Amy Poehler Is a Great Hang

After a rocky premiere, Saturday Night Live needed to give us some reassurance that season 51 (and the newest permutation of the cast) wouldn’t be all duds. Enter Amy Poehler, a reliable (but not overused) choice to anchor a confident episode. No disrespect to Bad Bunny, who has his charms in this format, but he isn’t a sketch performer like Poehler. It’s only fitting that she host the show on the 50th anniversary of its first-ever episode.

Poehler isn’t here to promote a new movie or show. If anything, she’s here because of Good Hang with Amy Poehler, her podcast that took off earlier this year. “That’s right, I am a podcaster now, and if that’s not a recession indicator, I don’t know what is,” she joked self-deprecatingly during a short, pleasant monologue, reminiscing about her early days of watching SNL and picking a fight with AI “actress” Tilly Norwood. Poehler brought that warm energy to the whole episode, no matter the quality of the actual jokes.

I very much approve of the choice to give Poehler new characters to play, rather than reviving old sketches for nostalgia. (We got enough of that last year.) These are basically all new roles or twists on old types, taking advantage of Poehler’s skill at embodying strong, often spunky personalities. The intentionally old-fashioned Rudemans sketch is nothing to write home about — the general premise has been done to death — but she and Sarah Sherman in particular stand out as Ashley Padilla’s passive-aggressive mother and grandmother. “I’ll get the landline we randomly still have?” she says while answering the phone.

This was a fairly star-studded episode, starting with Tina Fey’s appearances in both the cold open and Weekend Update (joined by Seth Meyers). Poehler’s bratty Pam Bondi starts the episode off on a decent note, likening Amy Klobuchar’s name to a Pokémon during a Senate Judiciary Committee session, but it’s Fey’s impressively scary-looking Kristi Noem who draws the biggest laughs, mostly through references to killing her pet dog (“Dogs don’t just get shot. Heroes shoot them”). Low-hanging fruit? Probably. But it works.

Then Aubrey Plaza reunited with her Parks & Recreation co-star for the Hunting Wives season two trailer, which amusingly plays on the show’s conservative lesbian contradictions. And Charli XCX showed up to silently dance around as the latest “Sally” in the first of Role Model’s summery, inoffensive performances. SNL can’t get by on cameos alone, but these enlivened a solid episode that bodes well for the show’s ability to turn out the same decent if unspectacular material this season.

Here are the highlights:

Sometimes realizing you’re in for a one-joke sketch actually makes it better, and that’s the case with this one. (It’s technically a parody of the medium Sylvia Browne, for those who remember — I stumbled upon a clip of hers on Instagram just the other day, and the similarities are striking.) Everything gets funnier when you realize Miss Lycus isn’t going to offer any deeper insight than “he’s dead” to her legions of desperate and grieving fans. But some of the twists are pretty funny, from the first “He drowned until he died” to “He drowned, but he’s still alive. What’s dead is your marriage.” Most of the audience doesn’t even seem to mind.

Poehler’s girlboss corporate manager insists on closing a big deal for the firm while nine months pregnant, switching rapidly between business mode and childbirth mode when her water breaks. Fun to see Ben Marshall as her doula, even if I’m not completely out of the habit of scanning the background for the other Please Don’t Destroy guys.

Colin Jost and Michael Che kept up their usual playfully antagonistic rapport this episode, with Che inserting Jost into the background of some famous Trump-Epstein footage using Sora. Sarah Sherman got some good material as concerned Long Island citizen Rhonda LaCenzo, worried about sharia law under likely incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani — or, rather, “shari-er lore,” in her accent — but the character is most amusing for her tics, like the bunched-up shoulders and constant offers for coffee. “Coffee, Che?”

Of course, the most notable segment is the Weekend Update Joke Off, where former long-tenured anchors Poehler, Fey, and Meyers joined Jost and Che to riff about the 13-pound baby born in Tennessee. Not all of the jokes are laugh-worthy, but it’s just great to watch this group hang out, especially with the various improvised buzzer noises. I wouldn’t have minded them trading off for the whole Update.

Possibly the best of the night? Poehler does typically good work as the mustachioed, hairy-armed attorney Lachlan Mulchburger, but the real beauty of this sketch is the steady escalation of the one-upmanship in the paid advertisement game, with different injury attorneys arguing they have the most combined experience. It really takes off with the clones reveal — five Billsons and five Liebermans — and reaches its apex at the conclusion with Yang’s appearance as Yggdrasil, the sacred tree, who had Zeus as a client.

Poehler gets mileage out of another one-joke premise, dressed up like your archetypal emo teenager but whining about very adult concerns like raising kids, taking care of aging parents, and a forgotten Etsy password. The brief transition to professional and back for a phone call (she’s the superintendent) is a highlight.

• “Two years ago, I was on the show, and you told me my brother was drowned but alive and thriving in Florida.”

• Good spokesman work from Andrew Dismukes in the ad for non-alcoholic beer that morphs into an ad for 96% ABV non-non-alcoholic beer.

• Jeremy Culhane also makes a good showing this week. I’m less convinced of Tommy Brennan so far.

• Gotta love the review from A.I. Scott, “the robot now doing reviews for The New York Times.”

• Apparently Jost’s family has been celebrating National German-American Day “ever since they hastily moved here in 1945.” The use of “hastily” singlehandedly made me laugh here.

• Grant and Alyssa, aka the couple you can’t believe are together, appear on Update to talk about cuffing season and Halloween. “I’ll be going as Sylvia Plath, because it’s the one day of the year that you can dress like a slut” is in contention for line of the night.

• YggDrasil: Injury Attorney, Time Is An Illusion, We Are Shadows.

• There are some funny moments in the theme songs masterclass ending sketch, particularly the first Severance rap and the later reversal with a somber instrumental version of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song. Bowen Yang’s corporal punishment-obsessed composer is more memorable than Poehler, and the sketch sputters to a close, but it gets the job done.

• Nice to see the photo of Diane Keaton pop up before goodnights. If you weren’t already aware, Ashley Padilla used to be Keaton’s assistant, so it must’ve been a tough day for her — and she did great work in this episode! Hopefully the show will continue slotting her into the roles that would’ve gone to Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim. She’s still only a featured player, but it feels like she’s on a different tier from the others.