For some reason, I got thinking back on all the Saturday Night Live sketches that became famous, even with people who were not regular SNL viewers. Ones that spring to my mind would be The Coneheads, Billy Crystals “You look mah-voulous” guy, Waynes World, etc.etc.etc.
Of all the skits that became regulars, sprang catchphrases (“Two wild and craaaazy guys”) or even movies “Night At The Roxbury”!?!, what do you think are the best and worst?
I never thought that Ed Grimley was at all funny, or got the Hans and Franz love, and the skit where Billy Crystal (and someone else in the cast-cant remember who) would talk about maiming themselves and end each example with “I hate it when I do that” was pathetic, but apparently others thought it comic genius; conversely, I liked Horatio Sanz’ “I’m Carol!!!” bit, and always thought that Bass-o-Matic was classic wierdness from a bunch of coked up wierdos…
The worst season of “SNL,” in my opinion, was the final season with the “original” cast- that is, when Belushi and Aykroyd left, but Bill Murray, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and Gilda Radner were still around.
The recurring sketches involving Lisa Loopner and Todd (“Noogie Patrol!”) were never funny, but the writers were completely out of ideas, and did a Todd/Lisa sketch every week. They’d also long since run out of funny ideas for RRoseanna Roseannadanna, who continued to appear on “Weekend Update” every week.
I don’t ever remember laughing during a “Mr. Peepers” sketch. “A man that acts like a monkey” is a pretty thin joke as it is, and they not only stretched over a whole sketch, but several sketches.
Do the Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker sketches count as recurring? I only saw a couple of them, but they were genius. My friends and I spent a year screaming to each other, “You’re not gonna amount to jack squat!!” Little did we know then…
Celebrity Jeopardy! for funniest. No contest. Every Celebrity Jeopardy has at least five or six high quality gags. They’ve never had a bad one.
For least funny, there’s a lot of candidates; SNL has had planety of recurring sketches that really were not funny at all, making them all equally stupid. “Goat Boy”? “Mr. Peepers”? And I’m sorry, but Mary Catherine Gallagher wasn’t funny, not for a moment.
Before reading any of the replies, I knew the correct answer for “all-time funniest” was “Celebrity Jeopardy.” Always funny, whether it’s the first time or the tenth that you’ve seen it.
Least funny? Even worse than Mr. Peepers (which might have been amusing as a single, non-recurring sketch) is Chris Kattan’s incomprehensible-talking guy. Or Mango. Or the Roxbury guys. Also agree that Mary Catherine Gallagher was not funny.
First one I thought of when I saw the thread title. I haven’t been watching it the last few years unless there was a guest I was interested in, so I’m not familiar with what they’ve been doing, but I never thought the “wild and crazy guys” or the one Mahaloth mentioned with Will Ferrel (who I don’t find funny anyway) were funny more than once, if that.
Funniest: Celebrity Jeopardy. Gold. Gold, every single time. Sean Connery, Burt Reynolds. . . Jimmy Fallon did a great Adam Sandler impression once. Great stuff.
Worst: The cheerleaders sketches with Will Ferrell. I hated hated hated them, and never laughed once.
Honorable mention for worst: the Molly Shannon sketches where she would put her hands under her arms and smell them.
What about that Dana Carvey character, “Massive Headwound Harry”? It was gross to look at. I remember one sketch where they had a dog eat his headwound.
Or is that, “the remarkably untalented Jimmy Fallon, who still got a late-night gig that wasn’t on Fox or UPN, who happened to be funny for the only time in his career…?”
ETA: Yeah, I finetuned it a few times.
