complicated women navigating growing pains that we often ignore.
I see Bridesmaids in a lot of things on TV and in film right now. Hopefully, I’ll see it more.
Natasha Lyonne was stoked to host Saturday Night Live. In her opening monologue to the final show for multiplecast members, the star and co-creator of Russian Doll gushed about her “cosmic connection” to the show. She’s friends with alumni, including her ex-boyfriend Fred Armisen and her Russian Doll co-creator Amy Poehler. And she digs its vibe. “SNL combines everything I like: New York City, show business, people who have done the same thing since the ‘70s, and different unions fighting.”
Lyonne, who will eventually be seen in the Columbo-esque murder mystery show she’s making with Rian Johnson, also gently ribbed the idea of shilling for Russian Doll at this particular moment in time. “Two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix,” she joked.
Lyonne has one of the more unique voices in showbiz, her nicotine-stained voice and Sam Kinison-esque mannerisms a throwback to a bygone era. She’s so distinct that she brought out to two SNL vets to do impersonations of her: Armisen and Maya Rudolph. When they were done, Lyonne joked about Armisen, “We were the only couple who had a sex tape nobody wanted to buy.”
She also ran through her life story, talking about how her parents decided she should be a showbiz kid, describing her style then as “a little Orphan Annie type who talks like Dee Dee Ramone.” She showed a clip from her at a very young age, appearing on Pee-wee’s Playhouse and listed her ‘90s credentials: “American Pie, American Pie 2, American Pie in the Multiverse of Madness.” (She also gave a shout-out to the LGBTQIA+ classic But I’m a Cheerleader.)
Lyonne also touched on her down period, when she struggled with “multiple arrests and addiction,” which she compared to the time Fabio was hit in the face by a goose on a rollercoaster. But, she said, she “brushed herself off and got back on the ride. And now I’m here.”
You can watch Lyonne’s opening monologue in the video above.
When she’s not voicing a hormone monster in Big Mouth or occasionally returning to late-night TV with her Beyonce impression, Maya Rudolph playing a billionaire who is going through a tough time. While it’s hard to sympathize with billionaires, we can for Loot, the upcoming series from AppleTV+.
Rudolph stars as Molly, a disillusioned billionaire who has everything she wants, until she learns that her husband, played by notoriously good guy Adam Scott, is having an affair with a younger woman. Molly spirals and then decides to take matters into her own hands, and begin spending her days working at her foundation to turn her life around, and prove to her ex-husband that she is capable of being rich AND a good person! Maybe life isn’t about the millions of dollars you earn….but the friends you made along the way? But having money is a really important bonus.
From the looks of the trailer, the show will feature some cute fashion montages and also some relatable moments of Rudolph crying while eating candy. The range!
Loot also stars Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Ron Funches, Nat Faxon, and Joel Kim Booster. The series was written and executive produced by Emmy award-winning creators Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard. Rudolph also produces, alongside her friend Natasha Lyonne and Danielle Renfrew Behrens. The series will consist of 10 episodes, with the first three streaming on June 24th. Check out the trailer above.
Among the fascinating insights of The Hollywood Reporter‘s cover profile of Maya Rudolph was the delightful nugget that high school classmate Jack Black took the comedy legend to her first Groundlings show, fanning the flames of her interest in improv that would later lead her to join the troupe in Los Angeles.
“I was really enjoying being king of the hill of the theater department,” Black said. “And then here comes Maya, and she was just so funny and gifted and relaxed, and it really made me question whether I should even continue, like, that’s how strong she was. It’s like I was Salieri and she was Mozart, and I was so jealous that it kind of paralyzed me.”
Oddly enough, Rudolph also claims that introducing herself to people she doesn’t know is one of her biggest fears. Maybe things were slightly different when she was 14, or maybe she’s always been incredibly good at hiding that fear. If you’re jotting down things for your Maya Rudolph Bar Trivia (which should be a thing if it isn’t already), add that, when asked by Lorne Michaels why she should join SNL, Rudolph answered, “Because I love wearing wigs.” Apparently, that answer embarrasses her despite being objectively perfect.
