I believe I saw it a few nights ago on E!- “The Leather Man”, with Fallon, Sanz & Brittney Murphy. An enitre sketch based around the premise that leather goods make a distinctive sound when rubbed together. This is funny? You could “maybe” get a chuckle out of the sound if used once and only once in another sketch- maybe. But an entire bit (and a pretty long one at that) based around something that lame is unthinkable. Add to it the fact that idiot Fallon started laughing before the sketch even got started and didn’t stop throughout- I can see Will Ferrell making him break character, but Horatio Sanz? Sanz is lamer than usual, and Britney Murphy is easy on the eyes, but adds zilch in the comedy department. Sanz has been worse (think his bit about his Members Only jacket in one of the Jeffrey’s skits) and Fallon’s shit-eating grins have ruined other sketches, but I think this one is overall the worst I’ve seen. And to cement its status as the worst ever IIRC there was actually more thanone of these- I’m surprised they didn’t make an SNL movie based on it.
Worst sketch ever?? Good god where to begin.
I know humor is subjective and all but when you watch a skit go from beginning to end and you don’t even hear one snicker out of the live studio audience you know it’s crash and burn time. And this has happen a lot over the past decade.
My votes are for “The Falconer” sketches. I never hear anyone laughing at those.
I haven’t watched regularly for years. I would say anything with Horatio Sanz would be a tie for the worst.
I’ll nominate a two-fer:
When Peter Sarsgaard was hosting, they first did a sketch about him being invited to a pirate convention just so people could say his name. That was the only gag. “Saaarrrrrrsgaarrrrrrd” has become our home’s new code for “humiliatingly unfunny.”
Then, later in the SAME show, they had him doing an infomercial selling the “SARS Guard.”
That’s right: two stupid sketches about his NAME. I would be mortified if I were Sarsgaard. Just mortified.
The task of picking just one is a bit daunting, but the one that I hate, hate, hated was the one with Nicole Kiddman and Mike Myers as two little kids on a playground. Unimaginably awful. He wasn’t funny but she was so obnoxious I wanted to stick my foot through the t.v.
No accounting for taste. I found that sketch a scream, and started giggling just reading your account.
I haven’t seen the grand majority of SNL, but of those I have seen, the one that always stuck with me as god awful was this one where:
There are some people in a fast food joint. They order something, and the guy at the counter takes the order and asks, “Do you want that with SECRET SAUCE?” They sit down. He brings over their food, “I added…SECRET SAUCE.” Etc. etc. I mean, done right, I’m sure that the repetition could have been funny, but it just fell completely flat. And you could feel the SNL group realising that it had fallen flat…but going on with it…endlessly…
It was rather horrifying.
With SECRET SAUCE…!
Well, not everything with Horatio Sanz was utterly godawful, but his being in a sketch sure did elevate the odds of godawfulness occurring. That said, I nominate any sketch with Sanz as “Carol”. I never made it through a full sketch, they were so bad; I fast forwarded through 'em all.
A sketch involving a “deleted scene” from the original King Kong in which Kong gets an erection while looking at Fay Wray and a couple inside the Empire State Building attempt to get rid of the “giant carpet” which just entered their window. Extremely stupid, although it, mixed with an old urban legend, make me come up with a running gag about the word “ape penis” followed by “Mr. deGaulle, I believe it’s pronounced ‘happiness.’”
Nah, I generally get a chuckle out of The Falconer. It made me smile just to read someone bring it up!
The WORST sketch ever, was, easily, the Horatio Sanz vehicle - “Hot Plates,” which centered around the staff of a restaurant warning their two patrons to beware of exactly how hot the plates were. Who really thought that would be a good idea? 
I gave up on SNL a long time ago, so this is an old one, from the 80s. I think Julia Louis-Dreyfus was in it, but I don’t remember the other cast member. Anyway, it was a period piece in which two young women were riding together in a carriage and discussing their travel plans with their future husbands. The “joke” was that they were going to be coincidentally present at every major disaster or historical event the writers could think of–everything from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Russian Revolution, various Civil War battles, and on and on like that for what seemed like twenty minutes.
Yeah, but that one had Amazing Special Effects.
The worst in recent memory is Maya Rudolph as Time Travelin’ Scott Joplin.
The audience made not a sound, and didn’t even clap when the “Applause” light went on.
Nope. The Peter Saarsgaard SARS Guard was one of the best things to come out of SNL in the last few years. “I didn’t want to seem like I was exploiting a tragedy, but come on: My name is Saarsgaard.”
I haven’t watched in awhile but the worst sketch I remember was one where they had ummm…Joe Pesci (I think) picking out a pinkie ring.
That was it. The whole sketch was him looking at pinkie rings. It seemed to go on for ages and nobody in the audience seemed to even chuckle the whole time (minus some embarrassed nervous laughter).
Back in the days of the original cast days I never thought the recurrent Knights of Columbus sketch was very funny, or the diner sketch ("Cheeseburga! Cheesburga!).
It’s Pat!
Come on, folks, have you forgotten about the Pat sketches?
The Mango sketches were pretty dire, too.
Never saw any humour in those “I hate when that happens” sketches that they used to do back in the Billy Crystal days.
One time they had John Cleese and Michael Palin do a word-for-word rehash of the old dead parrot sketch; it seemed pretty pointless and lazy.
I was thinking of that very sketch! I don’t think that many people in the audience knew it was an old Monty Python skit.
Are you kidding me? That was a classic! It’s on the Best of Mike Myers DVD, and deservedly so. It’s brilliant. When Myers was on Inside the Actor’s Studio, that was one of the three or so characters he was asked about.
And The Falconer is hilarious.
My vote for worst recurring sketch is Horatio Sanz as Carol. I’m sure there have been worse one-offs that I’ve just utterly forgotten.
The cheerleaders and anything with Chris Kattan (especially Mango.) That’s when I stopped watching.
It’s Pat! was funny most of the time.
I always found Bill Murray to have more misses than hits. The recurring ‘singing entertainer in a shoddy dive’ was consistently unfunny.