What The Hell America!

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 begins with Ego Nwodim and Marcello Hernández’s characters having glasses of wine at a bar; she is ready to move in after three weeks of dating, and he is sweatily trying to steer the conversation elsewhere. He gets a break when another woman, played by this week’s host, Scarlett Johanssen, insists that their table belongs to her and her man—played by musical guest Bad Bunny. After Nwodim urges Hernández to defend her honor, he gets in Bad Bunny’s face—shouts, “Ay!”—and they erupt in loud Spanish. But here’s what he really says: “I’m sorry, but my woman is a pain in my ass!” Picking up on the stray mention of “culo,” Nwodim jumps in: “That’s right, he’s about to beat your ass!”

The table argument is a flimsy premise, but it establishes Johanssen’s character as territorial and, crucially, inspiring terror in her paramour. Instead of demanding the table, Bad Bunny commiserates with Hernández: “Well mine too—and I’m afraid of her!” He looks back at Johanssen nervously, then confesses: “I know we’re not supposed to say that women are crazy. But this one? She’s crazy!” Hearing him say “loca,” Johanssen chirps up: “Do you hear that? He’s gonna go loca on you!” Meanwhile, the eavesdropping barflies (played by Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson) look on with glee at what looks like a raging bar fight: “I feel like I’m watching a telenovela,” Johnson says, scratching his chin and practically licking his chops. Dismukes hopes it’ll 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!”) make for good comedy, but the sketch’s best work isn’t done by the peeved girlfriends or the barflies’ misbegotten commentary. Instead, it lies in the gap between what these non-Spanish speakers are confidently reading into the situation, casting these men as macho Latino guys in some exotic melodrama, and what the men are actually saying. They’re not only misunderstanding the words; they’re missing the subtext. And so might some viewers.

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For these onlookers, the boyfriends are assuming archetypal roles that are completely at odds with how they actually feel, and their conversation deepens into a heart-to-heart between two strangers who don’t know how to quit a relationship they know is bad for them. As the argument grows more heated between Nwodim and Johanssen, Bad Bunny reassures her: “Baby baby baby, you’re talking about asparagus. Let me handle this.” He lets out a little “heh”—in a moment that displays his natural comedic timing. Instead of puffing his chest out, he goes even deeper with Hernández: “Why do you think we have such bad luck in love?” he cries out. Hernández takes the opportunity to confess a hard truth about himself, bellowing: “Honestly, I think I seek it out!”

In fact, the sketch is even more nuanced than non-Spanish-speaking SNL viewers will know, in part because of the live show’s limitations. The terse subtitles elide 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 admits that “in his heart, I think I want a woman who’s off her rocker”—his literal phrase is “crazier than a coffee maker”—the subtitles neuter the sarcasm entirely, reading: “Because deep down I want a woman who is not mentally stable.” At other points the subtitles arrive 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 aren’t even translated, such as when Bad Bunny says: “I feel you, brother.”

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The gag at the end is that no one gets the table at all. Hernández and Bad Bunny agree that there are some perks to their current circumstances, particularly in the bedroom. They cackle and bro-hug, 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 is just another SNL sketch about messed-up relationships and whether straight men are okay. But in its deliberate and inadvertent mistranslations, it also poses an intriguing question to its audience: How much truth can we really discern from a stranger that we watch from across the distance of a bar table or a language barrier? Nothing much, it turns out.