Rudolph’s latest project is Loot, where she stars as a billionaire whose life has imploded alongside Joel Kim Booster.
NBC's new variety show Maya & Marty may still be working through some rough segments but this week's episode has shown signs of improvement. Yes, it's still a rotating door of various Saturday Night Live cast members and alumni (as well as other notable celebrities, as variety shows tend to be) that overshadow the actual program but at least it's finding a way to use these familiar faces in a better way. Take last night's episode, where the easy highlight was Maya Rudolph and Tina Fey singing a medley of popular songs.
Fey and Rudolph waxed poetic about their past loves for variety programs before trying to emulate them, right down to the old-fashioned microphones and uncomfortable high stools that the women struggled to climb on. From there, they took turns singing a medley of songs popularized by variety shows of yore – “I'll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Love Will Keep Us Together” (in the style of Charo), and a particularly creative and inspiring rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
On the season finale of NBC’s Maya and Marty, co-host Maya Rudolph sat next to guest star and Oscar nominee Emma Stone as she confessed to the audience that she’s been inspired for years by a quirky YouTube cover of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.” In 2011, Swedish group Erato released a stripped-down, black-and-white video recording of the hit pop song, which shows them seated around a kitchen table with no instruments other than tubs of butter for delightfully synchronized percussion. It became a YouTube hit, garnering nearly 4 million views.
The track really struck a chord with the former Saturday Night Live comedian Rudolph, who, in turn, performed her own rendition alongside Stone after (endearingly) admitting that she’d been “practicing ever since” she first came across the video years ago. She added, “I’m finally ready to give it a shot.”
Stone piped up with a bit of nervousness and her signature wry grin as they gave a charming performance that only a monster could hate. Their cover-of-a-cover shows off their collective a capella musical talent and gives the Swedes a pretty good run for their money. The musical segment was the closer for Maya and Marty‘s first season, which has yet to be renewed for season two.
Compare Stone and Rudolph’s cover to Erato’s version below:
Correction: A previous version of this post noted Emma Stone as an Oscar Winner, but she has only been nominated for an Academy Award
The easy highlight of last night's season finale of Maya and Marty was Emma Stone. Along with Maya Rudolph, Stone performed an a capella cover of Robyn's hit song “Call Your Girlfriend” – using just handclaps and empty butter tubs.
Inspired by the Swedish band Erato, Rudolph and Stone nailed the cover, making it the best of all the sketches Stone appeared in all night.
Last night marked the end of the brief six-episode first season, though NBC has not commented on whether or not the variety series will be back for another round.
There are two types of Saturday Night Live viewers. Ones that love crack-em-up moments where SNL cast members can’t stop giggling, and those that despise such tomfoolery and have burned Jimmy Fallon effigies in a blind rage. The latter seems like a bit of an overreaction (who could have maintained such a robust effigy budget in the ’00s?), so let’s all have fun looking at some hilarious breaking character moments from NBC’s unkillable comedy franchise.
The YouTube user KateMcKinnonTV has crafted a fun, flub-friendly four-and-a-half minute highlight reel of memorable breaking character moments from the show’s history. The sketch chunklets that made the cut feature a number of reliably giggly recurring offerings like Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer, Bill Hader as questionable tastemaker Stefon and the divisive (read: makes some of us want to peel the skin off our face) soap opera spoof The Californians. Jimmy Fallon tends to be a load-bearing beam in these sorts of supercuts and this particular combo clip is no exception. It’s a bit ’00s/’10s heavy, but that’s a secret blessing because there are a few recentish cuts that should be new to lapsed fans.
We have this conga line of SNL stars breaking character located at the top of the post. See if you can keep a straight face while watching along.
