‘SNL’ Reunited Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller For Hilarious Mueller/Cohen Showdown, ‘Meet The Parents’ Style

When Saturday Night Live brings on a special surprise guest, it’s usually a frequently-visiting former cast member or regular host, or someone who was prominent in the news that week. What they are not, usually, is genuinely surprising.

Last night’s cold open saw the most surprising cameos since Larry David first appeared as Bernie Sanders.

After an brief intro where Beck Bennett and Kate McKinnon, as Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions, lamented the FBI’s raid on the home and offices of the president’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, Ben Stiller appeared as “Michael Cohen, attorney at law – and sometimes not at law.” Stiller gives Cohen a blunt New York accent as he laments the violation of his “attorney-criminal” privilege with the president.

Stiller’s Cohen explains the depth of the trouble they’re in – “I’m Donald Trump’s lawyer,” he says. “I got a whole hard drive that’s just labelled ‘Yikes!'” He then blasts Sessions for not protecting the president, who he calls “a fragile flower” who’s also “the smartest, kindest, sexiest, least colluding man on this planet which I call Earth.” Sessions and Pence then send him down the hall, saying there’s someone who wants to speak to him.

This leads to surprise number two, as Cohen enters room, empty but for a lie detector test, and through another door walks Robert De Niro as an uncanny Robert Mueller (kudos to SNL‘s makeup department on this one). The studio audience went wild, and what followed could have been a truly great reunion for the stars of the Meet The Parents franchise in a virtual recreation of one of the first film’s classic scenes. Instead, it was merely good, as De Niro continues his SNL tradition of never memorizing his lines and being way too obviously dependent on his cue cards. (The issue is not the reading itself, but the way that delays the comic timing.) Every sentence he uttered in the scene’s beginning had a comedy-killing pause just before it, and the timing of the scene began to stutter.

Still, the two had fun with it, with Stiller getting off the best lines as De Niro’s Mueller begins his interrogation. “Is your name Michael Cohen?” “Yes.” “And you’re a lawyer?” “Ish.” When Mueller asks if he threatens people, Cohen replies, “Let’s just say I’ve cut a lot of letters out of a lot of magazines. I’m just trying to milk some information out of people, so what?” Of course, De Niro picks up on “milk,” and we can a take on the classic “I have nipples. Can you milk me?” scene from Meet the Parents. By the end, Mueller reveals the investigation’s secret nicknames for everyone in Trump’s circle. The president was “Putin’s Little Bitch.” Now, he’s “Stormy’s Little Bitch.” Ivanka is “Girlfriend” – so is Jared Kushner – and the elder Trump sons are “Two Fredos.” Cohen is “Dead Man Walking.”

Host John Mulaney, the former SNL writer, showed why he’s become one of the country’s most popular stand-up comedians with a killer set. (Anyone else hear his introduction by SNL announcer Darrell Hammond as “John Mulvaney?”) He talked about his five years as a writer on the show, recalling one of his favorite moments – when Patrick Stewart introduced Salt N Pepa with a dramatic flourish – and imagining an entire background scenario for it. He did the same with a hilarious bit about a gazebo built in Connecticut in 1863, and why a town would build that during the Civil War. “Building a gazebo during the Civil War,” he said, “would be like doing stand-up comedy now.” Bits about how people used to go down to docks to wave at ships and the ridiculousness of proving your identity online with CAPTCHA also got huge laughs.

Mulaney, who wears suits when he performs stand-up, went way out of character in his first sketch, playing a drag queen at a drag queen restaurant, and it’s shocking how closely Mulaney as a drag queen resembles Mick Jagger. With Cecily Strong, Pete Davidson, Alex Moffat and Aidy Bryant as customers, Mulaney, as “Tawny Pockets,” greets them with “Morning, bitches,” then proceeds to rag on them. After delivering performative insults of the first three, taking in Strong’s fake Chanel (Charnel) bag and Bryant’s smokey eye, Tawny drops the cutesy pretense when he gets to Moffat. Leaning down and getting right in his face, he says, “You’ve never worked for anything in your life. You’ve had everything handed to you. The one thing you haven’t been able to purchase is a personality – and, a soul.” This continues funny enough – “When was the last time someone smiled when you walked into a room,” etc. – until the cop out ending, when it’s revealed that Tawny Pockets has a motive.

Next, we meet a high school class preparing to walk out in support of gun control. Mulaney is one of the student organizers, but just as they’re preparing to stand up and walk, fellow student Melissa Villasenor rubs his shoulder while looking right at him, causing an uncomfortable situation to arise. Mulaney, the walk-out leader, now has to find a way to obscure his erection, and the rest of the sketch finds him devising ways to not have to stand up. The sketch flitters around a bit, showing the quirky side of various students before returning to the central premise, but I found it sweet and funny, and ultimately a fun slice-of-life sketch.

