One of the joys of Saturday Night Live is the high quality of guests who turn up each week to guest host, and right now it doesn’t come much better than Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Last weekend saw Phoebe take the lead, and Paste take a look at what Phoebe did on the show, and how well – or not – she was used.
Here’s her opening monologue (it’s SNL, so there’s some adult content).
The first Brit skit (sorry, sketch—I’m a sucker for lazy rhymes) was a repeat of a sketch from last season’s Claire Foy episode. It’s the one where Mikey Day plays a British soldier at the front line (last time it was World War I, this time World War II) writing letters back home to his wife. His letters are long and sincere, her replies are short, emotionless, and increasingly absurd. The Foy sketch worked much better than the one this time, and not just because it was new and original. The specific scenarios in that sketch were more absurd and thus funnier, and also Foy was better at playing her character—she seemed utterly sincere about her increasingly ridiculous replies, genuinely in love with Day’s character even as she described what was clearly an affair with Kenan Thompson. Waller-Bridge didn’t have the same level of material to work with, but she also didn’t seem as fully committed as Foy, and that hurt the sketch overall.
Watch the Sketch video above, which breaks down the episode.
