In a sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live, cast member Andrew Dismukes played a suburban husband who throws a successful dinner party. As he basked in the company of his friends, he proposed a sweet, well-intentioned idea.
“Guys,” he said. “Am I crazy? We should do this, like, every Sunday!” Instead of agreeing, however, his friends reacted with a mix of confusion and discomfort, leading him to gesticulate desperately: “This! Us! Sunday Supper, every week!” As he repeated “Sunday Supper,” the anodyne phrase eventually became funny through sheer force of desperation.
Unfortunately for Dismukes’s character, the inconvenient demands of grown-up life make such commitments hard to stick with. One friend (Sarah Sherman) raised the difficulties of securing a babysitter (“those teens drive a hard bargain”); another (Ashley Padilla) noted that she and her husband usually have dinner with her parents on Sunday. In response, Dismukes’s character quietly cycled from disappointment to wounded understanding to a complete unraveling, as his wife (Melissa McCarthy, the episode’s host) looked on disapprovingly.
Eventually, after disappearing to his room, he returned carrying his clothes in a bindle and wearing a drifter’s jacket. “I am running away and never coming back,” he announced, his voice dripping with earnest sadness. “Because I’m embarrassed I got too excited about Sunday Supper, and no one else wanted to do Sunday Supper.” After a bizarre monologue about befriending and then murdering a fellow drifter, he mournfully sauntered off into the night, having accepted his fate as a social outcast.
Much of the sketch’s humor was powered by Dismukes’s ability to use his lanky, nervous frame to suggest that his character is still a scared little boy who never grew up. He specializes in satirizing men who worry they can’t live up to some imagined ideal of masculinity and who implode as a result. A regular cast member since 2022, the best moment of his run might be a Weekend Update piecewhere he created a puppet of his dad who told Dismukes he was proud of him for being “the 17th most famous current cast member on SNL.”
[Read: What does SNL think of straight adult men?]
Last night’s sketch used these talents to tap into the ongoing concerns surrounding the loneliness crisis, as many Americans feel more isolated than ever. In particular, some men have been hit hard by the trend. One oft-cited statistic claims that 20% of young men say they have no friends. Many guys deal with a less extreme version of the problem, as adult responsibilities get in the way of hanging with the fellas. (Up to 70% of men say they don’t see their friends enough.)
The result is that modern life can make a full-grown man feel like an awkward teenager who worries that no one likes them. Though McCarthy was hosting the show for a sixth time, she gave Dismukes the space required to portray a guy whose inability to handle polite rejection leads to a complete breakdown. In the sketch, McCarthy’s character, who called her husband “a burden on my life,” also pointed out that he’s threatened to run away before, following such crises. Sure enough, he returned shortly after leaving: “The neighbor’s dog was outside, and I got scared,” he said. If it’ll make our friends feel better, maybe it’s worth just calling a babysitter and committing to the dinner party.
The post Keeping Your Friends Is Hard. SNL Knows Why. appeared first on The Atlantic.
