In celebration of Jonah Hill’s fifth time hosting Saturday Night Live, he was inducted into SNL’s Five-Timers Club and received an interesting welcome from fellow Five-Timers Tina Fey, Candice Bergen, and Drew Barrymore. Hill walked into the club’s special lounge hoping to see more people than just the three of them, mainly more guys, and that’s when this sketch went downhill.
“Oh the guys, turns out they’re not allowed in right now, because they’re all a bunch of horny perverts. Times up on that,” Fey said. Barrymore added: “Like Tom Hanks, Woody from Toy Story. ‘There’s a snake in my boots,’ I think we all know what that means.”
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Fey went on to make another joke Steve Martin not knowing what consent was because he had just started playing the banjo in the lounge without asking if anyone was okay with it or not. But the real facepalm-inducing moment came when Bergen made a joke that Justin Timberlake was disinvited from the lounge because he had previously ripped a lady’s top off at the Super Bowl. Whoever thought that any of that would be funny was severely mistaken. It’s doubtful Janet Jackson is laughing.
First, the Tom Hanks and Steve Martin bits were clearly jabs at #MeToo and #TimesUp. Given Hill’s confused reaction to them, was the sketch trying to say that some of the women coming forward nowadays are doing the most? Second, adding in the part about Timberlake, made his incident sound just as frivolous as the other two things. Definitely not funny, given the effects the 2004 event had on Janet Jackson’s life. She was banned from the Grammys that following Sunday, and her career took a major hit while Timberlake's didn’t. One of them has been invited back by the NFL to perform at the Super Bowl and...it wasn’t her.
The whole sketch just reeked of misogyny and white elitism. The latter, because while the women had so many problems with men doing inappropriate things they seemed to have no problem treating SNL cast member Kenan Thompson like a butler not once, but twice. Really?
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is the only POC in SNL’s Five-Timers Club. So, while they’re all congratulating Hill for achieving this great feat, how about finding some POC to host the show? And not have them be just the butt of jokes or the help.
Maybe the next time SNL does a Five-Timers sketch, it will actually be funny.