Grading LBJ on SNL

LeBron James hosted the season premier of Saturday Night Live. Here’s how he did.

Opening monologue: LeBron comes out looking very tall and very velvety and also a little nervous. Fortunately his monologue is mostly a pre-recorded commercial for Nike. That’s one way of dealing with stage fright. And now we’re back to LeBron. The joke is that he solved the universal health care crisis while the Nike commercial pre-recorded bit was running, only we missed it. Seriously, do you think LBJ has ever thought about universal health care in his life? I say no. Does that make the monologue funnier or sadder? I say both. LBJ Grade: C

Sketch 1: Charity Speech Hey, it’s LeBron playing a professional basketball player named LeBron James! Interestingly the character LeBron James is playing holds many of the same records as the real LeBron James, like youngest player to score 1000 points. I wonder how many SNL writers it took to come up with this character. Four?

Sketch 2: High School Musical 3. LeBron plays a high school basketball player in a spoof of the Disney musical. He’s stiff and dreadlocked and does a little rap. It might be too early to compare this to when Peyton Manning was on SNL, but they’re both colossal sports stars the comparison was bound to happen eventually, so let’s just do it now. Here’s the critical difference between them: Manning was willing to make a jackass out of himself while LeBron isn’t willing to appear as anything but cool. I blame Nike. LBJ Grade: C+

SNL Digital Short. Really fantastic lyrics and a pretty great premise. Nothing beats a goofy looking white guy (Andy Samberg) singing a love song to the delusional, dictatorial leader of an enemy country (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). Bonus points for the biting political and social subtext.

Sketch 3: NBA Read To Achieve PSA. Wow. LeBron has now played himself in two of the first three sketches. Some acting chops we are all witness to. Are the writers afraid of making him do anything outside of his comfort zone? Sure looks like it. Wait. What’s that? There is a game of one-on-one in the sketch and….LBJ posts up? I guess they are pushing him out of his comfort zone. Sadly the sketch isn’t terribly funny and compared to the Peyton Manning NFL/United Way PSA from last season it’s a big dud. LBJ Grade: C

Sketch 4: Lyle Kane Show on BET. LeBron plays a dorky white guy who’s actually a black guy on a BET show hosted by a dorky white guy who is patently not a black guy. This character kinda works for LBJ because the stiffness is built right in, although at this point it’s clear the the extent of the humor in this sketch is going to be the sophomoric conceit. Dorky white guy on BET! Get it? Get it? Yeah, me too. To his credit LeBron is starting to show that he has a — what do you call it? — personality. Unfortunately this is the only positive thing that can be said about this sketch. It is horrendous. LeBron is the only mildly funny aspect of it and he’s only been given about 29 words of dialog and 63 seconds of camera time. LBJ Grade: B

Weekend Update: I cannot stand Seth Meyers. Doesn’t help that the jokes aren’t funny. Where’s Norm McDonald? Also, is there more of an ethnic chameleon than Fred Armisen?

Sketch 5: Solid Gold. So LBJ finally is coming out of his shell. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he looks like a Thriller-era Micheal Jackson (jheri curl and mullet!) and he’s wearing skin tight gold pants and a headband. Actually, no. That’s good news too. Pretty funny. But he only has one line, so points are deducted for lack of difficulty. LBJ Grade: B

TV Fun House. Eh.

Sketch 6: 106 and Park. Simply put, Kanye West should have been the host. Self-deprecating humor always work, but it works especially well when the guy doing it has (admittedly) the biggest ego in the world. Kanye, the Nobel Prize, and a pumpkin with a champagne bottle in it is high comedy. Hey, and there’s LeBron James….playing himself! He just stands there. Best sketch of the night by far, but can you really grade LBJ for appearing for three seconds? He stood there. That’s not funny, but it’s not exactly unfunny. LBJ Grade: incomplete

* Kanye saved his freestyle with the last line about getting back on NBC. George Bush still doesn’t like black people though.

Sketch 7: Great Moments in Guidance Counseling: You’ve got to be kidding me! It’s LeBron playing LeBron James in high school! This is ridiculous. And how were they not able to get an actual SVSM letter jacket? Weak. Four out of the seven skits have featured LeBron playing some version of himself and one of the skits had him playing a fictional high school basketball player, which is (essentially) what he’s playing right now. That’s five out of seven sketches. In the other two sketches he had about four lines total. Not a very strong showing. Not a very strong showing at all. LBJ Grade: C

Welcome to your new season of Saturday Night Live!