“I know you might be thinking I’m here to promote my album Mayhem, I’m actually here to remind you that I’m an amazing actor,” Lady Gaga said at top of her SNL monologue over the weekend, and the episode itself wound up as surprising proof that her joke was actually pretty accurate. A lot has changed in Gaga’s career since she last hosted SNL; in 2013, she pulled double-duty to promote her album Artpop, and had recently released her first movie, Machete Kills, an intentionally low-rent, tongue-in-cheek Danny Treo/Robert Rodriguez sequel in which she had a small part. In the decade-plus since, she only appeared on SNL once, as a musical guest only in 2016, and never to promote any of the major acting roles that took up an increasing amount of her time: Her Oscar-nominated turn in A Star Is Born, her no-shtick-barred peacocking in House of Gucci, or her high-profile flop sequel to Joker, which she also joked about in her monologue. But while those movie performances could be accused of mixing movie-star false modesty with theater-kid sweatiness, her latest SNL used some deeply silly sketches to illustrate how far she’s come as a performer.
In contrast, her earlier appearance on the show, while plenty of fun, was well within the musician-doing-sketch-comedy wheelhouse. Most of her parts seemed to exist to goof on her reputation. In a talk-show sketch hosted by Kanye West (Jay Pharoah) and Kim Kardashian (Nasim Pedrad), Gaga appeared as an Apple Store worker, doing a cartoony-even-for-a-sketch nerd voice and hunched-over nerd posture in case you didn’t get it. Her big moment comes when she gets to say “I think people who try too hard with their outfits are maybe hiding something” and mugs for the camera, not technically winking but close enough.
Other pieces in the episode engaged in a kind of false modesty, with Gaga as an overly enthusiastic kid actor, or an overly enthusiastic parent of an unseen child performer – material where she got to good-naturedly pretend to be a talent-deficient try-hard, with the implication that of course the real Gaga may try hard, but does so with genuine virtuosity. Late in the episode, she played an elderly version of herself, a cute bit of self-deprecation that nonetheless consisted of listing her many signature achievements.
Did the stripped-down emotional directness of Star Is Born or the campy histrionics of House of Gucci prep Gaga for a more varied SNL hosting gig, or is she just in better command of her instrument almost 12 years later? She seemed far less focused on winking at her own career, even throughout three different singing-related sketches (two of which were duets with hardcore Gaga fan Bowen Yang), and if you really squint, you can see some parallels with her movie career. “No More Slay” had her convincingly playing, well, normal, advocating for simpler and more direct language rather than a repetitive mélange of trendy slang – which for an intentionally outré pop star is almost the equivalent of going easy on the elaborate costumes and makeup for A Star Is Born. Meanwhile, on the House of Gucci side of things, she joined Sarah Sherman and Ego Nwodim in expertly caricaturing the kind of women who wear “little red glasses.”
She also successfully kept pace with Heidi Gardner in a sketch where she had to play a funeral planner who keeps steering the bereaved toward a “roaring twenties” theme and joined in the ensemble for a sloppy but hilarious demonic ritual within the beloved, languishing ice cream restaurant Friendly’s, showing a kind of teamwork that the movies haven’t really asked of her quite yet. Obviously these sketches were silly, but they also didn’t necessarily ask for the same degree of much-ness from Gaga’s style, and she was able to modulate her performances more precisely than a lot of SNL hosts can handle. Her performances helped the sketches, but no longer felt like the whole show.
This is an encouraging arc for Gaga, considering the degree to which Justin Timberlake seemed to start taking his rep as a do-anything talent more seriously as he accumulated SNL appearances, obviously flattered by implications that he could have made it as a cast member. (Hard to say, isn’t it, whether Timberlake minus the global fame brought to him by a massively successful career as a singer and sex symbol would have done just as well on SNL, considering how many of his sketches depend on it being Justin Timberlake doing something silly, often while singing?) On movie screens, Gaga does have undeniable presence; I’d even go so far as to say that within the star-packed Gucci ensemble, she was the one who best understood the movie’s deranged conviction, or maybe just bent the movie to her performing style by sheer force of personality. But on SNL, she was as versatile and cooperative as she’s ever appeared, all in service of utter ridiculousness. When she sang to a weight-lifting mouse, she betrayed no trace of “look, it’s Lady Gaga singing to that mouse!”
Even as she performed her own new songs that felt nakedly derivative of other work – hers, David Bowie’s, whoever’s – the sheer dexterity and inventive choreography of those performances were deeply impressive, making for one this season’s best SNL episodes. On its own, some of Gaga’s work threatens to feel like components of an over-explained art project, from her fickle-fandom-as-deranged-muse version of Harley Quinn in the Joker sequel to various songs that are supposed to be forward-thinking art pop while sounding more or less like Madonna pastiche. As well as Mayhem seems poised to do, Saturday Night Live may turn out to be her best showcase in years.
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