Daytime dramas, also known as “soap operas,” are an underappreciated artform. Daytime dramas have the unique opportunity to invite us into the world of these characters five days a week, 52 weeks a year. These people become like family to us. “The Young and the Restless” star Katherine Chancellor was like a grandmother to me, “As The World Turns” actress Lily Snyder was like a second mom, “All My Children” star Erica Kane was the diva I wanted to be like, and “As The World Turns” actress Rosanna Cabot was the friend I wanted to hang out with every day. Movies give us a small window into people’s lives, and television series give us more, but usually only 8-to-24 episodes a year. They can’t entirely give us the connection that soap operas can.  
 
The last 20 years have been very sad for this artform. In 2003, ABC’s “Port Charles,” was cancelled after six years, leaving only nine soaps on the air. However, 2008 started a mass exodus of soap operas getting cancelled: “Passions” (2008), “Guiding Light” (2009), “As The World Turns” (MY FAVORITE, 2010), “All My Children” (2011) and “One Life to Live” (2012). Beginning in 2013, this once-thriving genre only had four more shows on the air: “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “Days of Our Lives,” “General Hospital” and “The Young and the Restless.”  

I was shocked and thrilled when CBS announced a new daytime drama, “Beyond the Gates.” Ironically, “Beyond the Gates” is replacing the talk show, “The Talk,” which replaced “As The World Turns in 2010. This knowledge makes it very apparent that networks may have been giving up on soap operas too soon.
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“Beyond The Gates” is a groundbreaking daytime drama focused on a black family. The cast has many familiar faces who have made their mark in the daytime community throughout the years, including my two favorite on the show, Tamara Tunie from “As The World Turns” and Karla Mosley from “The Bold and the Beautiful.”  
 
“Beyond The Gates” follows the very rich and powerful Dupree family: matriarch Anita Dupree (Tunie), her husband, Vernon Dupree (Clifton Davis), and their children, Nicole Dupree Richardson (Daphnee Duplaix) and Dani Dupree (Mosley).

This drama is set in a Maryland suburb just outside of Washington D.C.  The Duprees live in an elite gated community called Fairmont Crest. The main story that starts this soap opera is that Dani’s ex-husband, Bill Hamilton (Timon Kyle Durett) has just moved back into Fairmont Crest with the woman he left Dani for: Hayley Lawson (Marquita Goings). Hayley is younger and was friends with Dani’s daughter, Chelsea (RhonniRose Mantilla) but ended up moving in on her friends’ father. This infidelity led to the divorce between Dani and Bill. Dani is on a downward spiral and starts becoming unhinged very quickly when she learns that not only are they moving into this community, but they expect to get married at the country club her family helped start.  
 
This soap does have some secondary characters and families on the show: the McBrides: Vanessa (Lauren Buglioli) and Doug (Jason Graham), and their twin children; and the Thomases: Dana “Leslie” (Trisha Mann-Grant) and her daughter, Eva (Ambyr Michelle). The most interesting character out of the secondary characters is most definitely Leslie. Grant portrays Leslie as a scheming, manipulative woman to perfection. She can come across as a genuinely good person out in public, fooling everyone (including the audience in the beginning) that she is a heroine. Leslie’s plot will be the most interesting thing to watch unfold in the coming weeks.
 
The true standout on the show is Mosley as Dani Dupree. Dani is an infuriating character to watch because you love her so much but she manages to make mistake after mistake. She cannot seem to help herself, but you still root for her. I will be disappointed if Mosley's name is left off when the Daytime Emmy nominations are announced next year. She is definitely the most deserving of a nomination for this show so far.
 
This show does manage to move the genre forward in many ways. One of these is that instead of just shooting on a set, the show has scenes that are outside. It makes us all feel that these characters are people living out in the world. However, even the scenes filmed on a set feel more real than lots of soap opera sets in the past. This mostly has to do with incredible lighting that gives the space the feeling of a natural room in real life. Also, the writing team did an excellent job setting up these storylines and moved everything at a swift pace in the first couple of weeks.

Soap operas are known for having storylines that can last so long that you almost do not care about the ending when it comes. “Beyond the Gates” does not have that problem so far. Finally, the show also does not seem to be afraid of pushing the boundaries of the intimate scenes. A couple of scenes, while incredibly tame, might have made my grandmother blush years ago.  

The show has managed to be entertaining and given us characters to root for and care about. The biggest issue with the show is that it is an hour-long daytime drama. The other show on CBS that focuses mainly on one family, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” is only 30 minutes long and still proves to have very repetitive dialogue and episodes that feel like they were repeats of the day before. With limited characters, there will be limited storylines and things to talk about. Even within the first two weeks, multiple characters brought up Dani’s ex marrying her daughter’s best friend. While that was the most interesting thing, it will make the show very boring in coming weeks and years if this is a forecast of what is to come.  

“Beyond the Gates” is mildly entertaining and shows promise with new approaches to the genre. However, if it is not careful, it could also fall into normal soap opera conventions that make it less special.   

by Julian Spivey
Lady Gaga returned to pull double duty at “Saturday Night Live” in the 14th episode of the 50th season on Saturday, March 8, one day after releasing her latest album Mayhem. She presided over a delightfully weird episode, which proved she should be a frequent host of the show. It certainly shouldn’t be another dozen years before she returns to do so, as was the case this time.
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Here’s the best and worst from her hosting stint… 
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Best:
The best part of Lady Gaga’s episode on Saturday wasn’t necessarily one sketch over any others. It was simply how magnificently weird many of the night’s sketches were, but usually in a charming fashion – like early on when she’s leaving her boyfriend to go to culinary school in Paris and takes riding luggage to the airport, which includes a hilarious shortcut through the halls of Studio 8H and a riding luggage biker gang featuring Andrew Dismukes, James Austin Johnson and Jane Wickline. Then there was the darker, weird, like a customer at Friendly’s lying about her birthday for a free sundae, turning into an occult sacrifice.

