SNL hosted by Eli Manning with musical guest Rihanna

In this episode of SNL, Eli Manning follows his older brother Peyton's footsteps of hosting the show. Both Manning brothers are currently NFL quaterbacks, with Eli leading the Superbowl ring total with two compared to Peyton's one. However, Peyton leads the league MVP total with four compared with zero for Eli. Eli is once again faced with following Peyton's footsteps and is expected to have the same success on SNL.

SNL begins with a spot on imitation skit of the weekday morning show Fox and Friends. The skit featured the imitations of hosts Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson, and Brian Kilmeade. SNL did a great job with the skit as far as showing how all three hosts excessively rip President Obama throughout their show. SNL also made Brian Kilmeade especially brain dead with his contributions to the discussed topics. I thought that the most essential part of the skit was the fact that SNL captured and showed how biased the hosts are. What's funnier is that it wasn't really that exaggerated compared to the real Fox and Friends.

Eli Manning begins with a shaky start in his monologue. Throughout the monologue, Manning sounds like he is reading instead of speaking. I know that all of the hosts kind of have that sound, but I thought it was even more noticeable in Manning. Also, Manning spoke like he was in a hurry. I noticed that he would continue to talk while the audience was laughing and it killed his rhythm. On the bright side, the SNL writers threw in an Olive Garden joke that never fails to make an audience laugh.

The following skit features Manning playing a character on trial for murder, while his lawyer tries to prove the jury of his client's innocence. Manning was at home texting during the hour of the murder, but he turns out to be a massive creeper repetitively texting women he barely knows. His conversations of the previous night were being read aloud, with Manning giving examples of his texting faces such as ;P and :o.

 The icing on the cake for me was a picture he sent to a woman, followed by his pronouncement of the word "kewl" and his web search history that proved his innocence. His last two web searches were elderly butts, and very elderly butts. Manning made a great recovery from his monologue with this "kewl" skit.






The next skit features Manning playing himself on the set of the Madden NFL the video game. Alongside other cast members playing the parts of Tim Tebow, Victor Cruz, Ray Lewis,and Troy Polamalu, Manning is trying to find the right touchdown celebration for the game. His first attempts seemed awkward, and I wondered if the skit could recover. Then he tried to throw an imaginary grenade in celebration, shown below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PT4ErmuPRQ&feature=related&safe=active

The video quality of that link wasn't great, but that turned the skit around for me. His next celebration was making a sandwich, dropping it and picking it up, and looking around before consuming the sandwich. It wasn't as funny as it was silly, but I think silly, pointless things are funny.

Rihanna is next to perform after a short skit concerning Occupy Wall Street covered by Herb Welch. Welch, played by Bill Hader (my favorite cast member), was very unprofessional, and politically incorrect with a hint of racism. Welch made a poor video about Occupy Wall Street, downgrading its importance.

Rihanna performed with her song Talk that Talk first. Now, I'm not very familiar with pop culture, but I know Rihanna is very famous. As far as her song, she performed well, but I'm not a big fan of the lyrics. But my conflicting beliefs with musical guests doesn't hurt the rating. But I deduced that she was talking about sex due to the lyrics and how she was dancing...

 Weekend Update is tough to go over since it was a review from four months ago. However, Seth Meyers made fun of people who go to the tanning bed too much, and the star of the movie The Dictator made an appearance which was awesome. After Weekend Update, there was a short tribute to Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys who had died around early May.

 Since I have been extremely late posting this review, and since this episode was just a rerun, I am cutting this review somewhat short. For now, I'll use positives and negatives to rate the episode.

Positives: Great skits, exceptional effort and contribution from Manning

Negatives: Mediocre monologue, occasional awkward moments from Manning

Overall review: 6 out of 10.

Feel free to comment your thoughts, and thanks for reading.