Was Michael Phelps’s SNL Performance Golden?

We’ve all wondered how long Michael Phelps would stay in the spotlight and how he’d do it. Besides making appearances on several talk shows and reportedly being offered a recurring role on “Entourage,” Phelps hosted “Saturday Night Live” on September 13th.

When Phelps came out to give the opening monologue, I was pretty skeptical. And not just because I always thought the way he talked was funny, but also because he has no acting or comedic experience. His only credit as an “Actor,” according to IMDb, is “Miss USA 2005,” which isn’t exactly acting (he was a celebrity judge). On the other hand, Phelps has described himself as sarcastic, so I was hoping he’d be surprisingly hilarious.

My skepticism was encouraged by his monologue, which wasn’t exactly a monologue. It had an unusually strong reliance on other “characters” in the scene, namely Amy Poehler as Phelps’s mother and William Shatner as himself. Phelps didn’t have a lot of lines, but what he did have, he delivered rather awkwardly. (He mostly failed to convey meaning in his tone.) He clearly wasn’t a natural.

Phelps then played a dumb/ignorant homeschooled and sheltered kid and since I never thought he sounded like the brightest candle in the box, I thought this role would be easy for him. It was. The success of the skit, however, is up for debate.

Mostly, Phelps played himself. As the night continued, he adjusted and his performances got better starting with the T-Mobile skit. He seemed was much more natural and delivered his lines well. Phelps played the wannabe-Casanova son who added his sister’s friends to his “5.” Students from the University of Michigan might say this role fit him nicely.

Phelps’s best skit, and probably one of the best sketches in SNL’s premiere episode, featured the Michael Phelps diet–eat anything you want as long as it adds up to 12,000 calories to get a body like Michael! Although Phelps fumbled a few lines, his tone fit the mock commercial pretty well and the skit’s content was strong enough to sustain him anyway.

Nerves were probably to blame for Phelps’s shaky performance in the beginning. Phelps said that hosting SNL would be harder than his seventeen Olympic swims and that he was out of his element. After dress rehearsals, however, the cast, crew, and even Phelps himself felt confident about his hosting abilities.

Retaining focus throughout a scene and thinking a few lines ahead would be areas Phelps could improve on; he did, however, remember all his lines, refrain from laughing (making him 300% better than Jimmy Fallon), and had good reactions with exaggerated facial expressions.

If Phelps wants to do anything in entertainment, he’ll need some practice, but he does have some potential. Overall, Michael Phelps did a pretty good job.