But if there were a standout moment from Lady Gaga’s episode it would have to be …

Best:
Pip!
Writer Dan Bulla has been with ‘SNL’ since 2019, but his promotion to writing supervisor this season seems to come with his recurring short film series titled Midnight Matinee. Previous segments of Midnight Matinee include Ariana Grande singing about the smell of her best friend's house and Beppo the monkey’s trip into space. But we hadn’t seen one since early November. The shorts' theme always seems charming and cute with a dark punchline coming ahead and “Pip” is no different. Pip is a mouse attending high school with humans and is embarrassed by a student played by Marcello Hernandez when the school’s weightlifting competition nears. With the encouragement of a student played by Lady Gaga through song, Pip works at lifting weights until the competition comes and he’s forced to save the day … mostly. 
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Worst:
Maybe I’m just tired of politics right now, and the show will focus on politics, it’s just what it does. But I found the cold opening about a rift within the President Trump administration between Marco Rubio (Hernandez) and Elon Musk, ‘SNL’ legend Mike Myers in a now recurring role, to have been flat. Neither impression completely works for me, and it’s pretty noticeable when paired against James Austin Johnson’s exceptional Trump impression. Still, I think it’s mostly just I’m not interested right now – I bet many watching probably identify with that feeling. 
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Best:
Lady Gaga brought two of her newest songs, “Abracadabra” and “Killah” to the ‘SNL’ stage on Saturday night, and while neither were quite my cup of tea musically. I couldn’t make out half of the lyrics, it was mesmerizing to see the performance and effort Lady Gaga put forth, and her usage of the studio as a whole, something we don’t often see from musical performances on the show. She had so much energy and the performances were so athletic, you could hear her hard breathing in the mic at the end of both. 

Netflix’s conspiracy drama limited series “Zero Day,” which premiered Feb. 20, is an epic disappointment.

Don’t confuse disappointing for bad. It’s not bad. It’s watchable. With a cast that includes many high-profile award-winning actors, it should be more than you’d expect from your typical TV procedural. This show stars two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro, a Mt. Rushmore actor of his generation, and feels like it could’ve aired on CBS minus the F-bombs.

“Zero Day” begins with a massive tragedy due to malware that takes down technology in the United States for one minute. Phones and computers go down, which causes incidents like subway and train derailments and multiple plane crashes. Thousands of people die.

In a fraught political landscape, exactly like the one in today’s America, President Evelyn Mitchell (Oscar-nominated Angela Bassett) realizes she must find the one man Americans trust to oversee a commission to figure out what happened, why it happened and if it can be brought to justice. That man Americans can trust is former President George Mullen (De Niro), who ran the country in a less conspiratorial time and gave up the presidency after one term due to both the death of his son (which is why the country thinks he left the office), as well as another secret reason we’ll find out a few episodes in.

There are two mysteries in the six-episode “Zero Day. " The first is the obvious: who created the bug that took down America’s tech and led to this disaster? The second comes at the end of the first episode when we realize something may not be right with Mullen—he’s either being messed with psychologically or is losing his mental faculties through age.

One of the mysteries is concluded in the series, the other is left wide open.

The supporting cast features a lot of terrific actors and actresses in roles that aren’t quite as interesting as they should be. There’s Oscar-nominated Joan Allen as the former First Lady who’s now hoping to become a federal judge, Emmy-nominated Lizzy Caplan as Alexandra Mullen, the former President’s daughter who is a Congresswoman at odds with her father, Oscar-nominated Jesse Plemons as Mullen’s right-hand man with a secret of his own, Emmy-nominated Connie Britton as Mullen’s former Chief of Staff (also holding a secret of her own), Emmy-nominated Matthew Modine as Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer, Emmy-nominated Bill Camp as the head of the C.I.A. and Dan Stevens as radical political commentator Evan Green, who is so obviously based on Tucker Carlson that it hits a little too on the nose.

There’s also Emmy-nominated Gaby Hoffman as tech billionaire Monica Kidder, who is so obviously patterned on Elon Musk. Though, I have to give “Zero Day” creators Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt some credit here as this series was surely thought up before Musk’s current hold over the American political situation took place—a bit of prescience on their part.

If you’re looking for something to pass the time over quiet evenings, give “Zero Day” a watch. It won’t hurt. It’s perfectly average television. De Niro is good and may even add an Emmy to his collection depending on the competition. But don’t expect too much, even with the stellar cast. If you do, you will be disappointed.

50. Ashlee Simpson Is Busted
It likely wasn’t the first time anyone had ever lip-synced on “Saturday Night Live.” There have probably been performances of lip-synched music on the show in the two decades since. Still, Ashlee Simpson’s malfunction on the Oct. 23, 2004, episode of “Saturday Night Live” remains one of the most jaw-dropping flubs in the show’s history and one of the few times the show’s ever had to cut abruptly to a commercial. According to Simpson, she was suffering from vocal cord inflammation caused by acid reflux on the day of the live broadcast, which caused her to lose her voice and unable to complete the final rehearsals for the show. Because of this she decided to use a pre-recorded vocal track as support for the show’s two scheduled performances. The first performance of the episode “Pieces of Me” went off without an issue. When it came time for the second performance, “Autobiography,” an incorrectly played vocal from the previously performed song was mistakenly used before Simpson reached the microphone. The vocal was immediately lowered, but in an attempt to mask the error, Simpson’s band began to synchronize with the notes of “Pieces of Me.” This caused even more confusion for Simpson, who reacted with an awkward, short jig on stage before leaving the stage in horror after about half a minute. The band continued to play, but without a singer on stage, the show was forced to cut to a commercial break. The performance of “Autobiography” on the show never occurred. During the goodnights portion of the episode, the night’s host, Jude Law, asked Simpson to explain the incident. She said: “My band started playing the wrong song, and I didn’t know what to do, so I thought I’d do a hoedown. I’m sorry. This is live TV. These things happen!” Simpson and the show faced criticism for lip-synching performance. Days after the episode, Simpson called into MTV’s “Total Request Live” to explain the mix-up. The CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” just so happened to be filming behind the scenes of the show on the same night of the Simpson performance, and their footage supported Simpson’s account of what happened. ‘SNL’ producer Lorne Michaels stated that he was unaware of Simpson’s plan to use lip-synching and that had he been aware, he wouldn’t have allowed it. He also said it was the only time in the show’s history that a musical guest walked off the stage during a live telecast. The incident would appear to leave an irreparable mark on Simpson’s career, which floundered afterward. Today, she’s arguably remembered for the ‘SNL’ mishap more than her music career. 

