Saturday Night Live Parodies "Walking Dead," New Pope, And The Sequester

There are two kinds of bad Saturday Night Live episodes: the ones where the cast desperately tries to hide the fact the host is terrible at comedy, and the ones where an effervescent host does their best with the miserable ideas that came out of the writer's room. Last night's episode was much more of the latter, with comedian Kevin Hart eager and energetic despite some disappointing material. Sometimes he relied too heavily on the volume of his voice (louder is not always funnier), but he used it to hilarious effect in certain sketches, including the Z-Shirts ads, the Dove Chocolate commercial audition, and the monologue.

Sandwiched between last week's very solid episode featuring host Christoph Waltz and next week's highly anticipated Justin Timberlake one, it's not that surprising we'd get some dead-in-the-water sketches like the Barnes and Noble firing one and the Shark Tank parody. One of the major problems this week was that several sketches with funny premises (The Walking Dead parody) or solid performances (the sequester cold open) just didn't really go anywhere—modern SNL sketches often have trouble finishing, but these ones had no rhythm to begin with.
There were a few more highlights, including Hart's impression of Quvenzhané Wallis as new pope, Steve Harvey's fear of horses, and appearances by Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-Un on Weekend Update. Click through for all those sketches, plus a performance by something called a "Macklemore and Ryan Lewis," whatever that is.