The Round Mound of Resounding Failure: Charles Barkley on Saturday Night Live

Charles Barkley hosted “Saturday Night Live” last night, and though he was generally awful, looking very uncomfortable with cue cards and cracking up at nearly everything, the above sketch was actually funny.

Anything mocking Barkley’s golf swing will probably always be funny. So was the use of Chuck as a stand-in for Alicia Keys during rehearsals, but the most NBC did with that was show it a couple of times during lulls in the Saturday night football game. (Upshot for NBC: Constant promotion during Cowboys-Eagles means this very well may be the highest-rated “SNL” this season.)

But this was an exercise in doing too little with plenty of ammo: There were gambling jokes, but nothing about Barkley’s run-in with the law last year, and much of the written humor was supposed to come from Barkley’s race, while the real humor was in watching his face. That’s in keeping with the current version of “SNL,” I suppose, but it’s disappointing that Barkley, witty when improvising on TNT, had to be thrown into this arena that suits him so poorly.

↵