49. Stunt Casting Gone Wild
Stunt casting on “Saturday Night Live” is a relatively new phenomenon. Sure, there were moments in the past like John Goodman, a frequent host of the show, coming in to portray Linda Tripp during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal and Tina Fey portraying Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential election, when it was noticed the two resembled each other. But when Larry David really hit the mark as Sen. Bernie Sanders around 2012 the show realized it could make headlines and bring in viewers by getting celebrities outside of the cast to come in and portray famous people, usually politicians. There was some good early on with this: David as Sanders, Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer and the earliest moments of Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. However, the stunt casting quickly went awry, especially with more than four years of Baldwin portraying Trump and the worst of all stunt castings Jim Carrey as Joe Biden. It became something that many fans of the show grew tired of and began to severely eye roll. The show’s still doing it to this day with varied degrees of success. For instance, the 2024 Presidential Election having Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris and Dana Carvey as Biden worked for me. It’s always nice to see legends of the show return to their natural habitat, but when they rely on celebrity look-alikes like comedian Jim Gaffigan portraying Harris’ running mate Tim Walz it always comes off as poor utilization of the show’s cast and a ratings ploy on the part of the show. Hopefully the days of stunt casting will end soon, but it’s gone on for more than a decade now.  
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48. 'SNL' Bows to Trump for Ratings
“Saturday Night Live” is in the television business, which means it’s in the ratings business. It hopes to entertain, but its priority is bringing in viewers. So, when the show can bring in an A-list superstar over a likely funnier host, it does so because the business demands it. But what about when some of the most famous people who might draw in significant numbers of viewers are despicable? The show came into this predicament in 2015 when it brought in Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump to host an episode (he had hosted previously in 2004 when he was merely a rich game show host). At the time, it may have felt like Trump wasn’t a real threat to win the White House, but he had begun his candidacy with thinly-veiled racist attacks against Mexicans by calling them rapists and murderers. Still, the show thought, “We should get this guy. He’ll bring in viewers.” Well, he did. And it didn’t matter to the show and NBC if it had to shed some moral high ground to get those viewers, even if the show’s cast wanted nothing to do with Trump as host. Cast member Taran Killam, who once impersonated Trump on the show, told NPR in 2017, “It was not enjoyable at the time and something that only grows more embarrassing and shameful as time goes on.” The show, which Trump now includes often among his hate-filled social media tirades, may not have done much to get Trump elected, but it certainly helped normalize him. The show would do something similar, though less controversial at the time, in 2021 when Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hosted the show. He wasn’t nearly as controversial then as now, but he made for an incredibly awkward host and was rude to cast members. He even made cast member Chloe Fineman cry due to his reaction to a sketch she had written. 
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47. Extremely Stupid
Breaking character is always going to be an issue with live television, particularly live comedic television. Sometimes the jokes you say or the humorous antics you have to perform for a live audience and the millions watching instantaneously at home are just too funny not to laugh to or at yourself.

‘SNL’ fans have always had a love/hate relationship with performers breaking character on the show. Some are strict in their opinion that professionals should never break character while others love the fact that cast members occasionally crack themselves up and admit that at times breaking character actually makes a sketch much funnier than it would have been otherwise.

There have been many memorable instances of breaking character on the show from the almost-never-to-crack Phil Hartman doing so in Frankenstein makeup to Bill Hader’s hilarious crack-ups at last second joke inserts by writer John Mulaney during Stefon bits on Weekend Update. The most famous “breaking character” cast members were Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz, whose frequent crack-ups were a common annoyance to those who hate seeing such things.

Perhaps the best-timed flub in the 50 year history of “Saturday Night Live” came in its early years and started a crack-up so hilarious that it almost completely brought the entire sketch to a standstill … and in doing so turned what certainly would’ve been a long forgotten sketch into a classic.

It happened on Dec. 11, 1976 during the show’s second season and the third episode of the series hosted by actress Candice Bergen in just a year-and-a-half span. It was a simple plot. Bergen was supposed to be the straight woman in the sketch about a message from the Right to Extreme Stupidity League about how all Americans deserve their right to extreme stupidity. Gilda Radner was to be the American diagnosed with “extreme stupidity.”

Bergen’s character is named ‘Fern’ and Radner’s is named ‘Lisa,’ but at some point in the sketch Bergen mistakenly flip-flops the names and says, “You’re not too bright are you Fern [breaking character by laughing at her mistake] Whatever your name is! [continues laughing].” Radner interjects “Lisa!” to which Bergen continues with the sketch as written, “As a matter of fact you’re extremely stupid.” Radner says, “Well, you’re right Fern. And, you know I’m proud of it. [At this point she turns to the camera for emphasis] You know, we all can’t be brainy like Fern here … [the emphasis she puts on the name is something only a comedic genius like Radner could do].” At this point Bergen absolutely loses it to the point where she is in tears and can barely continue the sketch.

I’m not sure whether the “we all can’t be brainy like Fern here” line was written as part of the sketch or improvised on the spot by Radner, but it feels totally improvised when you watch it, and it makes it seem all the more hilarious.

I’m sure if you asked ‘SNL’ fans what their favorite memory of Radner is from her time on the show they’d probably name one of her memorable characters like Roseanne Roseannadanna or Emily Litella, but her quick wit and perfect timing upon Bergen’s misfortune in this sketch is my favorite memory of her.​

46. Colonel Angus 
I have to admit that the first time I saw the Colonel Angus sketch live in February 2003 it wasn’t one of my favorite sketches. I laughed but never thought years later I’d look back on it with such fondness.

In the sketch, the week’s host, Christopher Walken, a noted member of the Five-Timers Club, played a Civil War hero returning home from war. His name was Colonel Angus, and for some reason, the ladies around Shady Thicket absolutely loved him. When you hear the name Colonel Angus said with a Civil War-era Southern accent, you begin to realize why they’re so fond of him.

I think I truly began to appreciate this sketch years after I saw it when I found out that it was written by Tina Fey and revisited it. Something about a sketch with such ribald, tawdry wordplay written by a woman piqued my interest, because such things in the past had typically been considered with a “boys club” mentality. Here was Fey, who thanks to her magnificent NBC comedy series “30 Rock,” I’d grown to absolutely love, respect and admire for her acerbic sense of humor, showing the world that women could be just as raunchy and dirty-minded as the men when it came to comedy.

Some would say that the writer of a sketch shouldn’t matter all that much when it comes to the overall greatness of it, but if Adam Sandler had written the Colonel Angus sketch it just wouldn’t have felt the same. It would have been typical Sandler. From Fey the numerous double-entendres that make Colonel Angus so much fun weren’t as expected and it really adds to the humor and greatness of the entire bit.

It’s nice knowing which writers have a hand in writing which sketches, but that’s something that unfortunately isn’t well-known or publicized throughout the great history of ‘SNL.’ We remember the cast members and lines that made us laugh, but rarely get a chance to know the genius behind the words or plots.

Colonel Angus came at a particularly important time in ‘SNL’ history when female cast members like Fey, Amy Poehler and later on Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and more were about to steal a show that had always been dominated by men.
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45. Uncle Jemima's Pure Mash Liquor
Tracy Morgan had many memorable moments during his seven seasons on “Saturday Night Live” from recurring characters like Brian Fellow and Astronaut Jones to great one-off sketches like Big Bernard. I’d say he’s undoubtedly one of my favorite ‘SNL’ cast members of all time and I believe his most outstanding comedy achievement actually came shortly after his ‘SNL’ tenure when he joined the cast of Tina Fey’s incredible NBC comedy “30 Rock” as Tracy Jordan, essentially a more absurdist version of Morgan himself.

