SUNDAY MORNING LIVE: Sorry, Jamie Foxx, but This 'SNL' Episode Should Be Locked in a Lighthouse Crawling with Gators

Welcome to the ninth edition of Sunday Morning Live, Popculturology's look at the latest edition of Saturday Night Live. All of your questions about the Jamie Foxx-hosted episode will be answered after the jump.

How'd Jamie Foxx do?



After taking a few weeks off, SNL probably hoped to get back on air with a strong episode, an episode that would carry the show into Christmas next week and wrap things up before the new year. Well, this weekend's episode didn't quite do that. In fact, it didn't come close. The Foxx-hosted episode may have been the most uneven and disjoined episode of Season 38. Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon, this season's two standouts, were absent for pretty much the entire show. SNL went to the game show well not once but twice. Most of the sketches failed to land their punches.

The blame shouldn't go to Foxx, though, as he was only doing the best he could with the material SNL's writers gave him. Unfortunately, that wasn't much. Foxx's monologue was a weird collection of catchphrases ("How black is that?"), piano playing and a rapper that I have to admit I'd never heard of. Foxx did whatever SNL asked him to do, and he barely appeared to be relying on the cue cards. It's great to see a host who wants to do everything, but this may be the rare occasion when the rest of the cast should have been more involved.


What were the best sketches of the night?



This is going to be the one that people will probably be talking about. Taking a page from the infamous Potato Chip sketch, Maine Justice put Jason Sudeikis in a Col. Sanders costume and let him loose. Sudeikis was clearly having a blast in this sketch, causing Foxx to break character at the end. Regardless of how these people got in Maine — relocated after Katrina? Courtroom exchange program? Space portal? — this sketch is going to live on as one of the more bizarre things SNL has done this season. Charlie Day popping in as a Cajun-speaking Maine congressman makes up for the lack of good writing SNL gave him when he hosted last season.



After her rise to the top of the SNL talent chart, I can't understand why Strong only made it into one sketch this episode. Strong and Vanessa Bayer as former pornstars promoting Swarovski crystals may have been the episode's final sketch, but it was one of its bests. Maybe SNL felt it couldn't get Strong listing "anal" as the "one thing that never goes out of style" past the censors at the beginning of the show.



There was a time when Justin Timberlake frequently hosted SNL. In every episode, he would dress up in some ridiculous costume — can of soup, omlette, bottle of beer — with every costume involving a pair of oversized, Mickey Mouse-esque four-fingered gloves. With SNL in a serious Timberlake drought, it looks like the show found another use for those gloves, giving them to Foxx when he played a Hostess Ding Dong on Weekend Update.


What kind of shorts did SNL have this week?



The best short was Marcus Banks: Tree Pimp, a documentary style look at a pimp who left the prostitution game only to start selling/pimping out Christmas trees. Thanks to Keenan Thompson in this short, "photopimpythesis" is now a word.



While Tyler Perry's Alex Cross movie flopped at the box office, Perry is already working on a sequel, but this time he's bringing in his most well-known character: Madea. Yes, that's the premise of Tyler Cross 2: Madea: Special Ops. Not only is Foxx's Perry playing both characters, he's playing both at the same time, Two Face style.


With the presidential election a month in the past, how's SNL dealing with politics?



Jay Pharoah's President Barack Obama is still around, getting joined by Bill Hader's Speaker John Boehner in the cold open. I'm pretty sure that Hader also plays the Cowardly Lion whenever SNL does a Wizard of Oz sketch, meaning he uses the same sobbing cry for both Boehner and the Cowardly Lion.


What was the biggest problem with this episode?

Well, besides the lack of Strong and McKinnon, SNL made the mistake of doing two game show sketches. Look, I'm all for game shows now and then, and SNL can do Celebrity Jeopardy anytime they can convince Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond to swing by. Most of the time, though, the game show sketches are lame and fail to bring in any big laughs. This is why it was shocking that SNL would do two game shows in one episode. If you're only going to do eight sketches in an episode, why make a quarter of them game show ones?



Bitch, What's the Answer? was the first game show sketch of the night. By my count the word "bitch" was used 33 times. I don't know if that's an SNL record, but it didn't make the sketch any funnier. This was the first sketch after the monologue. Didn't bode well for the episode as a whole.



Do black people have trouble telling Dylan McDermott or Dermott Mulroney apart? Personally, I think everyone does. This sketch wouldn't been the same level of mediocre even without the attempt at racial humor. Having the real Mulroney show up and express confusion over who was salvaged a small bit of this sketch's dignity.


What's next?

SNL is back on Dec. 15 with Martin Short hosting and Paul McCartney as the music guest.


Previous editions of Sunday Morning Live

Nov. 18, 2012: Jeremy Renner
Nov. 11, 2012: Anne Hathaway
Nov. 4, 2012: Louis C.K.
Oct. 21, 2012: Bruno Mars
Oct. 14, 2012: Christina Applegate
Oct. 7, 2012: Daniel Craig
Sept. 23, 2012: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Sept. 16, 2012: Seth MacFarlane