What does eight gold medals get you? Among other things, a crack at hosting Saturday Night Live, the tenuously-relevant late-night institution that has given us such outstanding athlete-host moments as the Peyton Manning United Way ad and the tremendous Joe Montana “I’ll be in my room masturbating” sketch.

Unfortunately, Michael Phelps mostly made Tom Brady look like the charismatic comic genius of our generation. Personally, I laughed at Phelps when he donned headgear and played a baritone sax as Kristen Wiig’s cousin in the “ugly kids” sketch, if only because it was the lone moment in the show when Phelps was actually acting as awkward as he seemed to be the other 85 minutes.

Canada’s NATIONAL POST has a sketch-by-sketch breakdown of the show, which is of course peppered with words like “rumoured” and “centre”:

He stumbles a little in the last sketch, and aside from the awkward teen sketch and the final bit, they were all pretty unmemorable. But whatever… he’s the greatest Olympian of all time, not the greatest SNL host. Which one would you rather be?

You have your opinion, Shane Dingman, and Christopher Walken has his.

FANHOUSE’s Will Brinson was even more merciless in his assessment of Phelps’ comedic talents:

…there’s a big difference between not being funny and just being flat out unentertaining and, well, flat.

Phelps was both on Saturday. One skit was funny and it drew on the softball Michael Phelps Diet joke, but that didn’t matter since anyone with any sensibility (or charged with reviewing this FAIL-fest) had already turned off the television, since it came at the very end of the show.

A much-rumored (rumoured?) appearance by Barack Obama never materialized, but Jared Fogle, the Subway guy, was there to help rescue the evening. And when you’re bringing in Jared Fogle to add star power to your show, you know things aren’t exactly going all that well.

Given the ease with which Phelps commands the camera, I think he’d fit in perfectly with this trio of effortless performers: