Saturday Night Live: Jason Bateman gets a monkey off his back

After a month-long hiatus, we kick off with the Michigan hearings over allegations of fraud in the 2020 election.

Related: Trump team’s discredited fraud witness compared to SNL character

Fart-machine Rudy Giuliani tries desperately to overturn results by bringing forward several “highly intoxicated individuals”, including bleached-blond star witness Melissa Carone (Cecily Strong, the show’s go-to for such characters), My Pillow founder Mike Lindell (Beck Bennett), a random UFO abductee, Nicole Kidman’s oddly accented character from The Undoing (Chloe Fineman), and a couple of white militia dirtbags who just want to kidnap the governor (Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney, bringing the characters back from a few episodes past).

On the one hand, the clown show of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election seems like a layup. On the other, when real life is this cartoonish and gross, how can comedy send it up? Certainly, this cold open didn’t come off as any more ridiculous than the actual hearings in Lansing.

All that said, it’s a shame former cast member Victoria Jackson – whose resemblance to Carone has been much remarked upon – is a Trumper herself. A special guest appearance would have brought the house down.

Jason Bateman is our host. The actor recalls his previous time in the job, 15 years ago, when a monkey almost murdered him during curtain call. Footage of the animal nearly biting his nose off is played. The monkey “apologized”, Bateman says, but it was “destroyed later that night. It was my choice. Lessons have to be learned.” It’s an enjoyable monologue that makes good use of Bateman’s aloof, low-key, sinister charm.

In the first sketch, Bateman’s “lame-ass dad” interrupts his tween daughter’s sleepover to announce that one of the girls has broken an upstairs washing machine trying to hide a period stain on a couch cushion. At first, it seems clear the culprit is suds-soaked Megan (McKinnon), a bald-faced liar with truly monstrous periods (“We all got the pill, but we fought it off, we all got an IUD but it rusted and passed…”), but it turns out all the girls are responsible. It’s a beat-for-beat repeat of a sketch from last year, but the chemistry between McKinnon and Bateman makes it work.

At the North Pole, Santa and his elves read children’s Christmas lists. Things take a dark musical turn when they read one from “scary guy” Stu (Pete Davidson), who’s asking for a PS5. The whole thing is pitch-perfect parody of the Eminem classic Stan. Davidson is a dead ringer for Devon Sawa in the original, and it’s nicely rounded out by McKinnon as Dido and Bowen Yang as Elton John, as well as an appearance by Eminem himself.

Next, Yang is back as the saucy, bitter MC of an outdoor cabaret, duetting with a Liza Minnelli-like singer while arguing with keyboard player Devon about Covid precautions. Theater kids and gay New Yorker barflies will get a big kick out of this one. It’s followed by The Christmas Conversation, in which three young women Zoom their parents to let them know they won’t be home for Christmas. The mothers do not take the news well, laying a guilt trip of massive proportions on their exhausted children. No doubt, many a trepidatious millennial will relate.

Next up, musical guest Morgan Wallen pokes fun at his embarrassment from two months back, when he was bounced from the SNL musical spot after pictures came out of him partying in Tuscaloosa. Bateman and Yang play his future selves, come to warn him against his heedless ways. This results in him singing a sincere mea culpa. The country star sticks around to perform his song 7 Summers.

On Weekend Update, Colin Jost mocks Trump’s pathetic conspiracy mongering while trying to flatter him so he’ll actually go on 20 January: “I see you. You is smart. You is kind. But you is need to go.” Michael Che discusses his mixed feelings about the coronavirus vaccine, saying “On the one hand, I’m black, so I don’t trust it. On the other hand, I’m on a white TV show, so I might get the real one.”

They bring on Davidson to discuss anti-lockdown protests in his neighborhood, Staten Island. He’s “just happy I’m not the first thing people answer when they ask what’s the worst thing from Staten Island.” Then comes teen movie critic Bailey Gismert, who, thanks to the closure of theaters has been forced to watch “super old movies” like Forrest Gump, American Beauty and Silence of the Lambs. Her response – “You can’t DO THAT anymore, Michael” – is a great sendup of Gen Z petulance, and combined with a solid dig at Che for never showing up in any sketches, it makes for the best appearance of the character yet.

A family visit to a socially distanced Santa’s Village in a mall goes off the rails as Bateman’s Santa and Mrs Claus fumble around in their giant plastic bubbles, destroying all in their path. There’s a lot of game pratfalling (particularly from Bateman), but it never quite reaches the fever pitch of insanity it seems to be building up to.

Wallen returns and performs Still Goin Down, before the night wraps up with a funny and sweet musical number from Mooney, in which he laments his fate as the guy “who kill the bit”, that friend whose desperate attempts to joke with his friends always makes things awkward.

Thus concludes a solid if middle-of-the-road episode. There wasn’t much in the way of big laughs, but there weren’t any outright turkeys. Bateman made for a good host, especially in his ability to blend in and play off the strengths of the cast.