Move Over Sarah Palin: Mad Men's Jon Hamm Hosts SNL, And Rocks
Saturday Night Live is so back. This isn’t a show with nine lives. It’s a show with infinite lives. Just when you think it’s finally over, it returns from the dead - with a vengeance. Last night was (almost) wall-to-wall laughs.
I was live-tweeting SNL. (fyi - my Twitter handle is marymcnamara.)
Mad Men’s Jon Hamm hosted and last night he was strutting his comedic stuff. Even without the beloved Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in the house, SNL had genius moments, pushed along with some heavy hitting by the versatile Hamm.
Mostly, we know Hamm as Don Draper, the dark, conflicted ad genius on AMC’s Mad Men. There’s not a scintilla of joy in Draper. He’s complicated but still a bit of a one note character emotionally; he rarely smiles and his expressions are subtle. But last night Hamm was obviously delighted to break out and experiment with crazy material he obviously never gets to touch on the set of Mad Men.
In one of the more whacky skits - Vincent Price’s Halloween Special - Hamm shows up to Price’s party as a boorish James Mason. Yes, James Mason! Who would’ve thought. Hamm nailed Mason’s blue blood accent. He walks in the door, scans the room and says, "say, where are the whores!?" And the skit was off to the races.
On weekend update, "McCain Rally Crazy Lady" - a take on the nutty woman at a McCain rally who asserted Obama was an Arab (before McCain snatched the mic from her clutches) - was replaced with the latest campaign mind-boggle du jour: the infamously dirty, nasty McCain campaign robocalls.
"Robocall," outfitted with a silver keypad on his chest and slathered in silver body paint, suddenly turns confessional. He laments he feels dirty and ashamed and next week he has to "make phone calls to black people telling them the election is canceled."
SNL - you. are. genius.
In another skit, Jon Hamm presents "Jon Hamm’s John Ham" - the ham you can eat on the john, that rolls off the toilet paper dispenser! Now, this may not sound all that funny but it just shows how Hamm can take meh material and raise the game. He paced around the bathroom to tout his product and sat on the stool in a stall to demonstrate the ham slab on the TP dispenser.
SNL writers successfully and hilariously summed up the character of Don Draper in a skit (embedded below) titled "Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women." Hamm moves through the range of Draper mannerisms and delivery, and mocks all things Don Draper - especially the strong, silent, pensive expressions.
This is the "Barack Obama Variety Half-Hour" with Maya Rudolf as Michelle Obama, singing "Solid As Barack" (celebrating Obama’s lead in the polls) and later featuring "Nancy Pelosi" (who belts out Graham Nash’s "Our House"). "Bill Ayers" makes a cameo, on keyboards. Hamm is JFK.