The long-running live musical trend on television won’t be dying anytime soon, as proven by ABC’s and Fox’s recent announcements regarding their respective The Little Mermaid andRent live broadcasts. Considering the recent success of Grease: Live, Hairspray and other adaptations, however, broadcast networks hoping to cope with streaming’s increasingly bigger wins can’t be blamed too much. Especially when they nab some pretty amazing talent, as Fox’s holiday-set A Christmas Story live musical did by casting Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph as Ralphie Parker’s mom.
First played by Melinda Dillon in the 1983 classic film, the role of “Mrs. Parker” is one of the more significant ones occupied by the many adults who surround Ralphie throughout his misadventures. The official press release offers very little information about Rudolph’s casting, other than the fact that the Ralphie character will be 9 years old. However, as more casting announcements are released, hopefully A Christmas Story‘s creative team will deem it necessary to give Rudoplh’s character a full name.
Executive produced by Marc Platt (Grease: Live, La La Land), and with a musical score and brand new songs written by the award-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, La La Land), A Christmas Story: The Musical will air Sunday, December 17th from 7 to 10pm ET. Per the usual practice established by previous television musicals, the east coast’s broadcast will be live, while the west coast’s version will be tape-delayed.
Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph might only be presenters at the 2018 Oscars but Jimmy Kimmel should be on high alert, because the two look like they’re out to snatch his hosting job next year.
In something out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s most beautiful dreams, Rudolph and Haddish teamed up to present the award for Best Documentary Short at the Academy Awards. The two riffed. They joked. They assured nervous Caucasians in the audience that there were still plenty of white people running the show backstage. They even singled out Meryl Streep (the second time Haddish as targeted the Oscar-winner) to pitch her a role as Haddish’s on-screen mother in Girls Trip 2. All of this it turns out is just a secret campaign the two are launching (with Anderson’s help) to host next year’s Oscars.
Okay, not really, but we can dream.
Haddish, who came out on stage carrying some expensive-looking heels and comfortable-looking house slippers, also made sure to give her go-to dress a moment in the spotlight. Haddish wore the same form-fitting white gown that she’s donned on previous red carpets and that she wore while hosting Saturday Night Live last year. In fact, the comedian used her SNL monologue to come correct about how expensive high-end fashion can be and to make the rest of us feel a little bit better about recycling outfits.
So just in case you were on the fence about your feelings for Haddish at this year’s Oscars, here are a few bullet points to sway you to the stan club:
Jumps Meryl Streep on the red carpet
Wears something out of a Wakandan catalog to honor her heritage
Wears Ugg house slippers on stage
Cracks jokes about white people to white people to make white people feel comfortable
There really can never be enough Maya Rudolph in our lives. Even when she’s co-headlining a seemingly doomed attempt to bring back the weekly variety show (see: Maya and Marty), her talent and exuberance make it clear that she’s someone always worth paying attention to.
Which is why the news that Rudolph will join her old SNL pal Andy Samberg in Season 4 of the latter’s Fox sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine is such a welcome development. Per TV Line, Rudolph will join the series in its season premiere on Sept. 20 for a multi-episode arc. Rudolph will play a United States Marshal serving as the official liaison to Samberg’s Peralta and Andrew Braugher’s Capt. Holt while they are in the Witness Protection Program. The thought of that trio together feels very promising.
Rudolph has been busy this year, doing a memorable arc on the late, lamented The Grinder, appearing in Sisters with fellow SNL buddies Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and popping up in Samberg’s massively underrated and under appreciated Popstar in addition to NBC’s Maya and Marty. That show, which wrapped a guest star-studded, six episode run earlier this month, remains up in the air regarding whether or not it will return for a second season, so if you loved it and love Rudolph, allow Brooklyn Nine-Nine into your life (if its not there already) in the meanwhile.
“I would love to do something like that. I know my father would be extremely proud if I got to do that… As long as I get a pay check.”
