Aubrey Plaza’s Saturday Night Live hosting gig featured the usual mix of hilarious and “???” sketches that we’ve come to expect from the series in its 48th season. The thing is, though, nobody is going to remember whether or not they cared about “The Black Lotus” or the weird Miss Universe thing. No, no. Everyone is, rightfully, losing it over getting a double dose of Parks and Recreation reunions with Plaza and Amy Poehler. And honestly, we’d be happy if they never left.
Brilliantly enough, Plaza and Poehler appeared as themselves for their first reunion…and their Parks characters for the second one. Plaza has a history as an NBC page. Obviously, that meant honoring an SNL tradition. Nope, not the one where the host sings during the monologue — the required tour of Studio 8H. Just as the host was making a snarky comment about how people on the tour always wanted to know if they’d see a celebrity, quipping, “no. You’re going to see an old security guy eating a sandwich or a writer crying because their sketch got cut. Famous people don’t just — …” a wild Amy Poehler appeared to prove her wrong. As we all know by now, famous people do, in fact, just make surprise visit to this set.
At this point, we were kind of hoping Poehler would just do a complete Weekend Update takeover. Full offense, but it was it was simply far superior in her day. Well, let’s just say we kept winning because we didn’t get exactly what we asked for…but something almost better instead. It all started with a bit about local governments having a hard time hiring people. Enter Plaza’s Parks and Recreation character, April Ludgate, to work on convincing the masses to do their part. (Sort of.) At this point, Poehler joined her as none other than Leslie Knope.
Unsurprisingly, Leslie wasn’t interested in government jobs — she wanted intel on Joe Biden and details from Colin Jost on what it was like working the Update desk. She even mentioned that she used to love watching “when Seth Meyers did it by himself with no one else.” Of course, we all know that Meyers did Update with Poehler, but Poehler and Knope can’t exist in the same universe. (…or can they?) So, instead of Poehler taking over the Update desk, it was Knope who cycled through two “planned” jokes that were too mean before getting to one she was ok with. The whole time, April Ludgate was all about the secondhand embarrassment and trying, very hard, to distance herself from Leslie’s antics.
So, to slightly paraphrase Poehler Knope here, yeah. It felt good…it felt nice.
But don’t take our word for it. Plenty of people agree, so here are just a few reactions.
So, are you with us? Want to see more of Leslie Knope and April Ludgate on Saturday Night Live? Drop us a comment!