Tracy Jordan is one of the greatest sitcom characters ever, in my opinion, but out of all of the things Morgan did on ‘SNL’ the most memorable for me remains Uncle Jemima’s Pure Mash Liquor, which might be the greatest fake commercial in the show’s 50-season history (and believe me that’s truly saying something). It’s also the only ‘SNL’ commercial parody to make this list.

The idea behind Uncle Jemima, the husband of pancake maven Aunt Jemima, is simply genius. It also shows just how good racial humor can be when it’s done right.

The Uncle Jemima’s Pure Mash Liquor commercial is set up perfectly as a parody to the long-forgotten and deeply buried Disney movie “Song of the South” with Uncle Jemima staring into the camera trying to sell his Pure Mash Liquor. The faux-commercial is perhaps one of the most quotable bits in ‘SNL’ history (again, that’s truly saying something) with memorably hilarious lines like “I’m Uncle Jemima. You probably know my wife, Aunt Jemima, the Pancake Lady. Now, she says that sellin’ booze is degradin’ to our people. I always say that black folk ain’t exactly swellin’ up with pride on account of you flippin’ flapjack!” and “Uncle Jemima's Pure Mash Liquor has a 95 percent alcohol content, and that's per volume. That means you get f***** up for less money!”

Uncle Jemima’s Pure Mash Liquor is such a simple concept, but Morgan’s performance and reading of such truly funny lines make it one of the greatest of all time.​
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44. Robert Goulet's Coconut Banger's Ball: It's a Rap
Will Ferrell will appear on this list an incredible number of times, which is a good reason why I believe he’s the greatest cast member in the 50-season history of “Saturday Night Live.” I believe many others think this too – after all Ferrell is the only cast member to ever have multiple ‘Best Of’ specials dedicated to his work on the show.

The fact that Ferrell had an impersonation of lounge singer Robert Goulet in his bag of tricks was uniquely and hilariously absurd. That he portrayed Goulet as pompous ratcheted up the laughter even more. But Ferrell’s Goulet impression was at its peak when he paired the old-school crooner with some of the day’s biggest hip-hop songs.

Listening to Ferrell as Goulet croon Sisqo’s “Thong Song” and The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Poppa” a capella is one of those ultimate ‘SNL’ moments I will never forget and constantly find myself thinking of whenever I hear any of those songs. The idea of Goulet singing songs with the content of those hip-hop hits is enough to make somebody almost bust a gut. Goulet claims in the sketch that he can do hip-hop better than the gangsta rappers selling millions saying, “You wouldn’t let a clown fix a leak in the john, so why let these hooligans tear down the biz?” I only wish Ferrell had been able to do more hip-hop classics as Goulet. Frankly, his other Goulet sketches never quite lived up to this one.

However, the funniest part of the sketch isn’t even Goulet trying to pimp his record “Coconut Banger’s Ball: It’s a Rap” but toward the end of the sketch when the big horn mountain goat – the true reason he drives out to the middle of nowhere – comes wandering by and the two engage in an epic staring contest concluding in the hilarious “you win, you always do” line by Ferrell.

Few cast members in this show’s history could pull off such a ridiculous sketch idea as Robert Goulet performing rap songs and then having a staring contest with a goat and make it work as hilariously and effortlessly as Ferrell. That’s one of the many reasons he was the best.

43. Tom Brokaw Pre-Tapes
Dana Carvey is one of the all-time greatest cast members in “Saturday Night Live” history, but one of Carvey’s finest moments on the show came in a hosting stint on Oct. 25, 1996, his second hosting appearance after leaving the show in 1993.

In the episode, Carvey impersonated then NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw who was about to go on a multi-week vacation and needed to pre-tape some breaking news bulletins in the off-chance that specific big news stories broke while he was away. The big news story the producer (never seen on camera but voiced by writer Robert Smigel) of the NBC Nightly News is anticipating as a possibility during the sketch is the death of former President Gerald Ford.

Carvey as Brokaw does a straight take of himself breaking the fake news of President Ford’s death and thinks everything’s a wrap and he’s ready to embark on his much-needed vacation. Not just yet. The producer needs Brokaw to record specific takes for possibilities of how President Ford might die. This is where the sketch takes a turn for the utterly brilliant and hilarious, and even, at times, macabre.

Carvey, one of the greatest impressionists to ever grace ‘SNL,’ is supremely hilarious doing a spot-on Brokaw announcing President Ford being eaten by a pack of wolves, overdosing on crack cocaine, being chopped into tiny bits by an airplane propeller and being strangled to death by the corpse of Richard Nixon.

The absolute funniest bit of the sketch is toward the beginning when Brokaw is pre-taping news of President Ford being assassinated by gunshot, and the producer wants him to insert the word “senseless” into the take.

Brokaw snidely replies with: “Gerald Ford shot dead today, at the senseless age of 83.”

Interestingly this sketch didn’t actually have its origins on ‘SNL,’ but Carvey’s very short-lived sketch comedy series “The Dana Carvey Show” on ABC in 1996. That series only aired seven episodes but featured many of today’s biggest comics on its staff. Now disgraced Louis C.K. was the show’s head writer and Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell were a part of its cast. The Tom Brokaw Pre-tapes sketch was written for the eighth episode of “The Dana Carvey Show,” which never aired. Its loss was a massive gain for ‘SNL.’

42. 'SNL' Does Frank Sinatra
“Saturday Night Live” has had the great luxury of having two incredible Frank Sinatra impressions over its legendary 50-season run on television.

Joe Piscopo was the first, as he essentially owned the impression of “Ol’ Blue Eyes” in the early ’80s on the show. It was his greatest achievement during his ‘SNL’ tenure and the thing he’s most known for more than 40 years after leaving the show (he  appeared on the ‘SNL’ 40th anniversary special as Sinatra rather than himself). Piscopo’s Sinatra may be the ultimate – or greatest – Sinatra impression there’s ever been. But it’s something the ‘SNL’ higher-ups actually had to talk Piscopo into doing.

Piscopo said in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller: “The Sinatra stuff was early on, and they had to talk me into that too, because I didn’t want to disrespect my hero. When I first started doing him, I wrote him a letter and I sent him an album through his attorney – we put out this ‘I Love Rock and Roll, Sinatra Sings the Rock Tunes’ kind of thing. I was a North Jersey Italian American just like the Old Man, as we affectionately referred to Mr. S., and he couldn’t have been nicer. Matter of fact, he sent out cease-and-desist letters to anybody who’d even think of doing him and he never sent me a letter.”

Piscopo’s greatest moment as Sinatra was probably when he teamed up with Eddie Murphy’s spot-on Stevie Wonder to do a play on the hit Wonder had with Paul McCartney in the early ’80s called “Ebony and Ivory.” The parody version had Sinatra singing hilarious lines like: “You are blind as a bat and I have sight/Side by side, you are my amigo, Negro, let’s not fight.”