Now why would she bring up a paycheck? It’s doubtful that the host of the show is walking away empty-handed, but she has a good reason that stems from her time on stage with Rudolph:
“In my mind, Maya and I, we were auditioning for the ultimate job – because I thought were getting paid for that presentation,” Haddish joked about her appearance this year. “When I found out that we weren’t getting paid, I was like, ‘Well, I heard about gift bags.’ And then it was like ‘We don’t have no gift bags,’ and I was like, ‘Well what do I get?’ They were like, ‘We’ve got a bottle of wine that’s like thirteen dollars.’ So I got the wine.”
Hard to believe that Oscars is giving away Mums from Meet The Parents. Even so, hopefully they can find the cash to get Haddish a shot at hosting. She’s at least someone far away from past hosts and she could always just host with Billy Crystal to make the traditional folks happy.
This is a review of Netfix’s new animated comedy Big Mouth. The short version is that the show is a fun take on puberty and all — ALL — that entails. The long version involves monsters and singing ghosts of jazz legends and cartoon penises playing sports. It’s a whole thing. Let’s dive in.
1. Big Mouth was created by the team of Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett, and is based — very, very loosely, one presumes, unless ghosts are real and can take the form of a horny and debaucherous Duke Ellington, which I’ll explain, I promise — on real-life childhood friends Kroll and Goldberg’s teenage experiences. It’s a little like The Wonder Years if Kevin Arnold was relentlessly horny all the time and the narrator was actually a literal monster named Maury who constantly pressured Kevin into pleasuring himself. Again, I’ll explain. I promise.
2. The plot, on a macro level, is super simple. A group of kids— like, in the 12-14 range — deal with puberty, and what happens when some members of a group of friends get there before others. It’s the execution where things get fun. And weird. I’m not even exactly sure how to explain it all. Let’s give this a try. Nick (Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney) are best friends. Andrew has started puberty, which manifests itself in the form of the aforementioned Hormone Monster (a gravelly-voiced Kroll), who visits/torments Andrew throughout the series, often at the worst possible moments, and gives voice to his most salacious and deviant desires. Nick has not started puberty and is confused about why his best friend is acting so strange. You can see how this gets awkward. Which it does. Quickly.
3. The really cool thing about the show, though, is that it’s not just a story about gross boys with testosterone coursing through their veins. The girls on the show get their stories, too. And their own Hormone Monster, voiced in sultry and sashaying form by Maya Rudolph. (Maya Rudolph appears to be having an absolute blast the entire time and I came away from this honestly happy for her.) There’s an episode about one of the characters getting her first period on a school field trip. There’s an episode about buying a bra and the male gaze. There are stories about girls battling for status and how the pace of development can throw all of that into chaos. It would have been very easy for this to become a show about two little horny dirtballs with awkward erections but, instead, it becomes a more honest and universal show about a stage of life that is weird and uncomfortable for everyone.
4. It is foul. It is so, so foul. Aggressively foul. It is not a show for everyone. It pulls absolutely zero punches in expressing the hormone-ravaged thoughts of teenagers and it goes to very dark and occasionally uncomfortable places in the process. Things get pretty messed up. It’s all pretty organic because puberty turns people into borderline sociopaths, but, like… it can make South Park look like Boy Meets World at times. Yeah. That foul. Maybe more. And with teenagers. And monsters. You will want to watch Big Mouth with your headphones in. That’s what I’m getting at.
5. It is also surprisingly sweet. Underneath all the shock — I did not expect to feel such sympathy for Garrison Keillor, and yet, here we are — there’s a really nice story about kids trying to figure things out. And it’s not just hormones, either. There are a few troubled marriages, and mean (but loving, mostly) older siblings, and all the other problems kids face in that period of life where they start to feel like adults but can’t quite handle the responsibility of being one. The show is a wild fantasy involving X-rated daydreams but it’s also very real.
6. Between this show and the also excellent American Vandal, Netflix is really owning the “vulgar and silly but also weirdly accurate teen experience” genre lately. Also, between this show and American Vandal, I have seen so, so many artistic representations of dicks in the past few weeks. This time some of them are playing basketball. Don’t let anyone tell you the window on the Golden Age of Television is closing.
