18-05-2025
The Subtlety of the Macho-Men SNL Sketch
There's a low-stakes thrill in eavesdropping on strangers from afar, especially if the exchange descends into chaos. Yet a sketch in last night's season finale of Saturday Night Live—which revolved around two couples at a bar boisterously fighting for a preferred table as two men watched nearby, whiskies in hand—raised the stakes of voyeurism in fascinating ways.
The sketch began with Ego Nwodim and Marcello Hernández's characters having glasses of wine at a bar; she was ready to move in after three weeks of dating, and he was sweatily trying to steer the conversation elsewhere. He got a break when another woman, played by this week's host, Scarlett Johanssen, insisted that their table belonged to her and her man—played by the musical guest, Bad Bunny. After Nwodim urged Hernández to defend her honor, he got in Bad Bunny's face—shouting 'Ay!'—and they erupted in loud Spanish. But here's what he really said: 'I'm sorry, but my woman is a pain in my ass!' Picking up on the stray mention of 'culo,' Nwodim jumped in: 'That's right, he's about to beat your ass!'
The table argument was a flimsy premise, but it established Johanssen's character as territorial and, crucially, inspiring terror in her paramour. Instead of demanding the table, Bad Bunny commiserated with Hernández: 'Well mine too—and I'm afraid of her!' He looked back at Johanssen nervously, then confessed: 'I know we're not supposed to say that women are crazy. But this one? She's crazy!' Hearing him say 'loca,' Johanssen chirped up: 'Do you hear that? He's gonna go loca on you!' Meanwhile, the eavesdropping barflies (played by Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson) looked on with glee at what looked like a raging bar fight: 'I feel like I'm watching a telenovela,' Johnson said, scratching his chin and practically licking his chops. Dismukes hoped it would end in a 'slap and kiss': 'See, in their culture, the line between passion and violence is paper-thin.'
Johanssen's botched attempts at Spanish ('I'm about to asparagus nothing more and your ankle!') made for good comedy, but the sketch's best work wasn't done by the peeved girlfriends or the barflies' misbegotten commentary. Instead, it lay in the gap between what these non-Spanish speakers were confidently reading into the situation, casting these men as macho Latino guys in some exotic melodrama, and what the men were actually saying. They were not only misunderstanding the words; they were missing the subtext. And so might have some viewers.
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For those onlookers, the boyfriends were assuming archetypal roles that were completely at odds with how they actually felt, and their conversation deepened into a heart-to-heart between two strangers who didn't know how to quit a relationship they knew was bad for them. As the argument grew more heated between Nwodim and Johanssen, Bad Bunny reassured her: 'Baby, baby, baby, you're talking about asparagus. Let me handle this.' He let out a little 'heh'—in a moment that displayed his natural comedic timing. Instead of puffing his chest out, he went even deeper with Hernández: 'Why do you think we have such bad luck in love?' he cried out. Hernández took the opportunity to confess a hard truth about himself, bellowing: 'Honestly, I think I seek it out!'
In fact, the sketch was even more nuanced than non-Spanish-speaking SNL viewers could know, in part because of the live show's limitations. The terse subtitles elided the subtleties of Hernández and Bad Bunny's banter in Caribbean-inflected Spanish. (Hernández is Cuban and Dominican, and Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican.) When Hernández admitted that 'in his heart, I think I want a woman who's off her rocker'—his literal phrase was 'crazier than a coffee maker.' The subtitles neutered the sarcasm entirely, reading: 'Because deep down I want a woman who is not mentally stable.' At other points, the subtitles arrived too late, for instance making Bad Bunny's expertly delivered lament—'Instead of thinking with our head, we think with the other one!'—land with a slightly awkward thud. Some parts of their dialogue weren't even translated, such as when Bad Bunny said: 'I feel you, brother.'
[Read: Bad Bunny has it all—and that's the problem]
The gag at the end was that no one got the table at all. Hernández and Bad Bunny agreed that there were some perks to their current circumstances, particularly in the bedroom. They cackled and bro-hugged, confusing Johanssen. 'Why are you two laughing? What did you just say?' She didn't know what was going on after all, because just like the barflies, she thought she was watching a telenovela: A machista argument about honor resulting in blows and a triumphant return to their favorite two-top.
On the surface, this was just another SNL sketch about messed-up relationships and whether straight men are okay. But in its deliberate and inadvertent mistranslations, it also posed an intriguing question to its audience: How much truth can we really discern from a stranger we watch from across the distance of a bar table or a language barrier? Not much, it turns out.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
