It is a function of my age that I was swooning over Paul Rudd, not One Direction, on Saturday Night Live this weekend. In the grand tradition of old people assessing the new young boy bands, I now present to you the things I learned upon encountering these five young men on my television:
1. They are very genial. They did a nice job playing themselves in both Rudd’s opening — that amazing harmonized sing-along with his Anchorman castmates, Will Ferrell, Steve Carrell, and Steve Koechner — and the pre-taped sketch about Rudd being a middle-aged dad and hardcore 1-D (is that what the kids call them for short?) fan.
2. They are very good-looking. I don’t mean this in a creepy way, I swear. I was just really struck by how handsome every last one of those young men is. In my day, they used to stock the back rows of the boy-band dance line with some quite “relatable” and “accessible” looking dudes. (As they say in Almost Famous, the “out-of-focus” dudes in the back.) These kids have got hair and cheekbones and perfect skin and flat abs for miles.
3. They dress really well. I like those velvet smoking-jacket type getups. Very classy, stylists.
4. They apparently sing Kidz Bop versions of Mumford and Sons songs. This was what I gathered from their musical performance. I did, however, like how they took turns singing and kept shifting their little circle around to rotate the next one in. That was cool. Probably dancing would not be a good idea to Mumford and Sons songs, because it would just be kind of a hoedown-jig type thing.
5. That Harry Styles one’s hair is bananas.