7. Are you kind of a comedy nerd? Cool. Everyone you like does at least one voice on the show. In addition to Kroll and Mulaney, and Rudolph as the female Hormone Monster, we have: main girl characters voiced by Jessi Klein and Jenny Slate, the latter of whom is basically doing the Niece Denise voice from Kroll Show; Jason Mantzoukas as a magic-loving teenage delinquent; Jordan Peele as the Ghost of Duke Ellington, who gives young Nick advice, which is often terrible; Fred Armisen and Richard Kind as dads; and a collection of other notable comedy types, including Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm, Paula Pell, June Diane Raphael, Kristen Bell, Chelsea Peretti, Rob Huebel, Paul Scheer, and many, many others. There are so many people in this. It’s a little like BoJack Horseman but for people who listen to comedy podcasts. This is a compliment.
8. Some of the things I’ve mentioned so far, in addition to this tweet…
… bring up an important point: It is really fun to picture the people in this show actually recording their voices. Especially Rudolph and Mulaney. Rudolph because, again, she just appears to be having so much fun, kind of like if Diana Ross and Jessica Rabbit had their DNA spliced together and pumped full of concentrated neon hormone ooze. And Mulaney because his character takes a handful of wildly dramatic and/or perverted swings throughout the season, occasionally in song form, and it’s a lot of fun to think about the words coming out of his choirboy face.
9. Had I not mentioned there are songs? Oh, buddy. Oh, there are songs. At least a half a dozen of them. One is performed by an anthropomorphic tampon. One is performed by the Ghost of Freddie Mercury, backed by the Ghosts of Duke Ellington, Socrates, and Antonin Scalia. Scalia is on the drums. I won’t say much else about it so I don’t ruin it for you. It is definitely something.
10. You will never look at Sylvester Stallone the same way after watching this.
His film Phantom Thread was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (for a now-retired Daniel Day-Lewis), but all Paul Thomas Anderson wants to do is talk about Tiffany Haddish. The Girls Trip star, who had a breakout 2017 and presumably a deluge of offers in 2018, has been in contact with PTA after he recently asked to “cut to the front of the line” to work with her. “I’ve been talking to him on the telephone,” Haddish told Vulture. “I’ve talked to him a few times and we’re probably gonna work together.”
Maybe, if our dreams are answered, in a movie with Maya Rudolph.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Anderson called Haddish a “thrilling performer” and (favorably) compared her to Adam Sandler, whom he worked with in Punch Drunk Love. “Don’t just be fooled by how funny she is,” he said. “She just has a fierceness. I think I feel a connection to her because she’s such an L.A. kid as well. It feels like I’ve known her for a long time, which is weird. I’ve talked to her on the telephone. I’ve never even met her. But you follow those instincts. They’re always good. Yeah … Haddish.” That is my new motto in life.
When the possibility of Haddish and Anderson’s wife Rudolph starring in a movie together was brought up, he replied, “Absolutely! That’s a combustible combination, the two of them. That’s what you dream of as a director. Because you know if you just get your… together and you’re simple and you create a platform, why do you think people look good when they work with Daniel Day-Lewis? Because it’s Daniel Day-Lewis! Writing for them, I feel like you could turn on the faucet and that’ll come out. That would be a great team.”
Kenan Thompson has been on Saturday Night Live for 20 years, making him the longest-running cast member of all time. However, in his new memoir, When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown, the actor reveals that he almost walked away from the iconic sketch show early into his now record-breaking run.
According to his memoir, a show of support from Maya Rudolph went a long way and was exactly what Thompson needed to gain his confidence and become a beloved SNL staple.
“Rookie mistakes” in his early years, as well as being “donut’-ed,” an industry term for having no airtime, led his confidence to “sink to an all-time low.”
“I was famous enough that people were trying to follow me off the subway, but I couldn’t get on the show,” Thompson writes. He also says that then-castmate Maya Rudolph assured him that he was ready, which was influential for him.
