Sabrina Carpenter, the host and musical guest on this week’s “Saturday Night Live,” used her monologue to riff on her risque image, suggesting that she wants to be known for more than just being sexually provocative, while of course joking that she does indeed have a unique mind.
“Now, since I’m here, I want to clear up some misconceptions that people have about me,” Carpenter said. “Everyone thinks of me as a Horndog-type pop star, but there’s really so much more to me. I’m not just horny. I’m also horny and sexually charged. And I love reading. My favorite book is the encyclopedia. It’s so big and it’s hard…”
The pop star showed off the controversial cover photo of her recent album “Man’s Best Friend.” “Some people were a little freaked out by the coverage. I don’t know why,” she said. “It was just me on all fours with an invisible figure pulling my hair. But what people don’t realize is that’s how they cropped it. If you zoom out, it’s clearly a photo from the 50th anniversary special of Bowen (Yang) helping me by my hair…” The image got even bigger: “…after Martin Short pushed me out of the queue at the buffet.”
Regardless, Carpenter confessed, “There’s a real person underneath all the sequins and wigs and corsets. And another thing you might not know about me is that I love interacting with the audience during my show.” She made her way to the crowd, interacting with a young man who identified himself as Will from Maryland – which, understandably, excited her. “Ooh, what a sexy and unusual place. See, I love talking to normal people. They’re so fascinating when they’re real like you.”
But when she asked what the viewer did for a living and he answered “venture capitalist,” she quickly moved on.
“The last thing I like to do at my shows is arrest someone because they’re hot. So who can I arrest here tonight?” Kenan Thompson walked out with a pair of pink handcuffs, saying he was arresting her not because she was hot but “for falsely impersonating an officer 200 times at your shows.”
Thompson said he was actually there to get a Cameo for his daughter, only for Carpenter to tell him it would cost $200,000″ — and while he moved on, she announced that “if anyone else wants one, find me on Venmo.
The monologue followed an opening Domingo skit in which Carpenter was one of several women at a birthday party describing a bachelorette-style trip to Nashville while singing parody versions of Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” and Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra.”
Later, for her first musical number, Carpenter sang her No. 1 hit “Manchild” with girlish glee on a bedroom stage, bouncing on a bed in a yellow “SNL” T-shirt and pink “SNL” underwear, surrounded on either side by the band and eventually joined in the foreground by a saxophone soloist.
The second musical number, “Nobody’s Son”, had Carpenter singing in a martial arts setting. Controversy arose when the East Coast Wire made him sing the words “fucked up” twice, uncensored. West Coast viewers, however, reported that the audio went silent in both of these instances, with the censors apparently having a greater tape delay for this stream.
