Saturday Night News with Christopher Guest

After a one-episode hiatus for the news segment, Christopher Guest is back at the news desk, still too dry and fumbling his lines, though he seems to do better when interacting with the guests. He only has a pair of jokes tonight; one of them is a deliberately bad pun (Eddie Murphy stars as the young Frank Sinatra in “Old Blue Eyes is Black”), while the other (students not locating the USA on a map) died on arrival. Paul Harvey (Rich Hall) returns to tell The Rest of the Story about three brothers, working in plugs for different advertisers until Guest stops him and spoils the ending (they were the Kennedys). Nothing special, but decent. BBC journalist Angela Bradleigh (Pamela Stephenson) gives the British perspective on Reagan’s proposed spending cuts, though most of the commentary is obscured by the prosthetic teeth Stephenson wears (aside from choice lines like “tiny unpronounceable islands” and working in a sung “five gold rings”). Another bit that wasn’t anything special, but Stephenson does deserve praise for pulling it off. Eddie Murphy discusses the trends in Christmas toys, specifically shrinking GI Joes, Ken’s effeminate demeanor (probably the part of this that’s aged the worst), and all the celebrity lookalike dolls including the “anatomically-correct” Michael Jackson doll. This kills with the audience, and Murphy has many good lines all throughout (especially how the gremlin resembles the offspring of Miles Davis and Sammy Davis).

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