Only fifteen years have passed since this skit aired, but it feels impossibly dated. Lindsay Lohan was a few months shy of her 18th birthday at the time. The whole thing is weird and unfunny…a five minute long tit joke. At the expense of a minor. I doubt Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers count this among their finest moments. Lohan is game, though. She even does a passable English accent.
Isn’t it bizarre that it’s the most viewed video on the SNL channel?. Could such a skit be made in 2019?
I would have guessed “More Cowbell”.
I won’t argue that it’s the funniest sketch from SNL. Certainly not when we’ve got Cowbell, Super Colon Blow, and the Chippendale Audition. But it was a funny skit when it first aired and it’s still funny today.
My guess would have been Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker.
This claims to list the top 88 SNL YouTube videos. Note that it is very skewed toward recent ones. It doesn’t include the “More Cowbell” video, for instance. It includes one “Cut for Time” video:
It doesn’t include “Matt Foley” either. It may not actually really be the top 88. I just compared some well-known ones with the ones included in that URL I just gave, and it appears some have more views than the ones included in that URL.
I suspect most of those views are the result of Google searches by people who weren’t necessarily looking for SNL sketches.
If you want to talk about SNL skits that don’t age well, The New York Times has an article about the “It’s Pat!” skits, starring Julia Sweeney as a person of indeterminate gender. That was almost thirty years ago, but today it wouldn’t be acceptable.
Lindsay Lohan having giant boobs was a pretty popular joke back then, to the point they literally had to CGI out her boobs in some kids movie she had just done because apparently test audiences found it too distracting.
I figure the one about Katy Perry’s big boobs on Sesame Street would be pretty popular. She was an adult if that makes it less offensive.
As far as skits that might seem too controversial in this era, the Tom Brady workplace sexual harassment skit always comes to mind for me. Plays for laughs the idea (that a lot of people agree with, not just incels and “nice guys”) that it can’t be sexual harassment if the perp is attractive and every average looking guy is at risk for false accusations for merely saying “hi” to a woman.
I thought it’d be “I’m on a Boat.” It was ubiquitous back in… no. no. not gonna look up how long ago that was. nope.
I discussed this with some friends when the article came out. I haven’t actually read the article because I only get so many freebies but I think the skits were pretty trans-positive. Pat is perfectly happy with her/himself. It’s the people around her/him who get uncomfortable. They are always the butt of the joke. And it’s not like they are being mean spirited, they are just…confused.
It says right in the lyrics to the theme song:
“A ma’am or a sir, accept him or her or whatever it might be.”
Today we would probably change “it” to “they” of course. But especially for its time I think it was fairly enlightened.
“I’m on a Boat” has more views than “Harry Potter: Hermione Growth Spurt” does. “I’m on a Boat” doesn’t appear on the list of videos that I linked to. This mean that neither the source that Blank Slate got their information from nor the list I linked to is completely correct in their ranking of SNL videos on YouTube in number of views. I believe the problem is that none of thowe websites is attempting to stay up to date in ranking the number of views. Also, to count the total number of times that SNL videos have been seen on the Internet, you would have to include the number of times that they have been seen on the official NBC website for SNL.