SNL Didn’t Need Subtitles

When the Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny took the stage for his Saturday Night Live monologue yesterday, he announced that he was going to tackle the job on his own terms. “People are wondering if I can host the show, because English is not my first language,” he said. “I don’t know if they know, but I do whatever I want.” And then the host and musical guest, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, proceeded to speak in Spanish. Sure, the actor Pedro Pascal showed up to ostensibly play the role of translator—but the joke was that Pascal didn’t actually do much translating. Neither did the producers provide any real subtitles. One that was offered? “[Speaking a sexier language].”

With Bad Bunny as host, SNL essentially put on a bilingual show. In addition to the monologue, three sketches were either entirely or mostly in Spanish. Lady Gaga spoke in Spanish to introduce Bad Bunny’s first musical performance, which of course, like his second, was in Spanish. The show defiantly refused to translate every gag, which was a refreshing and radical change for a series that has rarely embraced Latino performers this way.

[Read: Bad Bunny overthrows the Grammys]

Throughout its 48 year history, SNL has had only four Latino cast members: Horatio Sanz, Fred Armisen, Melissa Villaseñor, and the current featured player Marcello Hernandez. The long-running series’ diversity issues have been well chronicled, and last night these limitations were obvious. It was clear, for instance, that only one cast member could truly riff with Bad Bunny in Spanish. Yet the musician’s presence ended up providing a showcase for Hernandez, who joined the cast last year and has done bits about his heritage, including a “Weekend Update” segment where he expounded on Dominican baseball players. Hernandez starred alongside Bad Bunny in sketches such as “The Age of Discovery,” executed without a word of English, in which they portrayed historical royals receiving explorers who presented mostly unexciting spoils—a turkey, a tomato—from the Americas.

In the following sketch, Hernandez and Bad Bunny played telenovela stars whose dramatic sequence was interrupted by Punkie Johnson’s character Latina Jefferson, who didn’t know a lick of Spanish. Her only qualification for getting the telenovela role was that her name was “Latina”—she was not herself Latina. And finally, in a coup de grâce, Pascal appeared to reprise his work from last season as the protective mother of Hernandez’s character Luis. This time Luis brought home another white girlfriend (played by Chloe Troast) who was insulted in Spanish not just by Pascal’s bewigged matriarch but by Bad Bunny as an equally judgmental aunt, who called Troast “muy Old Navy.” The sketch cleverly put its non-Spanish-speaking viewers in the place of Troast’s character, gently roasting them for their linguistic lack. Pascal and Bad Bunny’s critical ladies eventually embraced Troast’s character, however, as a little wink to the audience that it was all in good fun.

In fact, except for “The Age of Discovery,” which was subtitled, these sketches pointedly didn’t make an effort to overexplain the Spanish-language gags for non-Spanish-speaking audiences. They were constructed to be funny if you speak only English, but doubly funny if you could catch everything that Bad Bunny, Hernandez, and Pascal were saying. SNL has experimented with this kind of joke telling before, like when Hernandez and Ana de Armas took over a Spanish class. Still, with Bad Bunny leading the action, the show appeared confident enough to commit even further. That’s the most crucial element the musician brought to last night’s broadcast. Bad Bunny has made a habit of refusing to alter himself in any way for mainstream institutions. This time he came for SNL—and made the show all the better for it.