The many faces of Emma Stone on Saturday Night Live (Photos: NBC)
This weekend, Emma Stone returns to Saturday Night Live for her fifth hosting gig. The five-timer distinction has become more notable over the decade or so, even as it's become a far less exclusive club (what once was the rarefied domain of Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Candice Bergen and a few other legends now includes Jonah Hill and Dwayne Johnson).
But if the notion of having earned one's place in the SNL pantheon exists, Emma Stone certainly has. Since she first hosted in 2010, Stone has proved to be uncommonly adept at every kind of comedy style the show has thrown at her, featuring in some of the best sketches of the last 15 years. She's the best Saturday Night Live guest host to emerge this century (so far), and it's not a particularly close race.
What makes Stone's accomplishments on SNL all the more impressive is that, despite a childhood ambition to become a sketch performer, she doesn't have that background. For the majority of guest hosts from film or dramatic TV, keeping up with the regulars in the cast and holding their own for a sketch or two, is enough to be impressive. Stone's episodes tend to feel more like the ones hosted by sketch-comedy veterans or SNL alums. This bridal-shower sketch from 2011, in which Stone plays Wallace, a co-worker who severely misjudges the level of raunch expected at the part, feels like the actress trying out a recurring character, like a full-time cast member would.
Stone's best SNL moments have always showcased her tremendous adaptability. She's up for the absolute silliest sketch premises, like her multiple appearances as poster pin-up Chrissy Knox, who comes alive in Pete Davidson's dreams as a Maxim-reader's wet dream with vocal fry. There is nothing secretly deep about these sketches, but Stone throws herself so grotesquely into her performance that she makes the formulaic sketch work. Meanwhile, she can fit in seamlessly with Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant in one of their deeply specific musical parodies, in this case a Judds-esque Christmas song about regifting a candle.
What's so fascinating about Stone's success on SNL is the way that it has parallelled her success as a movie star. The very same qualities that make her such an exciting and daring actress on film are the reason why she's so good in these sketches. It makes sense that broad comedies and musical parody would work for Stone given her career, which launched from small roles in Superbad and The House Bunny and eventually led to an Oscar win for La La Land. But it's Stone's willingness to dive into more arch material that, more and more, sets her apart as an actress. Her performance this fall in Poor Things, as a woman "reborn" with a new brain who must re-experience the world anew as an adult, is her second collaboration with Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Their previous film together, The Favourite, earned Stone an Oscar nomination as a secretly ruthless young scullery maid. These films call upon Stone to transcend the girl-next-door charms that made her a movie star to begin with and instead take on characters who are thornier and more archly comedic.
It's this ability to find the comedy in incredibly niche setups that has made her the perfect star for the niche sketches that writers like Julio Torres and Bowen Yang specialize in. Torres wrote the phenomenal "Wells for Boys" sketch, a fake advertisement for a Fisher Price-style kids toy for sensitive, introspective young boys who are destined to "grow up and have a wildly passionate creative life… just not yet." Stone plays the boy's understanding mother, who indulges her preternaturally wistful young son with viewings of Y Tu Mama Tambien and knows that when he whispers into the well, he's telling it a secret. In the sketch's big moment of comedic release, Stone flips out on another boy who thinks the well is weird ("everything is for you, and this one thing is for him!"), giving voice to the sketch's outsider perspective.
It sounds silly to say that a two-minute sketch like "Wells for Boys" is an acting tour de force, but Stone packs a lot of range into those two minutes. But perhaps that compliment is even more applicable to "The Actress," a sketch penned by Torres and Yang that explores the introspective process of a woman who plays the cheated-upon spouse in a gay porn video. The writing walks a tightrope — drift one way and it's too silly, the other way and you lose the jokes. Stone walks that tightrope as her character earnestly strains to find the truth of her in-sketch character, "Dierdre," amid the scraps she's allotted in the costume bin.
There's a commentary in the sketch about actresses who must make the most of underwritten characters, taken to the extreme (where is an actress more bereft of real character than in a gay porn?). Stone's line readings are perfectly stilted on camera, while her inner monologue searching for the truth of Dierdre hits the perfect note of melodrama.
Who knows whether Stone will appear in another sketch that's as creative and smart as "The Actress" on December 2. The one certainty is that whatever flavor of comedy gets thrown at her, she'll be able to handle it. The same kind of comedic instincts that allow her to ruthlessly satirize white savior characters as Whitney Siegel in Showtime’s The Curse are the same instincts that will serve her well whether she's screeching about some nasty hot dogs on a poster or tumbling down some esoteric, queer-coded rabbit hole. She's good at everything, which makes her great at Saturday Night Live.
Saturday Night Live airs Saturday nights at 11:30 PM ET on NBC. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.
Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.
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