I really miss the old SNL with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin. The Weekend News or whatever that great sketch was. IHMO they were some of the best produced yet.
I just got a bunch of the videos of the old shows, the first season included, but alas! none of my favorite sketches were included. Well, Land Shark…
What were your favorite comedy sketches?
The SNL “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches where the character Sean Connery mispronounces all the categories. “swords” ::snickers::
I loved the Levon and Barry sketches on The State. “Two hundred and forty dollars worth of puddin…”
Favorite comedy sketches? Well, since you didn’t specifically say favorite comedy sketches from SNL…
Rowan Atkinson in a sketch called “Fatal Beatings”. There’s a transcription of it here, but you really should see him doing it; Rowan is absolutely brilliant.
Also, The Kids In The Hall in “Citizen Kane”. One of the guys is trying to remember the name of a great classic film he’d seen the previous night. It was in black and white, there was a sled called Rosebud, a snowglobe, etc… he’s clearly talking about Citizen Kane, of course. But he insists that that’s not it. The other guy goes insane insisting that it IS Citizen Kane, and… um, okay, it’s hard to describe it and keep it funny. Sort of like describing a song. You really need to see it. But trust me, it’s very funny.
The Chris Farley/Patrick Swayze danceoff for the Chippendale’s dancer spot is pretty damn funny.
Also, the Martin Short skit where he and someone else are shooting for the Olympics as a men’s synchronized swimming team is pretty good too.
“I’m not that strong a swimmer”
LOL
Ernie Kovacs’s Nairobi Trio skit.
Who’s On First?
The Two Thousand Year Old Man
Monty Python’s Dead Parrot skit.
Just about anything where Tim Conway played that shuffling old man.
About a jillion skits from The Muppet Show.
And oh, how I miss Gilda…
The Monty Python sketch where a man from a charity tries to get a banker to make a donation. In true MP fashion the sketch ends with a couple of pantomime horses fighting to the death. That one, and…
…the film version of “Elizabeth I” directed by a Japanese director so the film becomes known as “Erizabeth I” and all the English characters speak in Japanese-pidgin and ride mopeds…oh, and the director is trying to pass himself off as Visconti…is it any wonder these guys were geniuses?
<------ pssst Check out the user name! You can read the entire skit (the Live at the Hollywood Bowl version) here:
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/HollywoodBowl/hollywood.html#whizzo
I also love Monty Python’s Michelangelo and the Pope skit, where the Pope complains of the way Mike has painted the Last Supper. Read that one here:
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/HollywoodBowl/hollywood.html#michelangelo
And I LOVE the Argument Clinic.
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/TheArgumentClinicSketch
BTW, here’s the Dead Parrot Sketch:
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/TheDeadParrotSketch
Ok, I’m just going to stop now before I post a link to everything Monty Python has done.
Celebrity Jeapordy is hilarious. Connery just got more and more belligerent as the series went on, and Norm’s complete non-impression of Burt Reynolds always made me smile. “It’s a big hat. You see, it’s funny because it’s bigger than a normal hat.”
As well, anything by the Kids in the Hall. I was never really all that worked up about the recurring character like the head squisher, but there was some truly surreal and wonderful stuff in there too. My favorite, without a shadow of a doubt, is the one where the comedy writer comes in to ask for a raise, and his boss cites the lousy sketch they’re currently doing as an example of why the guy’s a lousy comedy writer. If the above makes no sense, I apologize. The whole thing gives me a headache trying to explain coherently, but it “ends” when the boss mentions that the writer forgot to write an ending, and then the two of them just kind of stand their. Gold.
some of my faves (not already mentioned):
Stan Freberg: Green Chri$tma$, Heartbreak Hotel, John and Marsha, St. George and the Dragonet, Little Blue Riding Hood, Stan Freberg Presents the USA, Elderly Man River (1957 skit on political correctness), and many more.
Spike Milligan: Good King Eccleslas, Another Lot.
Nichols and May: Merry Christmas, Doctor; Chopin (improvisation to music); Back to Bach (ditto).
Second City (circa 1960): Football Comes to the University of Chicago.
Peter Sellers: reciting the lyrics to the Beatles’ “She Loves You” as Dr. Strangelove.