The other legendary ‘SNL’ cast member with an iconic impression of “The Chairman of the Board” was Phil Hartman. Hartman’s Sinatra was more mean-spirited than Piscopo’s, probably meaning Hartman didn’t have the same closeness to the source.

According to Piscopo the Sinatra family wasn’t happy at all by Hartman’s impression.

“The Sinatra family was not happy with the impression Phil was doing at all, again rest his soul. There was a meanness there to the Hartman thing. That was Lorne [Michaels] too, man. And I think there’s some kind of law: Don’t even attempt to do Sinatra unless you’re Italian.”

The greatest Sinatra sketch in the show’s history, in my opinion, was a Hartman one and came during the Jan. 19, 1991 episode hosted by musician Sting.

It was a unique idea to take The McLaughlin Group news show, which the show frequently parodied, and have it hosted by Sinatra with a panel of the day’s biggest recording artists like Sinead O’Connor (Jan Hooks), Billy Idol (Sting) and 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell (Chris Rock). Watching Hartman’s jerk of a Sinatra grill and make fun of these younger stars was an absolute blast, especially when he’d taunt or throw insults at them.

Hartman could own a sketch with the best of them in the history of ‘SNL’ and this is, without a doubt, one of his ultimate highlights.

41. 'SNL' At Home
One of the most admirable things “Saturday Night Live” has ever done was finish out its season in 2020 when the Covid-19 outbreak took over America and the rest of the world forcing the abrupt end of many TV seasons and changing the way late-night television was made in the U.S. Thanks to modern day technology that allowed for things to be done via phones, laptops, etc. over things like Zoom the show was able to re-tool itself to provide 90 minutes of laughs in one of the scariest times in modern history. The final three episodes of season 45, referred to as “Saturday Night Live at Home,” saw the show’s cast members doing comedy sketches from the safety of their homes during the pandemic. Sure, the show’s weren’t live, but they were still prepared weekly and gave the show a DIY feel like you would see if the show were done on a social media app like TikTok. The ‘SNL at Home’ period was weird but it certainly beat not having new material to finish out the season. I’m not sure there was anything on the three episodes that will stand the test of time as iconic ‘SNL’ moments, but the fact that the show just didn’t pack it in and call it a season is something I’ll never forget.
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40. Patriotic Shorts 
Patriotic Shorts was a very important sketch at the time for “Saturday Night Live” as it came less than a month after the tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11 had caused so much pain to not only New York, where the show is, of course, performed but the entire nation. It was important, I think, for two reasons. 1) Because people really could use a good laugh after so much tragedy and 2) Because the nation had already been taken over by over-patriotic symptoms (that frankly, it hasn’t gotten over in the decades since), and that’s something that needed to be poked fun of to some extent.

Will Ferrell is arguably the most outstanding cast member in the 50 seasons of ‘SNL,’ and this is probably one of his greatest hits on the show.

The sketch, which appeared in just the second episode of ‘SNL’ after 9/11, features the week’s host Seann William Scott as a boss of an office who, wanting to show his American pride, allows his employees to wear patriotic attire like ties adorned with the flag or flag pins. One employee, Ferrell’s Dale McGrew, takes things just a little bit too far when he shows up for a company meeting wearing a half shirt that says ‘USA’ that completely bares his midsection and flag shorts that have been cut into a thong.

The sketch's punchline is Ferrell’s wacky attire that shows off a sense of over-patriotism. Things get uncomfortably hilarious when McGrew wanting to pour himself a cup of coffee turns his back to the camera showing off both of Ferrell’s butt cheeks. Ferrell was known to be the one cast member to go above and beyond for laughs, and this was a clear sign of his willingness to make people laugh.

A great aspect of the Patriotic Shorts sketch is how the rest of the cast members (Horatio Sanz, Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers) struggle to keep their giggles under wraps throughout the six-plus-minutes, often failing to do so. Things get particularly hilarious when Ferrell leans back in his chair and places his feet upon the meeting room’s table, completely exposing his red, white and blue crotch.

Patriotic Shorts was the perfect sketch for “Saturday Night Live” to air less than a month after our nation’s worst tragedy. It was probably the first time some people had laughed since before 9/11.
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39. Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey
Few writers in the history of “Saturday Night Live” have ever become widely known in the pop culture lexicon. Many of those who did actually became popular well after their tenures as a ‘SNL’ writer like Conan O’Brien who became popular for his late night talk show gigs. Jack Handey is one of the very few, along with Robert Smigel and some others, that became not quite household names, but at least known to many.

Handey became known for his “Deep Thoughts” which are merely one-liner jokes, usually leaning toward the surrealistic or absurd. This was a very unique and unusual thing to see on a sketch comedy show, but the quick segments were so uproariously funny that they’ve always stuck with me.

Handey initially had his “Deep Thoughts” published in National Lampoon magazine in 1984 and in various publications in the years before his stint at ‘SNL.’

In Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s compilation “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live,” Handey said that his “Deep Thoughts” were unforeseenly important to the show.

“They proved to be pretty popular. And also they have a utilitarian purpose on the show, which I didn’t foresee, which was that a lot of times they need, you know, 30 seconds to move cameras from one set to another, so they can just drop in something like that, and so it was helpful in that regard. I probably did more than 200 of them,” Handey said.

After Handey left the show in the late ’90s, he would occasionally do guest writing, including the less popular but still hilarious “Fuzzy Memories” and “My Big Thick Novel” segments. Handey was also the creative genius behind two of the more wacky characters in ‘SNL’ history: Phil Hartman’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and Toonces the Driving Cat.

38. Get Off the Shed
Will Ferrell is the greatest cast member in the 50-season history of “Saturday Night Live,” in my opinion. I know that’s going to be controversial for some, and I agree that legends like Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Chris Farley, and others are right up there with him, but for me, it’s Ferrell.

Nobody has made me bust out into uproarious laughter more on ‘SNL’ than Ferrell and it all started on his very first episode on the show. How many other cast members can you think of having an all-time classic sketch on their very first episode?  

It’s one of the most simplistic sketches in the show’s history, with essentially only one repeated punchline, and honestly, it shouldn’t even be all that funny, but in the hands of Ferrell, it turns into a masterpiece. Ferrell plays Frank Henderson who’s having a backyard grill party with his wife, played by the week’s host Mariel Hemingway, when two new neighbors drop by (David Koechner and Nancy Walls). Frank is having a nice, typical conversation with the neighbors while flipping burgers on the grill when he notices his kids (whom you never see onscreen) playing on top of the shed. Frank politely asks his kids to get off of the shed and continues on his previous conversation. Throughout the entire sketch those blasted kids of his return to playing atop the shed and Frank admonishes them for it, but with each admonishment getting louder and angrier as he goes until he’s finally screaming full throttle at them to “GET OFF THE DAMN SHED!”

