Usually, Saturday Night Live saves the really weird, really funny stuff for the end of the show, but this week they gave the post-monologue slot to something genuinely great and bizarre: the 85th Annual Westminster Daddy Show, hosted by Matt Damon and Kate McKinnon. It’s exactly what you think it is:
The sketch is a showpiece for physical comedy from the cast, as Beck Bennett, Alex Moffat,* and Chris Redd somehow combine the walks and demeanors of the “West Palm Golf Daddy,” the “Berkeley Tweedy Daddy,” and the “Wall Street Business Daddy,” respectively, with dog show classics like “The Dog Who Is Visibly Unsure Why a Judge Is Poking at His Teeth But Just Kind of Goes Along With It” and “Bartleby the Dog.” Melissa Villaseñor’s appearance as an uptight Daddy trainer is an excellent silent performance—you know exactly what kind of nightmare her character is without a single line of dialogue—and Kenan Thompson packs an entire universe into ad-libbing different versions of the line “Tweedy Daddy, come here.”
But there is only one way that a Saturday Night Live sketch about the Westminster Daddy Show airing on the week Matt Damon is hosting could end: with Matt Damon a-dancin’ and a-prancin’ all the way to the Westminster Daddy Best in Show wreath. As The Informant! proved, nobody does a better vacant smile than Matt Damon, and he puts it to good use here, bouncing up and down with glee as he wins the highest honor any daddy can achieve: a funny Saturday Night Live sketch that plays to his strengths as a performer. Amuse us, daddy.
Correction, Dec. 16, 2018: This piece originally misspelled Alex Moffat’s last name.
