[VIDEO] ‘SNL’: COVID-19 Prescription Commercial

Like your laughs with a side of guilty cringe? Then it sounds like you need a dose of… COVID?

Saturday Night Live‘s latest prescription drug parody digs into the never-ending emotional confusion about the virus. Drug commercials are such an easy target for comedy. They portray a strange world where everyone is both deathly ill, but also cheerful and thankful for whatever wonder drug is curing their ailment. Look too sick and nobody will think your drug works; look too cheerful and people won’t think their sickness is bad enough to need your drug. So there’s plenty of room for jokes.

In the commercial, Heidi Gardner, Michael Longfellow and Sarah Sherman all basically get a paid vacation from their stressful lives. Gardner is an exhausted mom pawning her kids off on her inept husband (Andrew Dismukes). Sherman gets to regale her coworkers about her time off, while Longfellow just spends time reading in a forest cabin.

After years of living in (or denying) fear, it feels a little strange to treat COVID so cavalierly. But if you’re vaccinated, getting it now is kind of like getting chicken pox in grade school; it’s gross, but also, you get to stay home and watch TV. So… enjoy it? Sure, there are long-term effects. But like Longfellow says from his serene porch in the woods, “If [my brain gets] 10 percent worse, but I don’t have to talk to a single person for a week, I’ll take that deal in a horsebeat.”

Sherman has already made her mark on the show by creating some of the grossest, most surreal sketches in recent memory (most notably, Meatballs and Chucky). This episode finds her tackling a number of “normal” roles, including this one which doesn’t have any of her trademark screaming or bug-out eyes that marks a standard Sarah Sherman appearance. Hopefully, this points to her finally moving from featured player to the main cast — a move long overdue for the show’s most distinctive comedic voice.

What did you think of SNL‘s Amy Schumer-hosted episode? Grade it below, then drop some comments.