Jamie Foxx Wants to Teach the President How to Dance
It's amazing what can happen when a Saturday Night Live host is as charismatic as Jamie Foxx. It helps that he has sketch comedy experience, but whatever, last's night's episode was alright.
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Okay, we can all agree that the Jay Pharoah's Obama hasn't been what we hoped for at the start of the season. He had almost no chemistry with Jason Sudeikis' Romney. His impersonation before the election was almost too spot on with his ticks and 'uuuh's. But here, with Hader playing John Boehner, something clicks. We loved this sketch. Basically, the two reached a fiscal cliff agreement because Obama feels bad for Boehner, because Boehner's mean ol' Republican friends keep bullying him. They won't sit with him at lunch. They left a rubber snake in his desk! And then... they took his pants and pushed him into the girls locker. Hader deadpanning "they took my pants" could kill someone. The only thing that could have made the sketch better is if Lindsey Graham ran on stage during the announcement to give Boehner an atomic wedgie. More of this from Pharoah, please. Hopefully we get more Hader's Boehner, too. Let's push the fiscal cliff to the brink if it means more of these two together.
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Foxx's monologue was a standard six minutes, but when you have someone who can hold an audience like Foxx the time goes by quickly enough. It's also easy to forget, as we did initially, that Foxx got his start on In Living Color. The premise of his speech was simple. "It's good to be black. Black is the new white," Foxx starts. "Know how I know black is in? the Nets moved to Brooklyn," he says. "Jay-Z only owns this much of the team, but he acts like he owns all of New York. How black is that?" The bit about the President having two terms -- the first one being his "Barry Gibb Obama" term and the second being his "Barack Dikembe Mutumbo Tupac Mandela Hussein Obama X" term -- was excellent. When he made fun of Obama dancing on Ellen: A+++. And then at the very end, of course, Foxx had to sing about his birthday coming up. "All I want for my birthday is a biiiiiig boooooty hooooooooooooooe," he crooned, quoting his friend 2 Chainz.
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And then 2 Chainz showed up:
He might be the most GIF-able human alive.
A classic Celebrity Jeopardy sketch this is not. But we don't know anyone, black or white, who could ace the "Dylan McDermott Or Dermot Mulroney" game. Foxx, Kenan Thompson, and Jay Pharoah all fail miserably at figuring out which is which. This is one of those sketches that maybe rides a fine line of being questionably racist, but we went 0-for on our scorecards, too. So! The climax of the sketch comes when... one of them comes out. Just watch. This sketch is great, and Hader's kicker is best.
Things that work in this 'Maine Justice' sketch: Jason Sudeikis' drunken Louisiana judge, Jamie Foxx's jheri curl wig, and anything Charlie Day says or does. Everything else is a little weird. They're post-Katrina refugees who moved to Maine, and that's why everyone but Bobby Moynihan talk like drunken redneck Southerners. But even after they explain that, we can't help but stand by Moynhan's "I'm so confused," line. Seriously, what the hell is going on here? We only included it because Charlie Day is a genius and everything he touches usually turns to gold.
