What Adele Was Doing on <em>Saturday Night Live</em>

So there was something viscerally lovely about seeing her pop up in sketches like the one in which a group of friends—in the year 2019—visited a fortune teller. The predictions they received were puzzling ones about dreary social isolation and Zoom mishaps. As Kate McKinnon’s hammy psychic looked Adele’s character in the eye and spoke of a future inexplicably filled with adult coloring books, Adele appeared to be biting her tongue so as to not crack up.

Fans of Adele’s singing did get a concession in the form of a sketch imagining Adele—the actual, famous Adele—as a cast member on The Bachelor. While other contestants tried to woo their hunk with chitchat, Adele broke into her hit singles—including “Rolling in the Deep,” “When We Were Young,” and “Someone Like You”—at inappropriate times.

The bit was funny because it relocated the high drama of Adele’s music into the banality of a reality dating show. But the actual point of the sketch was to prove that Adele could still sing (as if anyone had doubted it) and to remind people that her catalog includes some absolutely walloping choruses (as if anyone had forgotten!). In emphasizing her songs’ bombast, the sketch also cut a contrast with the hypnotic cool of H.E.R., the R&B singer who ably served as the night’s official musical guest.

The danger of trying to maintain one’s likable brand via SNL, however, became apparent late in the show. Adele, McKinnon, and Heidi Gardner played divorced women advertising vacations to Africa, a continent that their characters seemed to use for sex tourism. As McKinnon’s character cooed a list of amenities that included “tribesmen,” Adele totally lost composure. She laughed—or stifled laughs—through almost the entire segment. It can be charming to see entertainers break character (see: Jimmy Fallon’s entire career), but given that the sketch arguably reveled in the same colonialist attitudes it tried to mock, it was a weird time to chuckle uncontrollably. (Not helping with the backlash now unfolding on social media: Adele’s recent Instagram picture that many followers felt showed her treating Jamaican culture as a costume.)

Read: ‘SNL’ takes a much-needed break from politics

Beyond that sour moment, the episode will go down as a blip both in Adele’s career and in SNL’s history. Less than two weeks before an election that, according to early signs, could break voter-turnout records, SNL’s political fare last night was strikingly meek. The cold open was even more forgettable than the debate it sent up, with Jim Carrey continuing to play Joe Biden as a collection of facial tics and suppressed rage. The only jolt of energy in the sketch came from McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani, who worried that he’d been caught in a Borat trap again. Later, a fake ad fretted that Americans will have nothing to talk about if Donald Trump leaves office. Many viewers might have wondered if SNL was really fretting about itself, even though seeing the show send up Trump hasn’t been very enjoyable for a long time.  

“Weekend Update” at least had some fun by staging a mock Village People concert to comment on Trump’s use of “YMCA” and “Macho Man” at his rallies despite the band asking him not to do so. SNL’s Village People sang insinuations about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and then leveled a threat to shave Ivanka Trump’s head. When the “Weekend Update” anchor Colin Jost objected to the band saying such incendiary things about the first family, Kenan Thompson’s cop-crooner character explained, “Hey man, everything is legal if you sing it in a song.” Fact check: untrue—though, as Adele knows, having a beloved music career does buy you a lot of goodwill.

Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers pop culture and music.