Jacob Elordi Was So Terrible on ‘SNL’ That Beautiful People Should Never Be Allowed to Host Again

Saturday Night Live had a grating habit in the 1990s of inviting hot, young female stars to host, and then putting them through a monologue in which leering cast members like Chris Kattan hit on them. Sarah Michelle Gellar wasn’t the first or last to go through the humiliation car wash. Who deserves to be groped on national TV by Horatio Sanz?

Play

Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox.

It’s not an evolution that SNL turned the “I want you!” spotlight on a hot, young male star last night. Unfortunately for Jacob Elordi, it wasn’t just a cheap monologue device but the premise for seemingly half the night’s sketches. A month’s break for the holidays and this is the best the writing staff could do?

From humping Saltburn clips to a lame audience Q&A (the eternal SNL fallback strategy when a host doesn’t have the chops to deliver jokes), it was all very, very tired. A sample audience question wasn’t even a question, simply a female fan swooning, “I just want to look at you.”

Play

Then there was “Crown Your Short King,” a Bachelorette spoof about a woman who has to choose a mate from three men under 5-foot-8. Who will win Chloe Fineman’s heart? She mustered up lukewarm affection for the contestants but guess who showed up — Jacob Elordi! The joke? He’s hot. Was there a twist? No, she chose the hot guy.

Surely SNL’s writers had it out of their system by mid-show, right? Not even close. In a sketch about a women-only AA group, the ladies get angry when idiots like Mikey Day show up looking for support. The group is for WOMEN ONLY! But what about when Jacob Elordi stumbles in? Fire up the welcome wagon because if you haven’t heard, Elordi is hot. The recovering women scheme to get him drunk so he’ll give them “the dicking of a lifetime.” Somehow, it sounds funnier than it plays.

Play

Then SNL beat the drum a fourth time in an acting class sketch where Jacob Elordi plays a thespian who gets work by… being hot. “I flew to L.A. to give the whole Hollywood thing a shot,” he confesses to the aspiring actors. “And as I walked off the plane, Selena Gomez came up to me, said I was gorgeous and asked me to play her boyfriend in a music video.” 

To be fair, Elordi didn’t show off a lot of comic promise during the “Look at me, I’m dreamy” sketches so maybe the writers believed their hands were tied. But a sketch about a late-night comedy show that insists on making an actor’s attractiveness the night’s only gag would be funnier and more interesting than all of this. There had to be a way to reimagine the “All the women (and gay men) want Jacob Elordi” punchline by the time the show got to sketch number four. If not, then stick to goofy-looking funny people as hosts. Sitting through endlessly recycled hot jokes is worse than being seduced by Chris Kattan.