Saturday Night Live review: Bad Bunny a mixed bag even with help from some friends

Bad Bunny is a talented guy and I am not disputing that at all. He knows how to create a song and he knows how to mesh that with an excellent sense of how to sell himself to the world. But being on Saturday Night Live can be awkward for lots of people.

In fact, many of the best performances on SNL haven't been from comedians or musicians with a great amount of suave. Comedians seem to struggle with being involved in skits where there are people saying things they don't control. A comedian is normally a singular performer and adding other stimuli often doesn't work.

A musician, unless it's the incredibly deadpan Paul Simon, sometimes has too much charisma that does not hold together well in skits many times designed to show how dumb other people are. This was Bad Bunny's issue. He certainly isn't dumb, but his pace of speaking English slowed the scenes down enough to kill the momentum of the skit. That isn't his fault; That's the fault of the writer of the skit.

Bad Bunny hosted Saturday Night Live but the show lacked many laughs

Because when Bad Bunny was able to speak his native Spanish, he was fantastic. Saturday Night Live should have written better scripts incorporating more Spanish. They did that to some degree and it worked. The skit with Bad Bunny and Pedro Pascal as the parents of a character who just brought home his "white" girlfriend was marvelous. It worked because Bad Bunny (and Pascal as well) were able to speak Spanish except for key words at the end of each sentence.

Mick Jagger speaks English just fine, of course, and he made a guest appearance in two skits. The Saturday Night Live writers wasted him as well. He came in at the end of two scenes, and one was forced and unnecessary (he was the father of some kind of crime family and one of his sons was Bad Bunny but the bit just appeared to be, "Oh, look! Mick Jagger just walked on the set!").

The two songs that Bad Bunny performed were "Un Preview" and "Monaco." "Un Preview" featured an odd rocking horse in the background, but he still was in total control of the audience. The set for "Monaco" was better conceived. Still, neither song was a waste and Bad Bunny doesn't do bad performances. Now only if he had better material to work with during his Saturday Night Live hosting gig, the overall show would have been better.

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