Taking a friendly get-together and turning it into an unsettling situation is a common premise at “Saturday Night Live,” but when it works, it can make for quite the hilarious affair. This is one of those cases, as a neighborly game night welcomes a new couple into the festivities. The game is Taboo, and everyone is about to learn what a terrible, terrifying couple Mikey Day and Aubrey Plaza are. The object of the game is to guess the word on a card, but there’s also a list of five words you can’t say to describe it. That’s no problem for Day and Plaza though, because their descriptors are incredibly unique, such as, “My nickname for your penis,” or, “I am not legally allowed back in this state.”
The first round is worth some good laughs, but the second round gets even more intense as Plaza gets increasingly aroused by how well they’re doing at the game, even going so far as to ask to be choked. It’s high-energy, and the punchlines made a one-note premise work incredibly well, and the sketch didn’t overstay its welcome. Great sketch comedy!
The rest of the evening felt somewhat chaotic, and it would go from a handful of big laughs to jokes that didn’t land because of stilted delivery or bad timing. However, there was still a lot of energy and enthusiasm to keep the show from going completely off the rails, especially when it comes to the assorted cameos that took place throughout the evening, which included the Property Brothers, Tony Hawk, Sharon Stone (hence the “Basic Instinct” bumper photo above), Allison Williams, and Amy Poehler. On top of that, there were a lot of timely pop culture parodies featuring the movies and TV shows of the moment. Speaking of which…