It’s one of the great up-the-ante sketches that Ferrell was so fantastic at where he’d start out mild-mannered and end up almost psychotic by the sketch’s end, and every single time, have you in stitches.

Interestingly, the ‘Get Off the Shed’ bit was one of the pieces that Ferrell auditioned for the show with, and you know Lorne Michaels and crew must have really enjoyed it if it ended up as a centerpiece of his very first episode.

37. Fan Campaign Leads to Betty White Hosting
For as long as TV stars had been such a thing, Betty White had been one. From the earliest days of television when she starred on the sitcom “Life with Elizabeth,” to her turns on numerous game shows, roles in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Golden Girls” and later “Hot in Cleveland,” she had been one of television’s icons. But White had never hosted ‘SNL,’ despite ‘Golden Girls’ being an NBC show. Supposedly, according to ‘SNL’ producer Lorne Michaels, the show had asked White to host on three separate occasions between the ‘70s and ‘90s and was turned down each time. Then something remarkable happened in early 2010, when a campaign, which began on the social media site Facebook titled “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!”, started to become noticed, receiving almost 190,000 people urging the show to have White as host, Michaels asked White, who was 88 at the time, again. This time White relented and gave the fans what they wanted. To my knowledge, it’s the only time in the show’s 50 seasons in which it listened to the petitions of fans to have a host without it being the show’s idea. White’s hosting stint would be one of the most memorable in the show’s history, not simply for having the TV legend host, but also for bringing back some of the great female cast members of the show, like Tina Fey,  Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer to appear alongside side her in sketch, leading to memorable moments like talking about her dusty muffins on Delicious Dish with Gasteyer and Shannon and playing opposite Shannon’s Sally O’Malley. White also appeared in some of the show’s best sketches of that era, as in MacGruber alongside Will Forte and in Scared Straight alongside Kenan Thompson. It was a unique moment in the show’s history in which the show’s viewers desperately wanted something, the show listened and magic happened. 

36. Fear Punks 'SNL'
One of the most infamous, unpredictable and likely wildest musical performances in the 50 seasons of ‘SNL’ came when the Los Angeles punk band Fear, unknown to the masses, made its national television debut on “Saturday Night Live” on October 31, 1981. Former ‘SNL’ cast member John Belushi had become a fan of the band after seeing them on an episode of the L.A. based “New Wave Theatre” and wanted to get the band on the soundtrack for his film “Neighbors.” When the band didn’t make the cut for the soundtrack, Belushi asked ‘SNL’ producer Dick Ebersol for a favor in booking the band as an apology. The band's performance was to include slam dancing (with Belushi as one of the dancers), popular in the punk music community, which scared the show’s director. The show relented to the dancing when Belushi offered to appear in the episode it would. Belushi’s appearance would be a wordless cameo in the show’s cold opening. Fear performed “I Don’t Care About You,” “Beef Bologna” and then its frontman Lee Ving stated: “It’s great to be here in New Jersey,” members of the punk mob could be heard saying “fuck” on the air and the band began playing “New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones.” Following the rowdy performance, the band dedicated it’s next song, “for all of you who voted – Republicans and Democrats alike” and began “Let’s Have a War,” before the live feed was cut off. A previously aired, filmed piece was shown in its place. Fear would never appear on ‘SNL’ again, and Belushi would be dead from a drug overdose less than half a year later. 
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35. Season 11's Cliffhanger 
The eleventh season of “Saturday Night Live” has been dubbed the “weird year” as the show was hanging by a thread after 10 seasons of ups and downs, mostly downs in the last half decade. The show had undergone something of a resurgence in its 10th season with an all-star cast that included Billy Crystal, Martin Short and Christopher Guest, but when Dick Ebersol left as executive producer after four seasons and Lorne Michaels returned to take over the show he created and ran for its first five seasons he decided a complete overhaul was necessary. This overhaul resulted in an odd cast that included veteran actors like previously Oscar-nominated Randy Quaid, along with youngsters like Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. The cast never really gelled and the now overly-used “Saturday Night Dead” tag was given to the show. The eleventh season really only had one standout, Jon Lovitz, who debuted his Pathological Liar and Master Thespian characters that immediately caught on with the audience. NBC president Brandon Tartikoff was likely going to cancel the show when Michaels came up with a unique cliffhanger idea that remains one of the most controversial sketches in the show’s 50 years. He was going to have that week’s co-host Billy Martin, the often fired manager of the New York Yankees set fire to the set with the entire cast locked inside – except for at the last minute, Michaels saves Lovitz from the blaze. At that point, the rest of the cast knew who the golden god was, and they were almost certainly about to lose their jobs. The story of this season is told in the brilliant documentary, “Season 11: The Weird Year,” as part of the series of ‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night’ on Peacock. 

34. John Belushi's Feelin' Alright
John Belushi is among the most beloved cast members in the illustrious 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live,” known for many great characters and impressions. Perhaps his best impression was that of English singer Joe Cocker. Cocker is considered by many to be one of the best vocalists of all-time thanks to his gritty, bluesy voice that led Rolling Stone magazine to name him the 97th greatest singer of all time, but it was for his incredibly spastic body movements while performing in concert that he’s perhaps most known.

These body movements mimicked by Belushi that truly made his impression of Cocker one of the most iconic in ‘SNL’ history. Belushi impersonated Cocker five times on the program. Some might choose his first appearance doing Cocker’s cover of The Beatles’ classic “With a Little Help From My Friends” in October of 1975 to be his finest Cocker turn, but my favorite was his final appearance as the singing legend in October of 1976 when Belushi got a chance to out-Cocker the real Cocker when the performer happened to be the night’s musical guest.

It’s the only time I can remember in ‘SNL’ history where an actual musical performance is turned into a fantastically funny comedy bit thanks to a cast member’s impression.

The musical performance starts with just Cocker performing his hit “Feelin’ Alright” dressed in white pants, a white sports coat and a black T-shirt underneath that had ‘Stuff,’ the name of his band, written in pink lettering. After Cocker finishes the first chorus, Belushi comes out onto the stage dressed identically to Cocker and performs the second verse of the song. Seeing Belushi’s impression right next to Cocker proves just how brilliant it was. Belushi, of course, takes it a little bit further by drinking a beer and wildly pulling at his frizzy white boy afro during the song.
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33. Brasky Buddies 
Bill Brasky is a son of a bitch. He’s a larger-than-life man who makes the Most Interesting Man in the World from those Dos Equis commercials look like a little boy and his buddies, who like to get hammered and talk of Brasky’s epic feats at the bar, are among the funniest characters to ever appear in the grand 40-year history of “Saturday Night Live.”

