Season 48, Episode 15: Jenna Ortega/The 1975
Airdate: March 12, 2023
Sketches:
- "Cold Open": Two hosts take on the red carpet for this year's Oscars.
- "School vs. School": The teams on an educational game show are West Grove High School and... Professor Zander's Academy for Extraordinary Children.
- "Please Don't Destroy: Road Trip": A burnt out Jenna Ortega joins the guys on a cross-country road trip that quickly goes awry.
- "The Parent Trap": While filming a remake of The Parent Trap (1961), a crew member (Fred Armisen) stands in for the star's body double.
- "Ridiculousness": A spoof of Ridiculousness.
- "Waffle House": Two high-schoolers have a conversation about their future in front of a Waffle House.
- "Exorcism": A family's upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Shaw, assists in exorcising a demon.
- "Jingle Pitch": Law firm Donalds & Dominguez recruit musical duo Soul Booth to come up with a jingle from their unremarkable phone number.
Weekend Update guests: Molly Kearney as Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, and James Austin Johnson as himself. The 1975 perform "I'm In Love With You" and "Oh Caroline".
Tropes:
- Age-Inappropriate Dress: "Ridiculousness" opens with Rob Dyrdek telling the audience that he's almost 50, even if he still dresses like a teenage bro.
- Big Stupid Doo Doo Head: The demon in "Exorcism" tells Mrs. Shaw that she's stupid and going to hell. Nonplussed, Mrs. Shaw dares it to do better. It ends up with "You ugly...uh....uh."
- Connected All Along: The Twist Ending of "Waffle House" is that one of the rednecks responsible for the chaos in the restaurant, which was completely separate from the couple's discussion outside, is actually the father of the female protagonist and drove her there.
- Driving Song: Parodied. "Road Trip" begins with a jaunty song about going on a cross-country road trip with your pals, but every once in a while the song cuts back to the less-idyllic car ride where the passengers are getting increasingly fed up with each other.
- Funny Background Event: The premise of "Waffle House". The teenagers are having a melodramatic conversation about their relationship and futures in the foreground, but in the background all sorts of chaos is going on in the restaurant.
- Hollywood Exorcism: Subverted. On a stormy night, a white couple has recruited a priest to get the demon out of their young daughter... but then their black neighbor, bothered by all the noise, takes the cross and sasses the demon out herself.
- Never Mess with Granny: The demon possessing the teenage girl in "Exorcism" is unfazed by the priest trying to cast it out...but then the annoyed Mrs. Shaw, an elderly Black woman, comes downstairs furious at all the noise. She grabs the priest's cross and proceeds to browbeat the demon so badly that it asks to be exorcised.
- The Noisy Straw: In "Road Trip" Jenna pointedly and loudly drinks the last of John's slushie. Annoyed, he venmos her for it.
- No-Sell: In "Exorcism," the evil demon inside a teenage girl tries all manner of tricks, from insults to levitation, to scare and intimidate the people in the room with her. Mrs. Shaw, her elderly upstairs neighbor, not only remains unfazed, she outright tells the demon to knock off its shenanigans—and it listens.
- Symbolically Broken Object: The girls' divorced parents in "The Parent Trap" are shown in a photograph of them torn down the middle.
- Unstable Powered Woman: Parodied with the teenage girl "Zena" in "School vs. School", a composite of the X-Men Rogue and Jean Grey (both one-time examples of the trope), who wails that the Professor X stand-in doesn't think she can control her powers or emotions.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Mrs. Shaw doesn't seem all that surprised by the presence of a demon possessing her downstairs neighbors' daughters in "Exorcism." She explains that she's worked as an elementary school crossing guard for decades and has thus completely lost any fear of threats either normal or supernatural.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In "Waffle House", the female protagonist's father seemingly forgets his dog when he picks up his daughter.
