‘Saturday Night Live’ Highlights: Walton Goggins Hosts

Walton Goggins is having a pretty phenomenal year. His much-talked about turn on “The White Lotus” has garnered him affection and disgust in equal measure, with many women around the world left wondering if they might’ve been the one to “fix him.” He also closed out a legendary four-season run as Baby Billy Freeman on “The Righteous Gemstones,” forever making “Teenjus” part of the common vernacular. Now, ahead of Emmy’s voting commencing next month, Goggins took on the penultimate episode of “SNL 50,” a special moment for him considering it was the annual Mother’s Day show as well.

To celebrate this, Goggins had his own mother join him on stage for a unique dance. After explaining how she raised him as a single parent with the assistance of his aunts and other friends, Goggins honored his mother by offering his hand and bringing her up before the audience. Though their dance initially started out as traditional, Goggins and his mother proceeded to show off their southern roots by kicking off a session of clogging. “Saturday Night Live” isn’t typically given the chance to go too sentimental, but when it does, it always manages to remind us of how magical the show can be for guests, cast, and crew.

Goggins may have needed to rely on cue cards for most of the night, but he looked like he was having a lot of fun no matter what. Of the live sketches, the best one was the first, which takes the been-there-done-that set-up of the Continental Congress and turns it into a hilarious indictment against our Founding Fathers, who maybe should have been referred to as our Founding Bros. In the bit, Goggins plays an obstructor named Matt who feels the most important amendment (next to our right to free speech) should simply be “guns.” It’s a little hard to laugh at considering how this choice by a small group of men hundreds of years ago continues to wreak havoc on U.S. society, but Goggins and the “SNL” cast’s willingness to go there — and be as silly as possible in doing so — garnered chuckles.

We love a weird bit and paired with featured player Jane Wickline’s odd sensibility, this one might be the strangest we’ve seen in a while. It starts goofy enough with Wickline finding a baby shoe in Central Park that leads her to launch into song. Her hope is to find the baby whom the shoe belongs to, but he instead comes to find that its wearer is a fully-grown man with exceptionally tiny feet. Goggins nails the self-seriousness of this comic character and gets a boost from best friend Sam Rockwell, who appears as a balloon salesman with similarly tiny tootsies.

Rumors abound that this might be Mikey Day’s last season at “SNL.” If so, he’d be going out on top with one of the most laugh-out-loud moments on Weekend Update in recent memory. Brought on to discuss Trump’s tariff chaos, Day is introduced as a “guy who just walked through a spider-web.” This soon comes to define his entire presence rather than the initial purpose of talking about current affairs. Day’s physical comedy is on another level and even seemed to get away from the comedian as he was unable to fully remove the shirt his character comes to try and rip off.

Later in the night, we were treated to another Dan Bulla “Midnight Matinee,” which have been popping up frequently this season and always manage to make the mundane utterly unique. This time around, Bulla takes aim at the use of the squatty potty, with Andrew Dismukes playing a recently promoted employee who can’t think about anything other than his boss and his wife shitting after seeing the appliance in their bathroom. As a squatty potty user, I feel attacked, but as a fan of “SNL,” I appreciate their ability to find humor in every detail of our existence.