Who is Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: March 31, 2018

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Tonight’s repeat episode of Saturday Night Live is the SNL – Season 43 mid-season finale hosted by comedy superstar Kevin Hart!

SNL will be back live next weekend, but tonight the late night variety series wraps up its March reruns with a show that had a lot of high hopes going into it and ended up being a let down once the stage was empty and the show was over. You can’t find a hotter comedian right now than Kevin Hart. His tours, movies and comedy concerts are all blockbuster events. It’s too bad that all that comedic juice didn’t transfer to Hart’s Saturday Night Live – Season 43 appearance. Our initial review of this SNL episode which originally aired December 16, 2017 described the evening as “not one for the books” and it was punctuated by a tired cold open, a monologue that offended more than it entertained and sketches that left us with “just question marks.” Tonight’s Saturday Night Live was the hat trick for Kevin Hart with it being his third time hosting and it was also a historic SNL because it was the first show with the series’ new head writers, Colin Jost and Michael Che, who of course, also handle the Weekend Update anchor duties.

The monologue should have been the strongest part of tonight’s repeat with Kevin Hart being a master comedian. However, it seemed like Hart and the SNL writers neglected to take the temperature of the climate in the country and filled Hart’s opening remarks with jokes that A) were deemed sexist and insensitive by social media to the #MeToo movement and the flash flood of sexual harassment stories going on in the news and B) just weren’t that funny to begin with.

The monologue followed a weak start to the show with a cold open featuring Alec Baldwin as President Trump in a sketch that seemed to just be following an earlier successful recipe, but added nothing new as it went through the same old paces. The one highlight was a special guest cameo during the cold open which we won’t remind you of here. We’ll let you be surprised all over again. After Hart’s monologue came sketches that limped along on shaky ground and were confusing and sluggish. These sketches included Kevin Hart playing an office worker who is found out after constantly making lame excuses to leave business meetings because he has to use the restroom, plus an “Inside the NBA” sketch with Hart doing a bad Shaq impression (an impersonation that Jay Pharoah was nailing less than a season ago,) also there was a super hero sketch called “Captain Shadow and the Cardinal“, a sketch about a former 70’s TV hero “Active Jack” who’s too old to make a comeback, and Christmas sketches involving a joke-less high school pageant focused on a llama and a holiday party where Kevin Hart plays a very henpecked husband. All of these missed the mark when it came to providing the usual comedy SNL is known for on Saturday nights.

However as usual, Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update roared with great jokes and commentary. WU was highlighted by jokes about Alabama’s U.S. Senate Republican candidate and accused pedophile Roy Moore who the Tuesday before found himself on the losing end of an election deep in the middle of Trump country. Tune into tonight’s rerun SNL just hear Colin Jost deliver the line of the night at the expense of Moore’s losing Senate bid. Other topics hilariously covered by the Weekend Update team of Jost and Che included calls for President Donald (Grab Ass) Trump to step down, Net Neutrality, generic Viagra, Amazon Echo, and a kid who made $11 million with his YouTube channel.

The show closes shop for the holidays with a special curtain call featuring Kevin Hart and the Saturday Night Live cast while musical guests, the Foo Fighters, add some extra cheer to the Christmas season.

In the promos for tonight’s re-airing of the SNL mid-season finale, Kevin Hart along with cast member Leslie Jones hug it out with the Foos, also watch Hart have a little trouble finding his mark. In the next released promo, your host Kevin Hart takes you on a 360° Tour of Studio 8-H, home to Saturday Night Live.

Kevin Hart hosts an encore presentation of the Saturday Night Live – Season 43 mid-season finale with musical guests, the Foo Fighters tonight at 11:30pm on NBC.

Next week, SNL returns live across all American time zones with host Marvel’s Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman with musical guest, Cardi B, followed a week later by a new SNL hosted by comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer John Mulaney with musical guest, Jack White.

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Ernie Tripper
Ernie Tripper