The Brasky buddies were always led by the hilarious Will Ferrell in the mid-to-late ’90s, typically with cast members of that era, David Koechner and Mark McKinney, by his side and one of the week’s hosts (usually Alec Baldwin or John Goodman). They would drink together at a bar or occasionally another venue, like their son’s little league baseball game, and get to bragging about their experiences with their shared friend Bill Brasky.

The group’s descriptions of Brasky always started out relatively normal with things like “I know Bill Brasky. He’s a big fella, goes about 6’4’’, 280. He loves his Scotch.” However, the descriptions of Brasky get more and more Paul Bunyan-esque as the sketch goes on, and the drunk buddies try to one-up each other until the sketches reach absolute hilarity. By the end of the sketch, Brasky would go from 6’4”, 280 to “a ten-foot-tall, two-ton son of a bitch who could eat a hammer and take a shotgun blast standing!”

The sketches would always end with the shadowy figure of Bill Brasky showing up and offering to buy a round for the buddies.

The sketches appeared five times from 1996 through 1998, and then in late 2013, after 15 years, a miracle happened – in an episode hosted by actor Paul Rudd, the Brasky Buddies returned. Rudd was supporting the movie “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” which co-starred former Brasky buddies Ferrell and Koechner. The three were joined by then ‘SNL’ cast member Taran Killam to recreate the sketch, which would probably become the funniest sketch of that season on the show.
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32. King Tut 

Does anybody remember that comedian Steve Martin actually had a top 20 Billboard hit in 1978 with his comedy song “King Tut”?

True story.
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The novelty song released by Martin and the Toot Uncommons (members of the popular group Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) from Martin’s comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy became a massive hit, selling over a million copies. It debuted on an episode of ‘SNL,’ hosted by Martin, on April 22, 1978, widely regarded as the greatest single episode in ‘SNL’ history.

According to authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, in their book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Martin came to the show that week and asked producer Lorne Michaels if he could perform it live on the air. Michaels put everything he had into the performance, and as a result, it became one of the most expensive productions to appear on the show to that point.

“King Tut” is a satirical novelty song about the Treasures of Tutankhamun traveling exhibit, which was popular in the United States at the time and celebrated the life of the Egyptian pharaoh.

Watching Martin perform “King Tut” dressed in Egyptian pharaoh garb while doing crazy Egyptian dances that wouldn’t be made famous for almost another decade when The Bangles had a hit with “Walk Like an Egyptian” is a blast. Among my favorite lines of this zany tune are: “Buried with a donkey/he’s my favorite honkey” and “Dancin’ by the Nile/The ladies love his style/Rockin’ for a mile/he ate a crocodile.”

The fact that “King Tut” was a satire of the disco fad at the time also adds significantly to the piece's humor, which might be lost on many hearing it for the first time today. Among the highlights of the ‘SNL’ performance is saxophonist Lou Marini, part of the first ‘SNL’ house band led by Howard Shore and a member of the Blues Brothers backing band, stepping out from a golden sarcophagus to play a blazing sax solo.

Martin, who has become quite the banjo virtuoso over the years, would revisit “King Tut” in 2011 as a bluegrass song on his album Rare Bird Alert with the Steep Canyon Rangers. Interestingly enough, both albums featuring this song were nominated for Grammy Awards.
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31. The Abduction of Colleen Rafferty
“Saturday Night Live” doesn’t seem to do recurring characters as often in the last decade-plus of the show, but one of the show’s all-time great characters, and one that never failed to provide laughs for both the audiences and those within the live sketch, was Collen Rafferty, Kate McKinnon’s alien abductee with wildly vivid remembrances of being probed and prodded by her celestial captors. The character has appeared eight times on the show, with its debut coming on December 5, 2015, in an episode hosted by Ryan Gosling. In the debut sketch, Gosling infamously couldn’t keep from consistently breaking character at the outrageous things McKinnon says as Rafferty about her encounters with the beings from beyond. Gosling has appeared in three of the eight Colleen Rafferty sketches, including one in April of this year in an episode in which Gosling hosted, and McKinnon returned to the show in a cameo to perform. McKinnon was the M.V.P. of her era on ‘SNL’; this is most likely the character she’ll most be remembered for playing.  
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29. Lorne Michaels Tries to Reunite The Beatles
One of the most memorable moments of the debut season of “Saturday Night Live” was producer Lorne Michaels’s attempt at reuniting The Beatles. On the April 24, 1976, episode, Michaels appeared in a bit facing the camera, in which he held a $3,000 check and offered it to the four members of The Beatles, which had been broken up for nearly seven years at that point, to perform three Beatles songs on the show.

The bit was a mixture of tongue-in-cheek humor and a bit of hope that it might entice the members to take the gig. Michaels joked: “$1,000 for ‘She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ You know the words – it’ll be easy.” John Lennon happened to be watching the episode live.

A week later, Paul McCartney was visiting Lennon in New York City, and Lennon explained the bit to him and suggested they should play along, show up to the studio, and attempt to claim half the cash. They ultimately decided against it.

​However, a similar joke would be made in the second season of the show, when on the November 20, 1976, episode, George Harrison appeared (in previously recorded bits) as musical guest with host Paul Simon, and a cold opening in which he attempted to claim the money or at least negotiate a price for one Beatle. 

28. David S. Pumpkins, Any Questions? 
Every now and then throughout the half-century run of “Saturday Night Live,” there has been a sketch or character that broke out of the show’s little fan community and gone into the pop culture lexicon almost instantaneously. Usually, it’s a moment from a cast member debuting a new character, but sometimes, it’s a performance given by one of the show’s hosts.

​Such a moment occurred on the October 22, 2016 episode hosted by Tom Hanks, when a strange Halloween character named David S. Pumpkins (Hanks) was born. The brainchild of Mikey Day, Bobby Moynihan, and Streeter Seidell, David S. Pumpkins is essentially the Santa Claus of Halloween, but when he pops up to spectators at a Haunted Mansion-type ride, he is more confusing than scary. The character wears a suit and tie covered in pumpkins and has the catchphrase “Any Questions?,” to which the people on the ride have plenty. David S. Pumpkins is also accompanied by two skeletons (Day and Moynihan) who dance awkwardly during the bit. The sketch immediately became an instant classic for ‘SNL’ and led to an animated special the following year. Hanks reprised David S. Pumpkins in an episode he hosted in season 48.  

27. Five-Timer's Club 
“The Five-Timers Club,” which originally appeared on Tom Hanks’ fifth hosting stint on Dec. 8, 1990, and was hilariously reprised during Justin Timberlake’s fifth hosting appearance in 2013, and a few times since, is one of the most memorable moments in the great history of “Saturday Night Live” just for the sheer quantity of talent involved.

