SNL wrapped its 40th season with an old, reliable friend at the helm: Louis C.K. hosted the show for a third straight year, and, as usual, his monologue set a hard-to-match bar for the sketches that followed. This time around, C.K.’s opening set played with some bold, taboo material, with the comic riffing on his “mild” racism, the joys of pedophilia (“this is my last joke, probably”), and the uncanny similarities between his daughters’ rapport and Israel-Palestine relations.
There’s already been some controversy about the bit, but really this is classic C.K.: a tad close to offensive, but uniquely hilarious in his ability to use suspect, seemingly reductive comparisons to belittle his own incompetence.
