Anything with Mike Myers. (Except that “Lothar of the Hill People” from his first season, that I could never figure out.) His portrayal of QEII slayed me.
Good grief, is there no one who remembers Eddie Murphy in “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood”? That was definitely the best running skit they had.
The best single skit: William Shatner’s “Get-A-Life!”
The best news anchor: Dennis Miller, without a doubt.
So many skits, so little time…
John Belushi: the Samurai skits
Dan Ackroyd: the sleazy, dangerous-toys-and-costumes guy. (“Broken Shards of Glass”), Coneheads
Jane Curtin: Newswoman, Coneheads
Lorraine Newman: Coneheads & Child Psychiatrist
Garrett Morris: Shouter for Weekend Update for the hard of hearing (“OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT: GENERALISIMO FRANCISCO FRANCO IS STILL DEAD!”)
Bill Murray: boyfriend Todd
Gilda Radner: Emily LaTella (sp?) (“natural race horses”)
Eddie Murphy: Velvet Jones, Buckwheat, Mr. Robinson
Billy Crystal/Christopher Guest: “I hate it when that happens” guys
Martin Short: Ed Grimley
Mike Myers: Wayne, Dieter (Sprockets)
Dana Carvey: Garth, Bush, Church Lady, Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual
Phil Hartman: The Caveman Lawyer
Kevin Nealon: Subliminal Advertising Guy
Ana Gasteyer (sp?): topless Martha Stewart
Darrell Hammond: Bill Clinton
I believe that was Bag O Glass with Dan Aykroyd.
Also Invisible Pedestrian.
Richard Pryors monologue about trying acid for the first time.
Most of my favorites have been mentioned already. Here’s some other sketches and characters that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Don’t forget"I be Gumby, dammit."
Weekend update with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin.“Jane, you ignorant slut.”
Larry the Lobser cracked me up. I suspect they rigged the voting so he wouldn’t boil.
Paul Simon taking about how everybody thinks he’s so serious, while wearing a turkey suit.
Hates: The sucky last sketch.
Keith
Most of my favorites have been mentioned already. Here’s some other sketches and characters that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Don’t forget"I be Gumby, dammit."
Weekend update with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin.“Jane, you ignorant slut.”
Larry the Lobser cracked me up. I suspect they rigged the voting so he wouldn’t boil.
Paul Simon taking about how everybody thinks he’s so serious, while wearing a turkey suit.
Hates: The sucky last sketch.
Keith
The one where Chris Farley has his own talk show and always hits himself on the head for making stupid remarks. Was the name “The Chris Farley Show?” I don’t know…
He’d be talking with his guest about whatever movies they have done, and Chris would always ask something obscure from the movie like, “remember when that guy was walking in the hall and the other guy stabbed him in the back?”
You’ve forgotten the best:
“Slumber Party” with Jane Curtin, Lorraine Newman, Gilda Radner and a guest star whose name I forget.
My favs (in no particular order):
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Phil Hartman doing the “Happy Fun Ball” commercial take-off. “Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.”
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Dana Carvey as the Church Lady. “Could it be…SATAN?”
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Eddie Murphy as Mr. Robinson. Who could forget the Christmas episode with the fake Cabbage Patch dolls?
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Eddie Murphy as Gumby. “Hey Lou Goldman…A guy like you should choke to death on his own mucus!”
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Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat. Who can forget the “Buckwheat’s Greatest Hits” collection? “Wookin’ Pa Nub,” etc.
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Chris Farley as the motivational speaker who lives “in a VAN, down by the RIVER.”
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Dana Carvey as the grumpy old man. “When I was a kid, we didn’t have any fancy toys. We went around chewin’ the bark offa trees…and we LIKED it.”
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Adam Sandler as the “cheap Halloween costume” guy. “Look at me. I’m crazy pickle mustache man.”
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Joe Piscopo as Frank Sinatra. Together with Eddie Murphy as Stevie Wonder on “Ebony and Ivory.” Hysterical.
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Eddie Murphy’s “Black History Minute” sketches. Especially the one about George Washington Carver. “Meanwhile, Dr. Carver died penniless and insane, still trying to play a phonograph record with a peanut.”
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Dennis Miller’s Weekend Update. No one has ever done it as well as he.
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Mike Myers/Dana Carvey in Wayne’s World
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Mike Myers as Lothar of the Hill People. “Recently, it has become difficult to walk with woman.”
Al Franken as Stuart Smallen. “Because I’m good enough, and I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.”
Steve Martin as…anything. But mostly as King Tut. (I did a kick ass impresson of him doing said sketch when I was 6.)
