Near the end of last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, something unusual happened. As Ashley Padilla, playing a painfully square high-school teacher named Ms. Perry, intercepted a note from one of her students, a graphic flashed across the screen: “The Contents Of These Notes Have Been Changed Since Rehearsal.” Standing next to the night’s host, Ryan Gosling, who was playing the school principal, she announced her next step: “You know my rule. If I catch you passing a note, I’m gonna read it out loud.”
The note, she found, was about her—a student had caught her asking ChatGPT for makeover tips. The laughter Padilla failed to stifle while reading it suggested that the graphic was telling the truth. She really seemed to be seeing these words for the first time. Gosling and Padilla’s fellow cast member Mikey Day also seemed surprised when it was their turn to unfold a sheet of loose leaf and divulge its secrets. Their barely concealed grins and guffaws—breaking, in comedy parlance—aren’t uncommon sights and sounds on modern-day SNL. But it is rare for breaking to be the entire point of a sketch.
Rarer still: The gambit worked. The notes, which included embarrassing tidbits about Ms. Perry psyching herself up for a gynecology appointment and tailored jabs at Gosling and Day, wouldn’t have been funny enough on their own. But the performers’ sincere shock sold the concept—particularly at the sketch’s climax, when Day read a note that prompted Padilla to cross the room and open a desk drawer. After seeing the contents, she snickered and then revealed a massive Ziploc bag of spaghetti and meatballs emblazoned with the label Lunch #2. Her fight to get out the words “You think I care about this?” violated all sorts of comedic rules—about committing to a character, about not letting the audience see that she found the sketch as funny as they did. But her infectious energy turned “Passing Notes” into the highlight of the episode.
The sketch, and its loose playfulness, was also in keeping with the vibe Gosling has brought to 30 Rock. A game performer who’s never hidden how much fun he’s having while hosting SNL, the three-time Oscar nominee has played a part in some of the most legendary crack-ups in the show’s recent history: quivering with amusement as Kate McKinnon smoked, slouched, and mugged her way through her exceedingly graphic description of alien abduction in the first “Close Encounter” sketch, or giving in to lizard-brain chuckling while he and Day were made up to look like uncanny re-creations of the cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-Head.
Gosling’s appearance last night felt geared toward these types of fourth-wall-demolishing moments, piling on one goofy outfit or prop after another on the Project Hail Mary star. He played a star-spangled weirdo at a wedding reception, as well as a cyclops whose dim-wittedness had Padilla struggling to maintain her composure. When “Passing Notes” arrived, it felt like the “Oops, all breaking” culmination of the episode’s mischief.
In SNL’s earliest days, this sort of silliness would have been strictly verboten. As the story goes, the executive producer, Lorne Michaels, and the show’s writers set out to establish a whole new rule book for TV comedy, and that meant distancing themselves from what they saw as the hacky, tacky sketch customs of the day. SNL’s initial brain trust found comedians laughing at their own material “smug” and disrespectful to the writing, according to Saturday Night, a history of the show. They sometimes dismissed such qualities as “too Carol Burnett”—and on Burnett’s eponymous variety show, she and her co-stars broke a lot. It was part of that show’s charm, but Michaels and company weren’t going for charm; they were going for edge, for realism, for commitment.
As with any piece of SNL lore, this commitment to nuance is arguably overstated. The show has always had its big, broad characters; even performers as committed as original cast member Gilda Radner couldn’t resist breaking or leaning hard into a punch line (or doing both in the same sketch) to score laughs. A performer feeding off the energy in the studio and giving themself over to an on-air flub is simply part of the high-wire act of producing live television.
Breaking gets grating only if it becomes expected, a problem that SNL isn’t immune from—think of Jimmy Fallon tittering his way through the recurring early-aughts sketches set at the cartoonishly hip boutique Jeffrey’s. But there’s a way around this: maintaining the cast’s sense of surprise, as John Mulaney did when he’d swap in new punch lines for Bill Hader’s recurring character Stefon, or as “Passing Notes” did last night.
The sketch was strategic about breaking—it harnessed the energy of past Gosling-hosted episodes and acknowledged the show’s old rules while finding humor in flouting them. Although it’s a bit that would likely grow stale if repeated, the initial run proved that there’s nothing wrong with showing the cast members of a comedy series enjoying themselves.
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