Adele on Saturday Night Live review: not a grand comeback, more of a 'hello'
The highlight of Adele’s hosting of the American comedy institution Saturday Night Live came during an unfunny parody of the reality show The Bachelor. With microphone in hand, Adele strode off the stage and into the studio audience, belting out the opening line to her 2011 hit Someone Like You.
This was a reminder of the stunning vocal virtuosity of the reclusive singer. It was also a demonstration of just what was missing through the rest of the 90 minutes. In her monologue at the start, Adele had announced she wouldn’t be singing. She was simply “too scared” to act and deliver a tune at the same time. “I'd rather just put on some wigs, have a glass of wine or six and see what happens.”).
Adele further revealed that her next album – the details of which are swaddled in mystery – isn’t even “half-finished”. And she used her big introduction at the top of the broadcast to humorously acknowledge the “controversy” – more accurately, the synthetic online version of controversy – regarding her recent weight loss.
“I know I look really, really different since you last saw me,” said the 32-year-old. “But actually, because of all the Covid restrictions... I had to travel light and I could only bring half of me… And this is the half I chose.”
She proceeded to skewer her reputation for dropping f-bombs on air. “I always get very nervous on live TV, but tonight especially so, because I swear a lot. And because I'm British I tend to skip all those medium ones and go straight to the worst ones.”
Adele’s music is not quite chortle-a-minute. Yet she displayed impressive comic timing on SNL. Nor does she crave the spotlight for its own sake, and so didn’t mind being overshadowed by Saturday Night Live regulars such as Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson.
But if Adele was firing on all cylinders, the same could not be said for Saturday Night Live itself. The problem with the series, now wheezing through its 46th year, is that it’s one of those “lost in translation” affairs that only Americans appear to find funny. Not even Adele was laughing – and she was appearing in the skits.
The only time she struggled to keep a straight face was during a dreadful routine in which she and McKinnon played love-hungry divorcees appearing in a tourist board ad for “Africa”. The Londoner was soon chuckling her heart out. Perhaps the laughter was to hide her embarrassment.
But then Saturday Night Live has rarely troubled the funny bone since its early Eighties glory days when it provided a leg-up to the likes of Eddie Murphy and Billy Murray. Here the star power was entirely courtesy of Adele. She held her own in the episode's only rib-tickling sketch, in which McKinnon played a fortune teller in 2019 furnishing a group of friends with a glimpse of what awaited them in 2020.
“I see you on the phone with a man from FedEx,” McKinnon told Adele. “You’re crying – ‘where’s my adult colouring book?’”
“I don’t colour. I like going to museums and concerts and stuff like that,” replied Adele. “I see no concerts in 2020… only colouring,” was the reply. For Saturday Night Live, it was hilarious.
Adele later dressed up as a ghost to spook Pete Davidson and rushed through snippets from her hit parade in the Bachelor parody. And she starred in a terrible, Eighties-themed routine about “A** Angel Perfume Jeans”. It felt like a rejected outtake from the Kenny Everett Video Show, circa 1982.
The actual musical component of the broadcast was courtesy of R'n'B singer H.E.R. (aka 23-year-old San Francisco native Gabriella Wilson). Her two numbers were sublime – yet not half as sublime as Adele’s teasing tiptoe through the start of Someone Like You.
Adele was a charming and very competent mistress of ceremonies. But with no songs from her and little solid information about her next album, fans may have been left feeling that she had done little beyond popping up from the other side of the Atlantic to say “hello”. If this was the start of Adele’s grand comeback, then the only way is up.
