Truly the world has gone mad.
Every time I saw Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri as those cheerleaders, I wanted to go to the mall with a machine gun and not leave until I was out of ammo and the coroner took me away.
There have been tons of skits based around one premise – the most famous being The Big Ear family.
I think the worst sketch really has to go beyond the mundane. I nominate Canteen Boy.
Was this the “You like it, the juice?” one? Because that’s which one I was gonna say.
The big ear family was real? You’re kidding me. I thought that was just a joke on the simpsons.
The spartans take the cake for me.
The entire episode when Steven Seagal hosted.
Two different skits with very similar premises. The latter should actually get a nod for worst skit too, since it doesn’t really have an ending. David Spade just kinda gives up while Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider just keep going.
By the time the show devolved into Molly Shannon sniffing her armpits and falling down, they had done so many bad sketches that that was the final nail in the coffin for me. I can’t imagine the horrors they’ve committed to film since then.
Seriously? Years ago these used to SLAY me! Probably my favorite SNL skit. I’d like to see them again to see if they were still funny - does anybody know if they are on any of the DVDs?
I missed something like ten whole year of SNL, but since from all reports it was the suckiest ten years, I guess I didn’t miss much. A lot of the sketeches mentioned here, I’ve never heard of.
Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but it was worth them doing that bit just so I could eventually read that comment.
From the first couple of seasons, I always thought the Killer Bees were completely pointless. Later on, I found I pretty much hated every single thing I ever saw Adam Sandler or David Spade do on SNL, although admittedly I wasn’t watching the show much in that era.
I can see how Kattan could have gotten on peoples’ nerves, what with the bizarre presentation and obsessive repetition of his characters like Mango. Didn’t he also do the “Mr. Peepers” sketches, where he acted like an ape and spewed pieces of apple in every direction? Those still give me nightmares.
Canteen Boy was just surreal enough to be reasonably funny.
The original Not Ready for Primetime Players had some of the funniest bits, but they also had some of the worst stinkers imaginable. Bad enought that sometimes they ended by having everyone just stop and walk off the set. And it was the era when occasionally they’d try to be ‘arty’. Sometimes it worked, as with Steve Martin’s dance with Gilda Radner or John Belushi’s walk through the SNL cemetary, but usually they just stunk up the joint.
The year after the show was taken over by Dick Ebersol sucked so hard that the show was completely retooled in short order and Lorne Michaels was begged to come back. There’s hardly a memorable skit from that entire time, and many of them were just jaw-droppingly unfunny.
Sam Stone writes:
> The year after the show was taken over by Dick Ebersol sucked so hard that
> the show was completely retooled in short order and Lorne Michaels was
> begged to come back. There’s hardly a memorable skit from that entire time,
> and many of them were just jaw-droppingly unfunny.
Your history is wrong. When Lorne Michaels left in 1980, Jean Doumanian became producer. She was fired after less than a year. Ebersol became producer and lasted four years. When he decide to leave, NBC told Michaels that he had to come back and build up the show again or they would cancel it.
Let me add another vote for Carol.
Same here.
Carol: I want to kill you, then use my powers to bring you back to life so that I can kill you again.
I came here specifically to nominate “You like-a da juice.” This sketch embodies the worst of the SNL take-a-single-phrase-and-repeat-ad-nauseum-in-a-funny-voice approach to comedy.
And yes, I realize that they were going for some sort of meta-sketch by recognizing the lameness of the premise within the sketch itself, but after five minutes of excruciating banality the payoff fell completely flat.
If there’s a worse sketch than the one where the cops start vomiting all over a crime scene, I don’t want to see it.
There have been some hateful skits, some boring skits, and some unimaginative skits over the years. BTW, Big Ear Family was just a Simpsons parody – I think it was based on one with the original NRFPT cast called Big Thigh Family, in which everyone wore below-the-waist fat suits (and, of course, corduroy pants); every time I see the beginnings of what looks like a real stinker I can hear Krusty saying “Oh God, this goes on for nine minutes.”
The original cast produced some remarkably unfunny stuff; the Doumanian/Ebersol years were just ugly (except for Eddie Murphy); I hated, hated, hated Hans & Franz, the cheerleaders, Carol, and anything that included Dana Carvey (except when he appeared with Mike Meyers). Kristin Wiig and Will Forte played clerks at Target in a bit that I’m willing to forget about, as long as they never, ever, ever bring the characters back.
But for the worst of the worst, just in terms of lack of imagination and real “phoning it in” attitude, I nominate three skits from this year: Dane Cook and Forte as water delivery men, Cook and Jason Sudeikis kicking patrons out of a bar at closing time, and “Big Wigs.”
As Leonard Pinth-Garnell might comment, “There! That wasn’t so good, was it?”
I haven’t really watched too many times for about 15 years, but two sketches I remember hating were David Spade’s - the “buh-bye” guy and the “Dick Clark receptionist.” Both strained to find humor in an annoying, arrogant character.
Too bad, because David Spade is pretty likable and funny, even with all the horrible vehichles he has been in (including straight-to-Comedy Central type movies).
Hugh Laurie was just on the show this past Saturday. This is the Hugh Laurie from House, the Hugh Laurie from Jeeves and Wooster, the Hugh Laurie from freakin’ Blackadder, and they do a sketch that’s nothing more than a three-minute-long fart joke.
It can’t get any worse than that, can it?
Probably it was and I misremembered “da juice” as “secret sauce”.
Bleh.