Saturday Night Live (SNL) is one of America’s most prominent cultural institutions. There is really nothing else like it in terms of show style and prestige. Because of its cultural significance, it has this unique ability to create powerful moments; to provide comfort through their comedy sketches. 

After 9/11, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani came on and did a tribute with first responders. When Kate McKinnon sang as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election, I cried. A week ago, thinking about how the 2020 season premiere would go, I wanted something like that. I feel incredibly disillusioned by the world right now. We are in the midst of a global pandemic that has gotten much worse than it ever should have; we are a month away from the most important, and scariest, election of our lifetimes and I just have, like, a lot of homework. Going into the 46th season premiere, I wanted a comfortable moment of reassurance that “we’re stronger together.” 

I didn’t get it. I got something better.

The episode started off with a debate sketch that felt like textbook SNL – a solid joke here and there, some celebrity guests and the iconic, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” By the time the credits rolled around, it felt like SNL was back to normal. But I wanted an acknowledgement that everything is crazy. In his monologue, the week’s host Chris Rock spoke on just that.

He provided real commentary on how broken our political system has become, how we “eed to renegotiate our relationship to the government” and that “We’ve agreed in the United States that we cannot have kings , yet we have dukes and duchesses running the Senate and the Congress, making decisions for poor people.” 

Rock ended his monologue with a radical statement – yet one that was true and refreshing.  

“We can beat this if we all work together,” Rock said. “James Baldwin said, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced.’”

Younger people don’t have much interest in SNL anymore because it lacks what made it special in the first place: when the show began in 1975, it was the most immediate, young vibrant piece of entertainment on television. Today, Twitter and TikTok are bigger sources of comedic content for young people because they do what SNL did weekly, every minute. Rock’s monologue was closer to the soul of SNL – it was fresh and immediate, not cliche. It was as engaging as Twitter because it was also commenting at that speed.

The episode took off from there. Kate McKinnon gave a silent, touching Ruth Bader Ginsburg tribute. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion, however, might have stolen the show with a powerful performance of her song “Savage” that included clips from Malcolm X’s pivotal 1962 “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?” speech. She ended with an assertion that “we need to protect our Black women and love our Black women, because at the end of the day we need our Black women. We need to protect our Black men and stand up for our Black men, because at the end of the day, we’re tired of seeing hashtags of our Black men.”

The antidote to the toxicity in our culture is not something sweet or comfortable. McKinnon singing “Hallelujah” was what we needed to deal with the hopeless feeling that followed the 2016 election. What we got this week is what we needed: an assertion that things are broken, but that it is our job to fix them and we can do it. That, coupled with some phallic jokes, reminded us that we can breathe for a second.