The Good: It doesn’t take much for The Hangover star Zach Galifianakis to make us laugh (Said the actor during his understated opening monologue, “I’ve been in Canada, opening for Miles Davis.” Only to quickly follow that that up with… “Kilometres Davis.”) Which is why — combined with the-never-not-funny mockery of Kathie Gifford and Hoda Kotb’s fourth hour of the TODAY SHOW, the always sharp Seth Meyers manning the Weekend Update Desk, and a digital short that had Galifianakis weaving his way in and out of NBC properties such as the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, 30 ROCK and LAW & ORDER — added up to a better than average episode of SNL.
The Bad: Aside from the Vogelcheck family “kissing” gag that stopped being funny months ago and a sketch that tried (and failed, spectacularly) to find humour with Kristen Wiig and Galifianakis uttering the word “Bidet” over and over and over again, our problems with last night’s show were two-fold. First and foremost, with the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert so ingeniously skewering the political world four nights a week, SNL is going to have to do a helluva lot better than trot out Fred Armisen’s Obama for a poorly thought out “Cold Open” that amounted to little more than reinforcing the obvious fact that his Healthcare Reform Bill hasn’t exactly gone as planned (Well, Duh!) And two, we couldn’t help but feel that Galifianakis” beard (which he, spoiler alert, may-or-may-not have shaved off in the final sketch!) was creatively stifling. Severely limited the types of sketches that could be done by relegating the comedian to variations of a stoner homeless man, stoner high schooler and possibly stoner ambidextrous flute player. Which brings us to…
The Ugly: Aside from giving highly-respected NY Times columnist Frank Rich his fifteen minutes of fame and providing a platform for what has now amounted to the show’s obligatory celebrity cameo of the night (Paul Rudd), we have to ask: What is up with the show’s continued insistence on giving Keenan Thompson’s highly unfunny “What is Up With That?” sketch airtime? 
