Keegan-Michael Key is Exactly the Kind of ‘Saturday Night Live’ Host You Love to See

Keegan-Michael Key Hosted Saturday Night Live

Keegan-Michael Key has decades of experience in improv and sketch comedy, so it should come as no surprise that he excelled stupendously when hosting Saturday Night Live for the first time. This is exactly the kind of host you want to see take the stage, and the result was an episode that was full of mostly fantastic sketches. Even the fact that the sketches ran a little longer than usual didn’t hurt the show.

So let’s get down to the best and worst sketches from the Keegan-Michael Key hosted Saturday Night Live.

The Best

The Muppet Show – It’s such a simple premise, but this twist on one of the staples of The Muppet Show was a riot. Though there are a couple technical hiccups here and there due to the lack of legit Muppet puppeteers (and their usual voices), it doesn’t hurt the overall sketch from landing comedically. You couldn’t ask for a better sketch that utilizes Keegan-Michael Key and Kenan Thompson’s penchant for yelling in hilarious ways. In fact, if Key was part of the SNL cast, I bet these characters would join the roster of recurring sketches on the show.

The Last Dance – Even though this isn’t exactly the most timely sketch, this feels like something that would have come from Key & Peele if the show was able to be as timely as Saturday Night Live. Aside from perfectly replicating the look of the archive footage from the Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance, Heidi Gardner is great as the security guard who once got the best of Michael Jordan in a friendly coin-tossing match behind the scenes of the United Center. I don’t know about you, but I especially appreciated the make-up crew giving Gardner hideously hairy legs once he lost his pants to Jordan.

Prom Show – Having a red carpet show at various events that don’t require them is an SNL staple, but it can be a bit of a comedic crutch, almost like an improv game. Though the template is familiar, this depiction of high school students at prom was right on the money, from limo ride and Red Robin dinner down to the sexually active band dorks.