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Confessions Of A Teenage Host

I have mixed feelings whenever I see Lindsay Lohan in the lineup of upcoming hosts. First off, I only know her from Mean Girls and all the chaos that randomly shows up in the news. At the time, I think my lack of familiarity led me to see her as just another wild child experimenting with vices in her youth. I mean hell, that’s what my friends and I were doing, but we were all just schlubs who were all completely un-newsworthy.

This visit from Lohan makes round three in as many years. She started hosting at seventeen making her nineteen for this visit, but for all three appearances, she was already joking about drugs and alcohol. As a man-child who partied all the way up to my forties, I didn’t think much of this at the time because I and almost everyone that I know went through this phase when they were young.

Now that I’m old and falling apart, it makes me sad that more wasn’t done to discourage this self-destructive side, especially now that I’m old enough, to be honest, that my crazy outgoing behavior was an unanswered cry for help. I’m still all for people doing whatever to have fun, but the fact that this young star openly joked about her issues on live TV only to be encouraged for her behaviors by grown ass adults is a bit of a bummer to me. Then again, at this time, I probably would have done the same which is why these feelings are so mixed.

Other than that, I did go as far as to say that this was the best of Lohan’s visits so far. That’s not saying much because her last to visit came during two of my least favorite seasons of the newer shows that I’ve watched. With that said, I do think that this visit was filled with much better acting from our host, who also had better content to work with in general.

On top of the improvements that I witnessed from our host, this episode also benefited from having two classic sketches in one night. As I said just the other day, one classic sketch can be enough to turn an average show into a memorable night. The two classic moments from this evening were the fake ad for Neutrogena Coin Slot Cream and the debut of the SNL Digital Shorts’ series, Laser Cats.

These two sketches were enough to where I would have considered this episode to be great, even if the rest of the night was absolutely terrible. I just hope that they can keep this energy up as they continue to wrap up the year. Speaking of wrapping things up, it’s time to move on from this review, and in order to do so, I will now shift gear so that I can give you…

The Wicker Breakdown:

This week's show started with a parody of The Situation Room where Chris Parnell played Wolf Blitzer in order to interview the ever-change cabinet members from the Bush administration who all were involved in the seemingly endless string of scandals that were plastering the headlines around this time. Of course, with this being the opening sketch, all this eventually led to the announcement of, “Live from New York…”
Lindsay Lohan then officially opened the show with a monolog about how she couldn’t believe this was her third time to host even though she was only nineteen. She then made a joke about how show hosted more times than she’s been in car accidents that were her fault. This hint at her party lifestyle led Kenan Thompson as a drunken Easter Bunny to help our young host tackle her demons by using his drunken antics to hold a mirror up to our host’s life.
This was followed by a fake ad for Neutrogena Coin Slot Cream which was a special moisturizer specifically designed to relieve the dryness that can occur in their female customer’s ass cracks, playing into the low cut jeans trend from this time.
Kenan Thompson and Rachel Dratch then returned as DJ Dynasty Handbag and Tiara Zee for another installment of Deep House Dish. As always, the bulk of this sketch was Kenan’s character making fun of Dratch’s character because of the fact that she was so dull while the two introduced new house and hip-hop music to the MTV-4 fans.
TV Funhouse then gave us a parody promo of for The Journey To The Disney Vault where a pair of kids discovered the horrors of Walt Disney’s real secret passions in life, which included things like collecting cryogenically frozen heads and getting involved in the Red Scare to run out any union-friendly writers on his staff. On top of that, they also discovered a plethora of lame cartoon sequels there were just waiting to be rolled out.
We then got another parody of The O'Reilly Factor where this time Darrell Hammond as O’Reilly used his confrontational interview style to question his political guests about the immigration crisis, the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, and the fact that we were still in Iraq. If I didn’t know better, I would think this was a current sketch from a recent episode.
Le Rendezvous had Lindsay Lohan, Jason Sudeikis, Rachel Dratch, and Fred Armisen as a group of friends out for a group dinner at a fancy restaurant who all were overly enthusiastic about their end of the meal desert, to the point where they acted like excited animals with every single bite.
This was followed by the debut of one of my favorite series of SNL Digital Shorts called Laser Cats. In it, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg pitch a Sci-Fi video to Lorne Michael where the two goofballs fought off space bad guys with real-life cats that acted as their laser guns. To add to the fun, this video was terribly shot in the hallways if the SNL studios.
Pearl Jam then took to the stage to perform World Wide Suicide.
Once again, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler closed the show. This week, Seth Meyers got a segment as a weatherman in order to give an apocalyptic forecast mocking the fact this was a time filled with extreme weather oddities. Jason Sudeikis also stopped by as Taylor Hicks in order to discuss the popularity of American Idol since this was the year that he won.
Debbie Downer then returned for another installment where this time she kept bumming everyone out at Lindsay Lohan’s Las Vegas, bachelorette party.
Introverts' Night Out took us to a bar where Lindsay Lohan, Kristin Wiig, and Will Forte played a group of introverted co-workers who finally worked up the nerve to grab a drink together after work. After a few drinks, the three lightened up, and by the end of the night, they started to question the possibility of having a threesome.
Pearl Jam then returned to the stage to perform Severed Hand.
Turner Classic Movies: Movie Archives had Darrell Hammond as the show’s host in order to through to a classic clip of a fictional lost classic starring Lindsay Lohan and Fred Armisen as Ann-Margret and Liberace that was a musical comedy called Atlantic City Fever.
Finally, Lindsay Lohan closed the show by thanking the audience and saying her goodnights.

So it turns out that my mixed feeling towards tonight’s episode worked itself out to where I landed on the fact that it was actually pretty good with the help of sketches like these that contained my three favorite moments of the night. First, I loved Laser Cats because I will always love to see pitches for quirky stories that seem to humor the author more than the audience because that’s always been my own comedic style. Next, I really liked Neutrogena Coin Slot Cream because I know it’s a sign that I’m still immature, but butt crack jokes still crack me up. Finally, I was a fan of the TV Funhouse segment, The Journey To The Disney Vault because I like how it shared the darker side of Disney through this cartoon that playfully told the truth.