I almost leapt out of my seat in sheer happiness at the intro to the next sketch, a parody of the recently-released Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, an insane tale about the Rajneesh cult of the 1980s and its complex leader, Ma Anand Sheela. This also brought genuine surprise guest number three for the night, as former cast member Nasim Pedrad showed up to play the charismatic and frightening Sheela. The joke to the sketch is that while, as in the original film, both the cult members and the townspeople take everything very seriously, Kenan Thompson appears as a cult member who was only in it for “all that ass.” As others discuss weeping at the mere sight of the Indian guru Rajneesh, Thompson says, “Man, I ain’t understand a damn word he was saying. I just know, 10,000 horny white women showed up in town wearing no bras overnight. So I told my old lady, ‘Look baby. I think we’re growing apart.'” I don’t know how this played to people who haven’t seen the documentary, but I loved every minute of this. Also, if you haven’t watched Wild Wild Country yet, it’s worth your time.

The next sketch finds Mulaney playing his second waiter of the night, this time in a greasy spoon diner. Davidson and Chris Redd are his customers, and Davidson upends the joint when he orders the lobster. This leads to a human-sized lobster cage being wheeled out, and Thompson, dressed as a lobster, launching into a “Les Miserables” parody about the foolishness of ordering lobster in a diner and the plight of the lobster itself. This evolved into a full-on production sequence between Thompson, Mulaney, cook Cecily Strong, McKinnon as Thompson’s lobster daughter and ultimately the rest of the cast as the chorus. Davidson didn’t even pretend to hold it together, cracking up as he watched. Mulaney tweeted this morning that he wrote the sketch with Colin Jost in 2010, and it didn’t make it past the table read at the time. Similar with “Switcheroo,” which appears later in the episode, and which he wrote in 2009 with fellow SNL writers Simon Rich and Marika Sawyer. Creative, funny, and well-performed (especially by Thompson as the proud, regal lobster), this sketch was pure joy. Loved it.

At the “Weekend Update” desk, McKinnon played Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham – who Colin Jost introduced as “Laura Ingram” – and made me realize I have no idea what Laura Ingraham sounds like. She talked about how her advertisers have fled in the wake of her nasty comments about Parkland shooting survivor, activist, and high school student David Hogg – Jost says Ingraham has lost 27 advertisers so far – and introduced some of her new sponsors. These included Lady Bump Stock, “for delicate hands,” and Reverse Mortgage – tagline, “We’ll take that house now.”

Thompson also brought back Lavar Ball, promoting his Big Baller brand and bragging about his basketball player sons. He’s opened a new basketball league for young players, and while he’s hyping it, it sounds pretty low-frills. Tryouts take place at the First Korean Baptist Church in Temecula, and players live the “Big Baller lifestyle,” including traveling the country on Peter Pan Bus Line, and staying in Super 8 Motels. “Free cable, no HBO. Regular Mini-Wheats only. Never frosted.”

Next comes “Hollywood Update,” a parody of an Access Hollywood type show. The host, Strong, is talking about television’s reboot fever, and talks with Mulaney as the star of a old show now being rebooted, 1987’s Switcheroo, a sitcom about a father and son who switch bodies. We get a glimpse of the show, which, like some shows of the time, lays out the premise in its theme song. With a father and son switching bodies, the premise concerns “the son having sex with the mom.” Strong and Mulaney then discuss why the show wasn’t popular, with Mulaney suggesting they might have focused on the wrong aspect of the Switcheroo – you know, with the exclusive focus on the sexual tension between the mom and, unbeknownst to her, her son. This was a middling sketch till the end, when Mulaney’s character is revealed as the show’s insane mastermind. The tale of how they tried to film the reboot at the end brought solid laughs.

Next, we get what could be considered yet another surprise guest at this point, as Luke Null, SNL‘s forgotten cast member, gets an actual starring role in a sketch, one of the few he’s had this season. (He did appear briefly in the classroom sketch.) He plays a man who has over done body modification to the extreme, and Heidi Gardner plays his nihilist, paint-huffing girlfriend. Null is seeing Mulaney, a plastic surgeon, about getting his horn implants removed, but Gardner is despondent; she thinks if he gets them removed, he’ll look like a banker. As Null is bald with no eyebrows, and has gauges in his ears and spikes in his lips, Mulaney correctly assures her this will not be the case. Null and Gardner are fine here, but the biggest laughs came from Mulaney’s incredulity at the idiocy of their conversations.

The final sketch was a Bravo TV promotion for their newest show, “The Real Intros of Reality Hills.” As the title indicates, the show is nothing but the braggy, self-aggrandizing introduction portions of reality shows, figuring no one cares about the plot, so why not cut to the chase. Pretty much the entire cast, plus Mulaney, get to trot out their most outrageous reality TV personas. McKinnon’s Chachki, with the worst fake lip-plumping ever, introduces herself by saying. “My husband is a doctor, and my face – all science.” Gardner’s Cristal, says, in her high-pitched way, “I may have a baby voice, but my husband is 100 years old.” Mulaney plays twins Brian and Tam, appearing together. “I’m as gay as my twin,” says Brian. “I’m as gay as my wife,” answers Tam. They own a skin care line that’s popular in Iraq. Jealous? A funny ending to a funny episode.

SNL returns on May 5. Donald Glover gets the host/musical guest combo, the latter as his musical alter ego Childish Gambino.

Watch the John Mulaney/Jack White episode of SNL on Hulu