Michael Keaton returns to 'Saturday Night Live,' as does Alec Baldwin

A man in a tan jacket flanked by two women.

By Omar L. Gallaga

Oct. 20, 2024 12:09 AM PT

For his fourth time hosting “Saturday Night Live” (last time was in 2015), Michael Keaton proved a grounding presence in several sketches. That’s not surprising given that at one time, he was one of the world’s most popular comedic film actors — you could argue that he and “SNL” alum Eddie Murphy dominated movie comedies of the 1980s.

But that comedic durability — Keaton doesn’t break character and he’s still got crack timing and line deliveries — felt like it was on the back burner in an episode that didn’t seem to make the most of Keaton’s talents. After a monologue in which a few cast members were dressed as one of his iconic characters, Beetlejuice, Keaton played a cookie maker with a zombie-eye cookie that looks like a breast, a father whose son unwisely performs the song “Hey, Soul Sister” about his proposed interracial marriage, and a canceled Lyft driver roped into a live Uber-car game show.

It’s not that the sketches weren’t funny. It’s that most of the pieces, plus a late-in-the-show restaurant sketch about lost love, didn’t really allow Keaton to create memorable new characters. In fact, they seemed to use his dramatic-acting gear more, like when he played a sad skydiving instructor in the first new Please Don’t Destroy video sketch of the season.

The exception to the drama-or-sidekick problem was a sketch in which Keaton played the stunt movement coordinator for a “Halloween” movie in which he makes Michael Myers move like a modern dancer instead of a serial killer. But the sketch was one joke stretched too long, despite Keaton’s performance.

Musical guest Billie Eilish performed “Birds of a Feather” and “Wildflower” with her band, including her also-famous brother, Finneas.

For the fourth week in a row, guest stars Maya Rudolph and Dana Carvey returned to reprise their roles, multiple times, as Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden. But this time, Alec Baldwin, who used to portray former President Trump on “SNL,” was here to play Bret Baier of Fox News in a takedown of his interview with Harris this week. Baldwin as Baier interrupted Harris frequently, suggesting he’ll only let her finish when he goes to bed. Kamala took interview breaks to turn to a phone camera and make quick TikTok spots (“See how I don’t let men interrupt my answers? Very demure, very mindful.”). Harris countered claims she can’t handle immigration cartels by saying, “If I was in ‘Breaking Bad,’ it would have ended in three episodes,” and complained that clips of Trump (James Austin Johnson) and Biden were being played out of context. And much hay was made out of Trump playing music for 40 minutes at a town hall — Harris points out that it seemed to be full of gay anthems such as “Y.M.C.A.” and “It’s Raining Men.” “Does he not listen to the lyrics?” she asked.

Keaton celebrated the 50th season of “SNL” by mentioning that when the show began, he was a production assistant on “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” What did they have in common? “Lots of puppets, tons of cocaine,” he joked. When he brought up the phenomenon of grown men wearing Beetlejuice costumes for Halloween, he was joined by Mike Day and Andy Samberg (“The writers couldn’t jam Doug Emhoff into the opening.”), each in full ‘Juice costumes and hamming it up with their impression. Sarah Sherman, who is typically dressed in vivid colors, wore a striped black-and-white suit for the monologue, but said it wasn’t a costume. After much prodding, Keaton finally performed the voice of Beetlejuice, but only to say, “We’ve got a great show!”

The Shop TV sketches are reliably funny because the premise is solid: An artisan goes on to sell a product alongside hosts Rhett and Lindy, played by Day and Heidi Gardner, but the product is always shaped like genitalia or is unsuitable for TV in some way. Last time, Adam Driver had a naughty Santa chocolate; this time it’s Keaton as a baker who’s made a Halloween zombie eyeball cookie that looks exactly like a woman’s breast, complete with a red velvet nipple center. As Day and Gardner struggle to keep the show on track, viewers calling in ask questions like, “Is the cookie available in different ethnicities?”

Also good: TikTok’s algorithm, but as an ‘SNL’ sketch

“SNL” has done this one before, too, in 2021, but it works just as well again: a random assortment of TikTok moments on someone’s smartphone. It’s a lot of jokes in a short amount of time, some very topical. Harris, Rudolph and Eilish all appear as people subjected to bad singing from Bowen Yang as influencer Harry Daniels. Carvey returns as Biden on a balance board while Ego Nwodim plays a woman with many, many complaints about her local Chili’s restaurant. Bethenny Frankel, a tradwife, a man slow dancing with his cat, and “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper make appearances in the mock TikTok clips. Sadly, the person viewing the videos misses the birth of their son, as we learn from a text message.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Emil Wakim says Christian Arabs are practically French

For the record:

2:19 p.m. Oct. 21, 2024An earlier version of this article stated that Emil Wakim’s father is Iranian. He is Lebanese.

Sarah Sherman returned to talk about what’s missing in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, including infected belly button rings and diapers, but Emil Wakim won the week by discussing what it’s like to be both Arab and Christian. Wakim, one of the season’s new featured cast members, had a chance to introduce himself to the “SNL” audience by talking about how his Lebanese immigrant father was such a success that he’s now a Republican. Wakim scored with jokes about how tension in any room drops when he tells people he’s a Christian Arab (including in Studio 8H). Wakim said that his father always told him that his family is more European than Middle Eastern in its beliefs, and that they’re pretty much French. (The French, Wakim suggested, would strongly disagree.) Wakim added that Christian Arabs are just, “Hairy, sweaty, passionate guys … a Greek you’re kinda afraid of.”