Saturday Night Live: Kiss Me I’m Irish good, Canadian Harvey Weinstein … bad

“I’m just a simple man who wanted to make things bad for immigrants, and here I am taking away the pension of a Christian white!”

Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon) is being interviewed by Anderson Cooper (Alex Moffat). Cooper turns to Rex Tillerson (John Goodman). “It really wasn’t a good fit,“ Tillerson says, struggling to drink a glass of water. “It’s just crazy how you can be the CEO of Exxon … and the next day, you get fired by a man who used to sell steaks in the mail.”

He smashes his glass.

Cooper’s final guests: it’s Michael Wolff (Fred Armisen, who, I must say, really does look a lot like Michael Wolff) and Anthony Scaramucci (Bill Hader), who’s wearing “the first suit made by the Olive Garden!”

“Is it as bad as they say?” Cooper asks Wolff.

“Trump would line up his staff and use a laser pointer and circle their love handles every day,” Wolff says. Tillerson does a dinosaur impression. Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.

Hader is hosting. “I was on this show for eight seasons,” he reminds us, “210 episodes. I was nervous for every one of them and I’m nervous now.”

He makes a joke about fake ads being fake, which isn’t funny, and then he says “you can make the monologue as short as you want” before a team of dressers sprints out and puts him in a handyman’s outfit and blonde wig for the next sketch …

… in which he plays a soap opera handyman opposite McKinnon’s jaunty maid (“I’m not a maid, I’m an estate manager”) and Armisen’s creepy rich guy and a photo of Vanessa Bayer. There’s a lot of jokes about traffic and blonde wigs.

Kiss Me I’m Irish: “One fellow will choose between three Irish roses to see which smells the sweetest.” It’s a chance for several players to demonstrate their best Irish accents. Hader is Niall, the bachelor. He’s related to the one played by Cecily Strong. “No3 is my cousin, so she’s definitely off to an early lead.” Aidy Bryant is an Irish-American, and she’s not down with the cousin thing. Then he discovers that the first bachelorette (McKinnon) is his cousin too.

“What’s your idea of a romantic evening?“ says Hader.

“I guess dinner with someone I’m not related to?“

Then a priest arrives. This is the funniest sketch of the night, but the Irish people who hated the Aer Lingus sketch earlier in the season are really not going to like it.

They might also hate the next sketch, because it’s just quite filthy: it’s about a young woman (Strong) dating a much-older man (Hader) and trying to conceive under a tartan lap blanket. “It’s like breastfeeding in public,” she says, to her friends, as she sits on his knee, “it’s not a sexual thing.” Eventually, Strong and Hader try to ride off into the sunset on his electric wheelchair. He crashes repeatedly into the furniture, which might not be scripted.

Jurassic Park screen tests: an opportunity for cast members to do impersonations of 1990s actors. Well done, guys. Leslie Jones makes her only appearance in the episode as Whoopi Goldberg, and that’s a shame.

Arcade Fire are here. They’re dressed in gold lamé, like some kind of space Canadians, and singing Everything Now. As I always do when I see Arcade Fire, I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d made an effort to befriend them when we were all at university together, instead of getting annoyed when some of them were having a party in my shared house kitchen at 4am.

Weekend Update! Colin Jost and Michael Che discuss the latest White House firings, noting that “Tillerson will return to his previous job as the Eagle from the Muppets.”

On to Stormy Daniels. “This lady is just trying to show us revenge porn of a grandpa, and we’re OK with that?“

Michael Che asks: “What if it’s good?“

McKinnon, busy tonight, rolls in to play Betsy Devos. Jost asks what went wrong with her Lesley Stahl interview. “I think the problem is that the words coming out of my mouth were bad,” she says, with a big smile. “We’re working hard to ensure that all schools are safe learning environments for guns.“

Next, Hader revives his classic character Stefon to offer some local recommendations. “If you’re drunk in Midtown, doing coke off your laundry card, I have just the place for you!” He calls in John Mulaney to get him to help tell a very complicated joke that mocks little people and references a bit he used to do years ago. It feels like quite a deep cut.

The next sketch is set in an Arizona hotel with Hader playing a manager with a strong Swedish accent and a story about anal-probing aliens.

And next: Hader is “the Canadian Harvey Weinstein“. He admits to all of his misdeeds, exposed as “a monster by Canadian standards“ because he complimented a woman’s sunglasses. “As soon as realized, I said I was soary,“ he said. The members of Arcade Fire are soary, too. “Silly,” my husband sighs, and he is correct.

We return from commercial to the second Arcade Fire song, Put Your Money On Me, which they’re already singing – awkward cut! – accompanied by a what may be an unintentionally hilarious video of flashing dollar bills and some extras pretending to play slot machines. Or are they members of the band? It is a very large band. Maybe the extras are people who were nice to the Arcade Fire in college.

The final skit is about a man who uses a toilet in his office that’s disguised as a lamp. It’s disgusting, and not really in a funny way. And that’s it! Is it true that you can’t go home again, Bill Hader? It could be. It could be true.