“It took a major attitude adjustment to earn my place at SNL,” Thompson wrote about how much Rudolph’s encouragement helped him tough it out and not bail on his burgeoning SNL career.
Thanks to sticking around, Thompson got a chance to meet some of his comedy idols like Eddie Murphy. As Thompson wrote, the two “kicked it.”
“And by ‘kicked it,’ I mean I was fanboying from afar and leaving him alone as much as possible,” Thompson quipped in the memoir.
Multihyphenate doesn’t feel like the right word to describe Joel Kim Booster. He is one, a writer-actor-producer with an IMDb credits list as long as a white woman’s Lululemon receipt. But he’s not content with wearing just three hats, he’s got an entire closet full. Stand-up comedian. Podcast host. Drag Race judge. Professional dinner party guest. And the visionary who once read a copy of Pride & Prejudice while vacationing on Fire Island and (probably) thought, “I’m going to give the world the gayest Austen adaptation they’ve ever seen.”
He did, with Hulu’s Fire Island, a romantic comedy starring Booster, Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Tomas Matos, and Margaret Cho that made history and broke down barriers in 2022. Since then, Booster’s been popping up – on talk shows and Netflix specials – wielding his sharply insightful brand of funny.
His latest stage? The second season of Apple TV+’s Loot, a comedy series starring Maya Rudolph as an out-of-touch billionaire divorcee intent on doing some good with her eye-bulging bank account by way of her nonprofit. Some two years – and a couple of industry strikes – later, Loot’s sophomore outing sees Rudolph’s Molly Novak dead set on giving away all of her money to help those less fortunate. Of course, she’s also living in an oceanfront “cabana” with (only) five pools, a water bed filled with chamomile tea, and an emotional support sloth on call.
Booster plays her assistant Nicholas, a well-dressed wannabe influencer who dishes out biting commentary. He’s softened a bit since season one, building genuine friendships with the do-gooders hoping to use Molly’s influence to implement meaningful change in the community, but he’s still the walking insult generator that delivered some of the show’s most meme-able one-liners two years ago.
We chatted with Booster about the evolution of his character, breaking the “gay best friend” stereotype, and Bowen Yang Voodoo dolls.
You get to make out with Maya Rudolph this season which means I’ve now seen you and Bowen Yang play straight guys. Who do you think pulls it off better?
[Laughs] I think maybe me by a hair, only because I think I have more deep-seated insecurities bubbling underneath the surface in the same way that a lot of toxic straight guys do. So I relate to that experience a little bit more than Bowen, who I think is slightly more self-possessed than I am.
How does season two differ from season one, in terms of the comedy and your character’s arc?
I obviously love season one, but comedy benefits from time. We set the foundation and now season two is just a lift-off, baby. We hit the ground running and it’s very joke forward. In terms of Nicholas, he is still the same prickly, closed-off guy that he was in season one, but slowly, the cracks are forming in the armor. We’re seeing that transformation continue to happen. I think the best part about season two for me is that we established the character in season one, and dropped little hints here and there about his background and how he maybe came to be that way. But we really make good on the promise of the premise of those jokes. We see how he became the guy that he is today and why he might be a little closed off emotionally to some of these people. It was really fun to be able to add that dimension to Nicholas and I hope we continue to do the show so we can just layer more and more on top.
I do appreciate that Nicholas keeps his mean streak a bit. This isn’t the kind of comedy like Abbott Elementary where almost everyone is so genuinely nice to each other all the time.
I’ll never have enough of Abbott Elementary, but you need a Janelle James in that workplace comedy to break up the positivity. I think I am so grateful that I get to play that role on this show because it’s just so much fun. It’s so much fun being so rotten.
In real life, are you a “break up the positivity” kind of person?
No, it’s so cringey. I’m a fairly earnest person. I’m a much more introverted person than I think a lot of people expect me to be, especially people who know me primarily as a standup or from Loot. I’m a little baby sometimes. That is my vibe certainly in real life. It’s very different from Nicholas. I think he’s a much more confident person than I am at the end of the day.
