Maybe it was a lucky break for Joseph Gordon-Levitt that last week’s episode of Saturday Night Live was so universally acknowledged as terrible, because by comparison, his own perfectly decent gig began to look positively transcendent. After a rocky start with a ridiculously overlong and poorly written bit involving Obama in China, Joseph Gordon-Levitt took the stage for his monologue, an elaborate and impressively faithful reproduction of the “Make ‘Em Laugh” number from Singin’ in the Rain.

The monologue musical number has become just as much of a go-to in recent years as the “questions from the audience” bit, but if it’s done well, it provides a nice dose of variety into the mostly-comedic proceedings. This variation wasn’t particularly funny, but for me, the monologue stands with the music performances as a time when SNL doesn’t particularly need to be funny as long as it’s entertaining, and Gordon-Levitt’s physical dexterity — his ability to do back flips off of walls on live TV — was actually sort of thrilling, not a word I would apply to many other monologues.