Saturday Night Live Recap: Ryan Gosling Breaks Up With You

Saturday Night Live
Ryan Gosling
Season 49 Episode 17
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Ryan Gosling’s slow-building movie stardom is probably most attributable to a combination of his biggest and most memorable smashes like The Notebook, La La Land, and Barbie, plus maybe that jacket from Drive. But it’s hard not to believe that Gosling has earned a decent amount of goodwill by occasionally hosting Saturday Night Live and showcasing a complete inability to keep his composure while doing so.

There’s also something vaguely nostalgic about Gosling cracking up on Saturday Night Live, as he did this week during every single live sketch. It’s no longer a surprise that the hot guy with a rep for intensity can also do comedy; he damn near won an Oscar last month for bringing nuance to his most broadly silly movie role ever, as alluded in his monologue song Taylor Swift–ing a bittersweet farewell to Barbie’s Ken. But he finds a throwback to those earlier pre-comedy days with his SNL comfort zone: applying that straight-faced intensity to even-sillier roles until such time as the face can no longer keep straight. Whether he’s stage-whispering his cowardice to Andrew Dismukes, exchanging cookie crumbles with Bowen Yang, or causing experienced cast members to lose it just by showing up styled up as Beavis, Gosling came ready to go for it … and inevitably lose it shortly thereafter.

To some extent, all of this must have been expected — even, I dare say, calculated. In a break from recent routine, the episode cold-opens with the host and a recurring character rather than politics: Kate McKinnon returns as Colleen Rafferty, the repeatedly alien-abducted woman whose experiences are inevitably less transcendent than what her fellow abductees describe. Gosling was there for the first version of this sketch back in 2015 and has now appeared in three of the eight installments, making sort of a sub-series where McKinnon’s physically elaborate attempts to break Gosling are part of the game. The dirty secret of SNL’s much-referred-to aversion to Carol Burnett Show–style on-air crack-ups is that it almost always plays great with the live crowd and probably many of the at-home viewers, too.

But there is a line where all that in-studio glee turns self-indulgent. (Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz lived on the other side of that line for at least a season or two.) Gosling doesn’t show up often enough for this to register as a real concern, but his giggles do play a little softer in the final stretch of the episode, in part because it barely has any time for sketches. Only two air past Update, and it’s hard not to wonder if all that extra laughter (from the host, cast, and crowd) was what knocked another sketch out of rotation. (See the “Cut for Time” section for more!) Gosling may not be too big to host SNL, but is he too big, too ubiquitous in his movies’ promotional cycles, for everyone to still love it every single time he steers his lines into a stifled guffaw? For now, apparently not; the audience seemed to forgive a multipart, overlong, Swift-imitating, Emily Blunt–featuring monologue, too. SNL provides Gosling with a rare and strange opportunity to be simultaneously very good and kind of bad at something, with somehow equal conviction. Making that combo compelling is pure star power, babies.

Here are the highlights: 

The Engagement

Unofficial writing credits for the episode tend to trickle out into SNL fans’ social feeds unevenly, so it’s hard to say whether Andrew Dismukes was responsible for co-writing last week’s aces Jumanji sketch or this week’s aces confession from Ryan Gosling’s Harrison, who has just proposed to his girlfriend, Liz (Chloe Fineman), then unburdens himself to Liz’s best friend’s boyfriend, Brad (Dismukes), a near-stranger to him. But these escalating dialogue-based sketches feel derived from Dismukes’s uncomfortable fragile-normie sensibility, and this one gives Gosling his best performance of the night simply by feeding him a bunch of ridiculous lines to stage-whisper to straight man Dismukes while the ladies are out of the room. It’s just a good old-fashioned piece of strong sketch writing that takes perfect advantage of Gosling’s handsomeness, intensity, and secret goofiness.

Get That Boy Back

First: Am I just failing to recognize the specific songs this is knocking off (entirely possible!), or is this country tune catchy as hell? Musical guest Chris Stapleton gets a plum role as the poor guy whose vengeful girlfriend (Chloe Troast) decides to punish him psychologically, while her co-singers Chloe Fineman and Ego Nwodim have gone with more traditional post-relationship revenge. Troast’s niche on the show so far has involved her impressive singing voice, and part of what makes her singing sketches so much fun is the way she subtly equates a pop star’s full-throated commitment to a kind of myopic mania. (That was instrumental in “Little Orphan Cassidy” from earlier this season, too.) While she describes the disturbing lengths she’ll go to avenge a boyfriend who dared text his sister, Gosling gets a rap bridge, and Stapleton joins in on a final chorus. And, because it’s a pretape, we don’t see anyone laugh.

Can’t Tonight

Big credit to this sketch for swerving from what seems like its initial premise: Ryan Gosling adopting a Latin accent alongside his friends, who are legitimately Cuban (Marcello Hernandez) and Dominican (Kenan Thompson), while he’s actually from Tennessee. Instead, the problem is that Thompson’s character can’t make it out to the club tonight, where his friends promise celebs like Eva Mendes and the original dog from Beethoven. Everyone makes a real meal out of saying originaldogfromBeethoven, and the camaraderie between the three of them hits an unusually sweet note. Maybe this was a funny sketch, or maybe, like Sarah Sherman’s waitress characters, I simply love countries and places. This episode may not have sustained as many highs as the very best outings of the season, but the chunk of the show featuring “The Engagement,” “Get That Boy Back,” and “Can’t Tonight” is certainly one of its best 15-minute chunks in a while.

Caitlin Clark on Weekend Update

At this stage in Colin Jost and Michael Che’s record-setting tenure as Update hosts, both the pleasure and the tedium of their work are in the routines. This guest spot from college basketball superstar Caitlin Clark combined their desk’s worst and best: It sprung from yet another of Che’s tedious jokes about how no one likes women’s sports, a sub-category of his tedious faux-ironic jokes about women needing to get back in the kitchen. The idea is clearly to get a delighted rise out of the audience, but for a guy who’s spoken about how constantly recurring sketches don’t make that much sense in the digital era, he sure likes to repeat that particular shtick a lot! But this Update is also still capable of getting a little live-show charge from bits where Che and Jost (and/or occasional guests) goof on each other, especially with their recurring bit of feeding each other jokes supposedly prepped without each other’s knowledge. This guest spot from Clark, therefore, spins a tedious routine into a fun one, as she gives Che a series of jokes to read in revenge, dunking on him rather than women’s basketball. 

Doctor

It’s not the best Bowen Yang Weirdness sketch, but Gosling in blood-soaked scrubs provides a nice companion piece to the “I need a click-y pen and a sharp thing” scene from Barbie. It’s hard not to compare this unfavorably to the classics, but at the same time, Yang’s dedication to this kind of sketch is admirable, and it’s especially fun to see one working Gosling’s faltering demeanor into his character, who is introduced with a creepy, inappropriate smile.

Cut for Time

• First, a bizarre milestone: an actual cut-for-time piece advertised on the show. When it became clear that a pretape sequel of the classic Julio Torres sketch “Papyrus” wouldn’t have room on the episode, an on-screen message told fans to watch for it online later that evening! It’s been a rollercoaster season for fans of these cast-offs; after several seasons of posting cut sketches for almost every episode, the practice stopped for a stretch of this season, then restarted, and now gets its highest-profile placement ever. 

• The “Papyrus” sequel itself is … pretty good, though it’s difficult to recapture the perfection of the original. Gosling should have plenty of slack on this, though, because it’s technically the first time he’s ever made a sequel to one of his previous films.

• This episode’s serial breaking claims a lot of cast members. So, who held it together best? No surprise that super-veteran Kenan Thompson cannot be so easily cracked; he spent multiple sketches near Gosling acting goofy and/or cracking up and still managed to keep a lid on it. (Maybe we’ll find out in the next edition of Live from New York that he doesn’t find Gosling funny at all.) Among the many cast members without two decades of experience, Marcello Hernandez powered through a few close calls in “Can’t Tonight.” Sarah Sherman, meanwhile, was visibly containing herself in the cold open but never came as close to breaking as she did opposite Dismukes last week. A woman of taste!

• Chloe Fineman might not have an airtight Julia Roberts impression, but she does nail some of those Erin Brockovich intonations.

• Also, this may be our only opportunity to see Ryan Gosling dressed up like Aaron Eckhart. 

• The other season 49 host who seems almost too big to host the show these days? Gosling’s Crazy. Stupid. Love. and co-star Emma Stone. Coincidence? Maybe, but consider this: Another one of the highlights this year was the episode hosted by Josh Brolin, Stone and Gosling’s co-star in Gangster Squad. In the future, all the best SNL hosts will come from the two bad Stone/Gosling movies.