There are some parallels between your character’s background and your own that we get to explore in episode three. Why did you want to inject a bit of yourself into him?
I am really grateful to [creators] Alan [Yang] and Matt [Hubbard] because they’ve always been generous with all of us in wanting our input on how these characters develop and making them characters that we can really relate to. Specifically with episode three, they came to me early in the process of writing and asked, ‘Do you want his parents to be Asian or would you like him to be a transracial adoptee like you?’ I immediately jumped at the chance to be able to portray that kind of family in a really incidental way. The adoption part of it is not centered in that story, and that was really important to me. You just get to see this family existing and they’re just presented to you on screen and audiences are smart, they’ll figure out how that happened. I would love to see that more in media for sure. It’s like, why be so beholden to the race of a family when people like me exist out there and families like mine exist and look like that?
It also separates him from that stereotypical “gay assistant/best friend” stand-in. Were you worried about being boxed into that trope at all?
Listen, the fact is, I get called in to audition for gay assistants constantly. It is a constant rotation. That is the only role that Hollywood is really interested in seeing me play, ultimately. So I was definitely apprehensive at the beginning, but after talking to Matt and Alan at the start, they indicated that they were going to allow me some input to make sure that that character didn’t just become a one-dimensional gay assistant, best friend role. I think that has continued in season two as we’re seeing a lot more of me and Maya’s relationship.
I think that really grows and you see the many different layers to that relationship that makes it slightly different. Then honestly for me as both a gay guy and an Asian man, I think it’s really nice for me to be able to play a character that walks into the room and owns it and is like the alpha in a lot of situations. Being able to play someone who is never the butt of the joke in scenarios or never allows himself to be and gets there first. I think that’s really, for me, what sets him apart in a lot of ways and is the most fun that I have ever had playing that kind of role.
You share significantly more screen time with Maya Rudolph this season. What’s something that surprised you about working with her?
Getting to play with Maya more really is a masterclass in taking big swings and taking risks as a comedian. When I improvise on this show, so much of it is using my writer’s brain. I’m very analytical in the way that I approach comedy as both a standup and as a comedy writer and watching Maya — getting to be in the room with Maya a lot, she comes from the gut and instinct. That’s so inspiring to me. But of course, that isn’t something that I didn’t expect from Maya. Honestly, I always go back to this thing about Maya, which is she’s such a good mom. It is not like a five-nanny situation in that house.
She is driving her kids to dance practice. She’s going to the competitions at the Hilton by the airport. She is on sick duty. Quite honestly, I’ve worked for a lot of bosses who do not care if their families live or die, and it is so refreshing to work in an environment where the number one on the call sheet is like, ‘No, actually, we need to wrap on time because I love my family.’ That just really permeates through the rest of the set, and it is one of the nicest environments I’ve ever had the pleasure of working in for sure because of that.
The season opens with the show mocking the Vogue 73 Questions video series. You recently bought a house. What would a 73 Questions with Joel Kim Booster look like?
I would pull a lot of inspiration from the Donatella [Versace] 73 questions. I think that’s probably top of my list in terms of the most iconic 73 questions. But I would have a lot of fun winking at the theater of spontaneity that they try to create when in fact, it is so scripted and so stilted all the time. I would have little Easter eggs like that, sight gags spread throughout the house just in the background. Little voodoo dolls of Bowen may be sitting on the bookshelf.
How do you decide when to switch hats – from acting to directing to writing? Or is the goal to be able to do all three when you can?
I want to be the captain of the ship and I want to wear many hats. I obviously look up to people like Issa Rae and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, people who did that and created those shows — ran them and starred in them. That’s always been the goal. But barring that, I think for me, I’ll always think of myself as a writer first. There are some projects on the back burner for me right now that I’m writing for other people, and that’s really exciting. But ideally, I’d like to wear all three hats at the same time and continue to do that.
