I admit to being surprised that Dakota Johnson was hosting SNL, as I had no idea that she had a movie coming out. It must bode poorly for Sony that I hadn’t heard of Madame Web until she mentioned it in her monologue, or seen a trailer for it until the next commercial break.
That said, her monologue was kind of a delight. It’s always fun to have Taylor Swift trump Trump, but when ranking Johnson’s riffs down memory lane, I prefer her explaining her lack of finesse on press tours. The footage of her eye-rolling and smirking at seven years old while her father Don Johnson pontificated to a red-carpet reporter was priceless. So too was her taking musical guest Justin Timberlake down a peg when he crashed her monologue. “If you want me to be in sketches, I have hosted before,” he said, before mouthing five times to the audience. Johnson, so wonderfully dry, smirked and responded, “Yeah, well, that was 10 years ago.” And in the meantime, we all read the Britney Spears memoir, dude.
The SNL writers did Timberlake a terrific favor by sending him onto the stage seeming a little desperate and uninvited. “I heard my name. I thought that was my cue?” he said, breathless with anticipation. He let himself be the joke, playing a little fussy when Johnson poked: “I’m so happy you chose my show for your comeback.” But then Jimmy Fallon showed up in Barry Gibb suit and hair, and you remembered why Timberlake got himself a five-timer jacket in the first place.
When they recreated The Barry Gibb Talk Show later on, it was by far the best sketch of the night. Fallon looked like he was having a ball—“You will call me Sir Barry Gibb!” he shouted at one point to Bowen Yang’s political hack, later threatening, “I fear nothing! I watched Saltburn with the entire family!”—and one of Timberlake’s great comedic gifts is his refusal to break.
