Saturday Night Live is stuck in something of a holding pattern this season, but nowhere is the situation more dire than perhaps at the Weekend Update desk. Sure, Colin Jost and Michael Che have been Update co-anchors for the past four seasons and have earned themselves a gig hosting the Emmys, but something is still missing from their banter. Mainly, chemistry. After all this time, it’s really unclear what their relationships is. Are they friends? Co-workers? Rivals? Do they hang out together outside the show? Hate each other’s guts? Compete for laughs? I mean, I guess they get along, but you can’t tell from Weekend Update.

This non-chemistry between Jost and Che became ever so stark a little over a week ago, when former SNL writer John Mulaney dropped in to join Pete Davidson for a Weekend Update segment about the geriatric thriller The Mule. Even though Mulaney and Davidson seem to ostensibly have nothing in common, their IRL Odd Couple friendship erupted on the screen like a super volcano. Every joke they delivered hit harder because they could back each other up with giddy support, making their five minute segment the breakout of the entire show. Which has made me wonder…hey, how come John Mulaney and Pete Davidson aren’t the Weekend Update hosts?

On his own, John Mulaney has the kind of pedigree that makes him look like a natural Weekend Update anchor. He spent years working behind-the-scenes as a Saturday Night Live writer like Tina Fey did and he has that good-natured, snarky nerd vibe that Seth Meyers held down for years. But put him next to pop culture darling Pete Davidson, and you’re confronted with an intoxicating comedy duo that seems perfect for the madness of 2019. While Mulaney has the wits to come up with the single best political joke of the Trump era, Davidson himself feels like a personification of these times: wildly mischievous, somewhat sad, and so watchable you can’t take your eyes off him.

But what really makes me yearn to see Mulaney and Davidson take the Weekend Update desk as a team is how funny they are together. The two took a seemingly boring concept — Clint Eastwood’s disaster of a movie, The Mule — and made five hilarious minutes of comedy out of it. It wasn’t just a bit that poked fun at Eastwood as a director. Mulaney and Davidson also found time to poke fun at themselves. There was the recurring bit about how Andy Garcia was once mean to Mulaney at a Lakers game (and Davidson saw that), the gag about threeways, the Mule-aney pun, and the dark gallows humor of Davidson attempting to make light of his own public suicide threat. In short, it was a joke gauntlet. Both comics threw a variety of joke styles out and riffed off one another with a natural ease we haven’t seen on Update since the days of “Really!?!? with Seth and Amy.”

It just makes one think, if they can make The Mule that funny, what they could do for the news?

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