The aforementioned Emily LeTilla. “I don’t know why the president wants to make Puerto Rico a steak. I say, let them get thier own meat.”
Roseanne Rosannadanna. Big Gilda fan.
The Dana Carvey as George Bush sketches where “Dan Quayle” would appear – as a 12 year old.
Eddie Murphy in general. Gumby, Buckwheat, whatever. The man was so cool at one time. He did a monolouge where he said that basically, Lincoln never signed the emmancipation proclimation, so that if you’re white, you should tell the first black person you see to…well, I won’t type it. But it was offensive as all hell. The audience was silent. Then he ended with “And if he says ‘yes sir,’ You know he was watching this show. If, on the other hand, he starts chasing you, the likelyhood is that he isn’t a Saturday Night Live fan, and that you better run your motherlovin’ white ass off.” Just the image of a redneck in Alabama attempting that made me cry. “but…Eddie Murphy said it was so!”
Robin Williams. Guest starring. Fantastic.
Andy Kaufman’s stuff. But I’m a huge Kaufman fan from way back, so that isn’t a surprise.
“Slumber Party” with Jane Curtin, Lorraine Newman, Gilda Radner and a guest star whose name I forget.
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Buck Henry as Uncle somebody or other. Is that the one?
Does anybody remember Candy Slice?
Tom Hanks as Mr. Short Term Memory on a date. “Waiter, there’s food in my mouth. . .And it’s already been chewed!”
Putting on the play Gigi in prison. Garrett Morris sings “I’m gonna get me a shot gun and kill all the whities I seeeee. . .”
And how can we forget the Two Wild and Crazy Guys?
“Hi, I’m Annette, and these are my breasts.”
The Celebrity Jeopardy segments are, IMHO, some of the funniest things SNL has done. I love Will Ferrel’s increasingly flustered and frustrated Alex Trebek, Jimmy Fallon’s wide range of characters, and (of course) Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery.
(From the latest Jeopardy segment, with Tobey McGwire as Keanu Reeves)
ALEX: Welcome back to Celebrity Jeopardy. I thought we were done with this, but Regis ZPhilbin, that mongrel idiot, decided to do celebrity Millionare, and so I stand before you, a broken and disheartened man."
(The question is "This color ends in “urple” "
Jimmy Fallon as Hilary Swank: “What is Light Urple?”
TREBEK:(silence for a moment, then) “Wow.”
The Celebrity Jeopardy segments are, IMHO, some of the funniest things SNL has done. I love Will Ferrel’s increasingly flustered and frustrated Alex Trebek, Jimmy Fallon’s wide range of characters, and (of course) Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery.
(From the latest Jeopardy segment, with Tobey McGwire as Keanu Reeves)
ALEX: Welcome back to Celebrity Jeopardy. I thought we were done with this, but Regis ZPhilbin, that mongrel idiot, decided to do celebrity Millionare, and so I stand before you, a broken and disheartened man."
(The question is "This color ends in “urple” "
Jimmy Fallon as Hilary Swank: “What is Light Urple?”
TREBEK:(silence for a moment, then) “Wow.”
For history’s sake: Dan Aykroyd’s character who made dangerous toys (like Bag O’ Glass and Johnny Switchblade, Adventure Punk) and dangerous Halloween costumes (like Invisible Pedestrian and Johnny Human Torch, which was a bag of oily rags and a lighter) was Irving Mainway, the president of Mainway Products.
So many good ones have been mentioned. I’ll just toss in a few more favorite memories:
David Duchovny as Jeff Goldblum on Celebrity Jeopardy. His impression was so dead-on…
I really liked Lothar of the Hill People, always talking about “walking with a woman”: “My woman always wants me to walk faster. ‘Walk faster!’ she says. And yet when I do walk faster, the walk is very brief indeed.” “Lately I have taken many short walks…by myself.”
Rob Schneider as the Sensitive Naked Man.
Kirstie Alley: “Ah, bellissima!”
Steve Martin as the host for Common Knowledge, where the answers were selected by polling high school students. “Author of A Christmas Carol.” “Charles Dickens.” BZZ “Oh, I’m sorry. Ebenezer Scrooge.”
Rich Hall as Robert Lotta, the guy who periodically wandered onto the show and other places. Once he brought Christopher Guest a pack of new baseball cards; Robert was in the background of every picture.
Christopher Guest and Billy Crystal as the guys who always hurt themselves. “The other day I took one of those, uh…” “Vegetable peelers?” “Yeah! And I was scraping around in my nose with it…”
Anytime Gilda played a little girl. The best was when she kept getting scared and calling her parents because of noises in the bedroom. “Mommy, there’s something under my bed!” “Oh, honey, that’s just a family of gypsies we’re letting stay here.”
