Who is Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: June 16, 2018

at
Share This Post

Saturday Night Live brings back one of its favorite sports star hosts as Sir Charles Barkley hosts tonight’s repeat SNL!

The cast and crew of Saturday Night Live are enjoying their summer vacation. Some cast members are off making movies. Some are getting back on the stand up stage like Melissa Villaseñor who’s performing at Carolines on Broadway this weekend. And some are focusing on their personal lives like Pete Davidson who’s been busy getting engaged to Ariana Grande and getting tattoos to show his love for her. This really does make him King of the Arianators. So while the Saturday Night Live cast is vacationing, the show must go on with repeat episodes from SNL- Season 43.

The show selected for tonight’s SNL encore presentation is from March 3, 2018 and is hosted by NBA Hall of Fame player and now-broadcaster Charles Barkley. This was an important episode for Saturday Night Live‘s 43rd season. The variety series had just taken a month off mid-season with no repeats so that NBC could fully cover the 2018 Winter Olympic Games from PyeongChang, South Korea. Who would have thought that the Winter Olympics would have been only the second biggest story coming out of the Korean peninsula this year!?

This was the 4th time hosting SNL for Sir Charles, making him just one show shy of Saturday Night Live‘s prestigious 5-Timers Club. Barkley’s SNL monologue was a bit more politically charged than in his previous three times hosting. He took on the conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham who at the time had recently told NBA stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant that they should “Shut up and dribble” when they dared to publicly criticize Czar President Trump. Barkley had as assist from Michael Che during the monologue and kept it moving with some quick comments about the proud tradition of American athletes speaking out against injustice.

Looking back at the rest of tonight’s repeat SNL, the cold open brought back Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. It had been over a month since Baldwin’s last SNL Trump appearance so it was widely expected that this is how the show would start. The cold open led the way for what would be a lot of social commentary mixed with the comedy in this Saturday Night Live episode. The cold open featured Baldwin as Trump in a reenactment of the President’s bipartisan meeting about possible gun legislation following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The cold open featured Beck Bennett in his regular role of Vice-President Mike Pence and Kate McKinnon returning as AG Jeff Sessions as well as Cecily Strong as U.S. Senate powerhouse Diane Feinstein. The sketch really didn’t bring anything new to the SNL world of Trump and seemed more like just another attempt to tease the thin-skinned man in the White House.

A couple of the sketches in tonight’s repeat Saturday Night Live focused on the #MeToo movement. There’s a sketch featuring the red carpet ceremony at “The Grabbies”, the awards given out for achievement in sexual harassment. Watch for stand out moments in this sketch from Chris Redd and Aidy Bryant whose character was the first woman nominated for a Grabbie award. Another harassment inspired sketch featured Barkley and the SNL guys as cat-calling Con Ed workers who finally get in touch with their fashion side discussing color pallets and how they would dress if they were starlets appearing on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. The 2018 Oscars were being held the next night after this Saturday Night Live show aired.

Charles Barkley’s big moments during tonight’s Saturday Night Live were in a sketch where he played a teacher with a public access show featuring students calling in for help with their homework. Barkley’s deadpan delivery as the beleaguered teacher dealing with a barrage of crank calls actually shined in this sketch. A hilarious Aidy Bryant as the overwhelmed call screener helped make this the sketch of the night. Barkley’s other top moment was in an SNL Digital Short which took on gun control in the silliest of ways. Tonight’s host plays Ned, an exterminator with a good ol’ fashioned, patriotic, 2nd Amendment loving way to handle roaches with Ned’s Roach Army because “the only way to stop a bad roach is with a good roach with a gun.” This was Saturday Night Live‘s way of pointing out some of the ridiculousness of the solutions favored by the gun lobby. In other sketches, Barkley plays a darkly serious contestant on the VH-1 dating game show “Hump or Dump“, he also plays himself on a sports talk show taking on the concussion issue in sports today which includes a special New York City sports cameo appearance and also, Barkley plays the lucky recipient of Sheila Sauvage’s charms when Kate McKinnon brings back her popular bar fly character in this latest SNL installment of “Last Call.”

Weekend Update was pretty shaky compared to its usual sharp comedy. The main focus of Update was gun control and Michael Che struggled through a lot of his lines on the topic. We have no idea what was going on, but Che was really fighting his way through his cue cards. There was really too much stammering to edit it all out, so you should be able to relive it tonight on the Saturday Night Live rerun. Other topics the Weekend Update anchor team of Colin Jost and Michael Che hit on included the chaos and mass exodus of people working at the White House, arming teachers in the classroom (watch for Jost to earn some audience moans with a priest joke), NYC pot arrests, beer prices, Barbra Streisand’s dog clones and Women’s History Month. Stopping by the WU news desk were Cecily Strong as outgoing White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, Kyle Mooney as himself, trying to get invited to Colin Jost’s big Oscars party and Leslie Jones back from Korea to report on the Winter Olympics where she was part of NBC’s coverage and she brought along a gold medal friend with her, Hilary Knight from the USA women’s Gold Medal winning hockey team.

In the first two promos for tonight’s encore presentation episode of Saturday Night Live, cast member and coach Miss Aidy Bryant puts host Charles Barkley through some comedy workouts to get ready for SNL and to “Not Suuuuck!” Then in the final set, Charles is joined by cast member Kate McKinnon and musical guest Migos and the host finds himself in an embarrassing situation when he tries too hard to fit in with Kate and the hip hop trio.

Charles Barkley hosts a repeat of Saturday Night Live tonight at 11:30pm with musical guest Migos on NBC.

Read more comedy news.

Ernie Tripper
Ernie Tripper