Frantics: Last Will and Temperament
Royal Canadian Air Farce: Quebec Language Police
Lord Buckley: The Bugbird
Hoffnung Music Festivals
Ernie Kovacs
The early SNL
Monty Python
The Kids in the Hall’s ‘Mean Father’ skit always gives me a dark-hearted smile “Son, on the way home from work, I bought you a puppy, but then I got hungry and I ate it! Oh, stop crying, I’m just kidding. You know I’d never buy you a puppy!”
My absolute favorite, though, is Lenny Bruce’s ‘Thank You Mask Man’ “Now the Messiah has returned, all is pure, you’re in the shithouse.”
–sublight.
I love the Kids In The Hall sketches with the rube who keeps getting picked up by gay guys as soon as he gets off the bus in Toronto.
And Monty Python? Flying Sheep gets me every time. Cleese and Palin passing that cheesy moustache back and forth, and speaking nonsense French. I also think the Fish-Slapping Dance is an absolute classic.
"I WISH TO REGISTER A COMPLAINT!"
[sub]'Nuff said. And already mentioned, of course. You heartless bastards![/sub]
Kids in the Hall fan here, especially Scott Thompson’s monologues. Also Lenny Bruce. Does Bill Plymption’s animation count?
I love Kids in the Hall “No, I really like you. I just have a disease that makes me sound sarcastic when I talk. I totally love you.” And the escape artist–Cecil St Claire? What was his name?
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Facking Cant!
Dave
Let me second zgystardst on the Frantics… not only “Last Will and Temperment”, which is a 24-carat classic, but also for their sequel to it, “Ti Kwan Leep”, which segues immediately into the “Boot To The Head” song…
Also by them and absofreakinlutely great is “The Human Race” – evolution from the first cells to the Reagan administration called in the style of a horse race…
A big second also to “Fatal Beatings”. Absolutely hilarious.
Let me add:
Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre’s “Dr. Science” bits.
Firesign Theatre: “Porgie and Mudhead” from “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers”.
– Bob
In addition to some of the usual suspects I’ve got a few obscure ones that I’d love to place.
One is Rowan Atkinson & Hugh Laurie as Shakespeare and his editor. The editor is making all these suggestions that are how we know the plays now “Why don’t you move the ghost scene from the end of the play to the beginning?” and Shakespeare is whinging and dragging his feet about the changes and what’s being replaced is downright hilarious.
I have two that are from, I think, either The State or The Vacant Lot. The first is actually a recurring joke for that episode. There’s a guy in an kind of old-fashioned kind of suit, and in one of them, he’s whittling. “Call me an Old-fashioned kind of guy, but I believe in the one true God. His Name is Zarkon. He lives in the lake.” and “Call me an old fashioned guy, but I believe fire is magic, and it scares me”. All the while relaxing music is playing in the background.
The other one, which I’m fairly positive is from The State is the muppets are tasty skit. There’re two couples sitting at a table eating a meal of muppet, which is easy to catch, just say “can somebody help teach me how to count?” When one shows up, you grab it and bludgeon it to death. Great skit.
From KITH, the “Strange guy, but I think I like him” is a personal fave. Many of my other faves have already been mentioned.
I’ve also loved each Dieter appearance on SNL. Pity the movie’s been scrapped . . .
Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic”.
The Kids In The Hall sketch where someone is making a business presentation, vocalizes all of his thoughts, then freaks out because he thinks the others are all reading his mind. Like most of the other KITH sketches listed, it’s really hard to describe.
Burns and Allen’s “How Willy Broke His Back”.
Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?”.
The Hotel scene from “A Night At The Opera”.
The SNL sketches where Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest would out sado-masochism each other. “Y’know what I hate? When you take a big wheel of barbed wire, and stick one end up into one nostril, then pull it out the other nostril, and then tie the end to a car that’s about to drive away.” “Ooooh, I hate it when that happens!”
Y’all reminded me of a Kids In The Hall favorite: the “Creative Concepts” (or whatever it was called) office. Or, as he called it, his “Office…submarine!”
Another classic one came to mind today: “NIAGARA FALLS!!! Slowly I turned…”
I’d mention Firesign Theater skits, but man, they’re hard to separate from the album as a whole…how about Nick Danger, Third Eye, in “Cut 'Em Off At The Past”? “I lifted the heavy obsidian door knocker and…‘Hey! Open up, your door knocker fell off!’”