Rich Hall as Paul Harvey, and Norm MacDonald as Larry King.
Michael Jordan on “Tales From The Barbecue”.
Harry Shearer as Mike Wallace investigating counterfeit novelty and practical-joke products for 60 Minutes.
Martin Short as Nathan Therm, the chain-smoking lawyer who denies everything. “I never said that, you said that. (looks at camera) Is it me or is it him? It’s him, right?”
There was this one skit with, I believe, Robert Wagner and Jan Hooks. They were on a date, in a restaurant, and Wagner was just as charming and gentlemanly as could be. And then the food arrived, and he ate worse than your average 1-year-old. Food all over his face, hands, clothes…
So few people remember one of my recent favorites: the drunken salesmen talking about the finest human being they know, Bill Brassky. “You know, he sheds his entire skin once a year, like a snake.” “If you drop a phonograph needle on his nipple, it plays ‘Helter Skelter’.” “He once jumped off the Empire State Building and only sprained his ankle.”
During the ‘lost year’ (1985-86), they managed to turn out a few sketches that were really killer. For example: the game show “You Bet Your Finger”, complete with malfunctioning guillotine, and a serious talk show entitled “You Can Pick Your Friends, You Can Pick Your Nose, But You Can’t Pick Your Friends’ Noses” with John Lovitz and Randy Quaid.
Now, on to Least Favorite Skits:
Drain got on my case for this, but I never cared for Kevin Nealon in general, although his Mr. Subliminal schtick was pretty good. The dumbest skit I ever saw on SNL was a game show called “Comedy Killers,” a game show about topics like cancer, recent airline crashes, and other topics that would make a comedy club audience go silent. Nealon was the host, and the way he tried to milk it made me believe that he wrote the sketch. A whole sketch about subjects that people don’t laugh at? What was he thinking?
I never liked the Sweeny Sisters, either. They just weren’t enough of a parody to be funny.
The “Bill Murray as a lousy lounge singer” skits stop being funny long before they’re over. They needed to learn when to end those.
Ah well, that’s enough for now.
In one of the samaurai sketches (Samaurai Cleaner? Samaurai Deli?) Buck Henry got hit on the forehead by the sword. You know he did because the showed it in slow motion a few moments later. They put a band-aid on his head and kept going, but pretty soon every member of the cast also had a band-aid.
Well, it seemed really funny at the time.
Yeah, have to echo Dan Ackroyd’s Bass-O-Matic and Irving Mainway pieces!
“Planet of The Enormous Hooters”
Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor’s “Junglebunny-Peckerwood” bit.
Gilda Sweet Gilda as Patti Smith/Candy Slice.
Gilda singing “Goodbye Saccharin”.
Mr. Bill!
Michael Palin’s opening bit putting tuna & cats in his pants.
“The Wild & Crazy Guys”
Bill Murray’s Lounge Singer
And the film piece with an elderly Belushi visiting the other cast member’s graves. sniff
I date myself, but that show and it’s ideological parent, National Lampoon, helped me develop into the wise ass I am today. Kinda stopped watching in 81 when I was out on the streets up to no good at that hour.
Buh-Bye.
Buckwheat Dead! Brought to you by Texxon.
Big Red. (Commercial)
I’ll take swords for 400 Alex.
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord!
Crystal & Murphy as the elderly baseball players.
Murphy going undercover as a “white man” for a day.
Celebrity Hot Tub.
Tarzan, Frankenstein Monster, Tonto Christmas Message.
Farley getting his lifting harness wires stuck during the weekend update!
Touch my monkey.
Alec Baldwin & Sandler (Canteen Boy) on the scouting campout.
Land Shark!
Orgasim Guy.
Ah… so many more!
I cannot believe that I forgot the Superfans! Shame on me! And I’m from Chicago, too. My dad is just like those guys.
And Eddie Murphy’s “White Like Me.” The best part of that is when he goes to the bank (disguised as a white guy) and asks for a loan. The white loan officer just hands him piles of money and tells him he doesn’t have to pay it back if he doesn’t want to. ROTFLMAO!
Also, I forgot when Mike Myers would play Simon. He was the little English boy who had a TV show that he did from the bathtub. “Are you looking at my bum?” I loved that!
And, I will admit that the Copy Guy cracked me up every time. They had one where he was in a rivalry with a guy who would sing everyone’s name. (He was played by Jeff Daniels). Everytime someone would walk in, they’d start competing to to something funny with their name. I liked that one a lot.