That’s the plan. A lot of things could change between now and then. If they came to me tomorrow and said, ‘Coleman Domingo wants to star in it instead,’ I would say, ‘That seems fine by me. I’d rather the movie get made with him, than not get made at all.’ So yeah, we’ll see. I’m hopeful though.
Maya Rudolph made a grand return to Saturday Night Live tonight. Having had a long run from from 2001 to 2007, Rudolph has long been a fan favorite SNL alum. Though it’s been nearly two decades since she left the cast, she continues to make scene-stealing guest appearances. Tonight (May 11) marks her third time hosting SNL.
During her opening monologue, Rudolph acknowledged Mother’s Day, and noted that she’s a four-time mother. But not only is she a mother, she is also mother — per Bowen Yang. Afterward, she received a formal introduction by a drag persona played by Kenan Thompson. When the camera panned back to Rudolph, she was surrounded by a group of fabulous dancers, as she began to command the room in pure ballroom fashion.
During her song, Rudolph sent a shoutout to all the moms out there.
“Today we celebrate all kinds of mothers,” said Rudolph. “Stepmothers, godmothers, mothers from another brother. Dance moms, octomoms.”
Chloe Fineman chimed in, asking “What about dog moms?”
To which Rudolph replied “Honey, that’s not a dog, that’s a b*tch.”
Elsewhere in the clip, she lists off famous mom characters, while grooving to a dancefloor track, guaranteed to slay the house down boots.
Rudolph currently plays multibillionaire Molly Wells on the Apple TV+ series Loot. She also has a voice role in John Krasinki’s upcoming animated feature film, IF.
But tonight, we are excited to see her back on our screens on the SNL stage.
You can see a clip of the opening monologue above.
Beyoncé can do it all — singing, dancing, acting, and recently, launching a haircare brand. And even though she carries hot sauce in her bag — as she noted on her 2016 hit single “Formation” — it’s possible that even she can’t handle the spice level of the wings on Hot Ones. In a Saturday Night Live sketch tonight (May 10), Mikey Day played Hot Ones host Sean Evans in a parody of the iconic YouTube show. Joining Day was tonight’s (May 11) host, Rudolph, as the one-and-only Beyoncé.
Hot off the release of her latest album, Cowboy Carter, Rudolph’s Beyoncé reminds us that she’s a southern country queen. But the flavor and heat of the wings proves to be too much — even for the Queen Bey.
Rudolph’s Beyoncé takes to the first few wings pretty well. But by the time she tries the “Sergeant Sphincter’s Volcanpeño sauce, with a Scoville rating of 530,000,” she appears to meet her match.
“This wing is stompin’ my ass,” she said. “Damn, my bones are hot. That wing was a real one.”
But thanks to the help of Bey’s loyal assistant, De’Raphael (Kenan Thompson), the world, perhaps, might never see Beyoncé in this rather humbling scenario.
This Mother’s Day, we’ve gotta thank our moms for always being there for us — even in the most uncomfortable sitautions. In a painfully relatable sketch on tonight’s (May 11) episode of Saturday Night Live, Maya Rudolph receives a call from her daughter, who is at a slumber party of which she no longer wishes to be in attendance.
Though it is late, Rudolph comes to the party to pick her up.
“Kaylie needs to come home,” says Rudolph to the host dad, played by Mikey Day.
“How come?,” he asks.
“Her grandma’s having a funeral,” she replies.
Confused, the host dad asks “at 2 a.m.?”
“Her wish was for a night funeral,” says Rudolph.
In another scenario, Rudolph pulls the classic move, of pretending the kid is in trouble. The daughter goes along with it, telling Rudolph “Mom, you always do this. You’re embarrassing me in front of my friends.”
“I don’t care,” says Rudolph. “You’re coming home, young lady.”
“Why?,” asks the daughter.
“Because, I’m your mother, and I’m a b*tch,” Rudolph says.
Once the host mother is out of earshot, the daughter tells Rudolph “thanks Mom.”
The clips then ends with a special thankful message to the moms that have helped us out of awkward situations.