“The Five-Timers Club” is an exclusive club that only includes those select few celebrities who have had the great opportunity to host ‘SNL’ at least five times. The club currently includes 27 members. But, when the sketch debuted with Hanks in 1990, he was only the group’s seventh member along with Buck Henry, Steve Martin, Elliott Gould, Paul Simon, Chevy Chase and Candice Bergen.

The debut of “The Five-Timers Club” was a memorable moment because it featured so many famous faces who had hosted the show before with Martin, Simon and Gould (Chase and Bergen did not appear). It was also funny to see cast member Jon Lovitz, who frequently appeared in sketches with Hanks, as the club waiter. It’s also fun almost 35 years later to see Conan O’Brien, a then-unknown ‘SNL’ writer, as the club’s doorman.

Hanks recalled how the sketch initially came about in the terrific 2002 book Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live As Told By Its Stars, Writers And Guests by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller: “The Five-Timers Club’ is still one of my favorite sketches. By that time, I had figured that the secret of being the host of the show is to concern yourself only with the monologue. Because if you have a good monologue, everybody thinks the entire show was great. So, by the fifth time, I was like pushing for something slam dunk. We must have a magnificent monologue. And I think [‘SNL’ creator/producer] Lorne [Michaels] said, ‘Well, why don’t we do something like, you get to join a select club?’ And that was that.”

The Timberlake “Five-Timers Club” monologue is perhaps even better because it features more members of this exclusive club that Timberlake dubbed “the most exclusive club in New York.” Timberlake’s version featured Simon, Martin, Chase, Bergen, Hanks and Baldwin and included the nice touch of ‘SNL’ legends Dan Aykroyd as club bartender and Martin Short, who is the club’s most recent member, as waiter. 
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26. Debbie Downer
Now and then something will happen on “Saturday Night Live” that will wind up permanently engrained in the American lexicon. Debbie Downer is one of those things. Even people who have never seen a single one of the Debbie Downer sketches on ‘SNL’ know what the term “Debbie Downer” means and have probably used it on an occasion or two. “Debbie Downer” has become synonymous with a depressing person seemingly bent on destroying any positive atmosphere within a group.

The character, who quickly became the greatest and most recognizable of veteran cast member Rachel Dratch’s tenure on the show, debuted on May 1, 2004, in an episode hosted by Lindsay Lohan. The character's outrageousness and, more importantly, the giggles it created amongst every single member of the sketch instantly made it a classic. Debbie Downer would go on to appear on the show six more times, but it never quite lived up to the hilarity of the first time.

In the first appearance Debbie Downer (Dratch) is eating breakfast at a restaurant at Walt Disney World, the supposed happiest place on Earth, with her family members played by Lohan, Jimmy Fallon, Amy Poehler, Fred Armisen and Horatio Sanz. The family is extremely pumped about their breakfast, except for Debbie Dower, of course, who interjects depressing facts about the horrors of life amidst her families’ excitement.

Dratch’s punchlines as Debbie Downer are hilarious, but the real humor of the bit comes early on when the entire cast seems to come down with a fit of the giggles on live television. The first sign of the giggles comes after Debbie Downer’s interjection about Roy from Siegfried and Roy not doing well, and the slide trombone sound effect seems to make her break character ever so slightly – which sets notorious gigglers Fallon and Sanz off immediately. Within a half-minute the entire cast in the sketch has completely lost it. The best part of the whole thing is how much Dratch loses it because of how depressing her character is supposed to be.

The first Debbie Downer sketch is one of the most memorable sketches in ‘SNL’ history because it’s incredibly rare to see every single member of the sketch in hysterics and almost unable to carry on. At one point in the sketch, you see Sanz wiping tears from his eyes because he’s laughing so hard. It’s one of those sketches they probably couldn’t keep together during dress rehearsal and just tried their best during the live show. The cast’s reactions to the sketch make it so memorable.

25. Dana Carvey as President George Bush 
“Saturday Night Live” has been known for its political humor over its legendary 50 years on television such as Will Ferrell as President George W. Bush, both Darrell Hammond and Phil Hartman as President Bill Clinton, and many more.
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I believe Dana Carvey's President George H.W. Bush was the first truly great political impression on ‘SNL’. There had been political impressions before. Hartman did a good President Ronald Reagan, and Dan Aykroyd had done a good President Jimmy Carter, but Carvey’s Bush was the very first, I believe, that essentially changed the country’s impression of the president, at least in some minor ways.

Carvey absolutely became President Bush, and the impersonation likely became the one Carvey was most synonymous with – and Carvey is probably one of the three greatest impressionists in ‘SNL’ history alongside Hammond and Bill Hader.

The interesting thing about Carvey’s Bush impression is that it wasn’t something he already had in his bag of tricks, but was actually assigned to him and he had to learn on the spot.

“I was just assigned George Bush, and I couldn’t do him at all. It was just a weird voice and weird rhythm. It’s one of those things where you go, ‘There’s nothing to do.’ But then over time, after Bush won the election, one night I just sort of hooked it, and it was that phrase ‘that thing out there, that guy out there doin’ that thing,’ and that sort of hooked it for me, and from there on I kind of refined it,” Carvey said in Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller.

Carvey’s terrific impression of Bush would revolve around these great little Bush-isms that I’m not even sure President Bush ever actually said or not, but have become synonymous with him because of Carvey’s impression like “not gonna do it” or “it wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture.”

Almost 35 years after Bush’s presidency ended and long since Carvey has left ‘SNL’ I still consider “not gonna do it” and “it wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture” among the show’s best catchphrases and ones I always find spots for in my daily conversation. I think that’s the mark of a great impression. 

24. Andy Kaufman's Mighty Mouse 
Andy Kaufman was a misunderstood genius. What he did for comedy was so before its time that a lot of people at the time, and probably even some now just don’t understand. The thing was he wasn’t really a comedian in the natural sense. He didn’t tell jokes. In fact, he once said: “I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. ... The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him. ... My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can. ... They say, 'Oh wow, Andy Kaufman, he's a really funny guy.' But I'm not trying to be funny. I just want to play with their heads.” Kaufman was a performance artist. And somehow the fact that he just wanted to mess with people more so than even make them laugh makes him all the more endearing to me.

On many occasions he would both mess with people and still make them laugh. One such time was his first appearance on “Saturday Night Live” during the show’s very first episode in October of 1975 when he lip-synched with gusto to a record of the “Mighty Mouse” theme song. It was a variation of his Foreign Man routine, which would later be adapted into the character of Latka Gravas on the popular ABC sitcom “Taxi,” which was a source of frustration for him as he hated sitcoms. That very first episode of “Saturday Night Live” is not only one of the most important episodes of the series’ great run, but also one of the all-around best and it can be argued that Kaufman’s act was the highlight of it.

According to ‘SNL’ creator Lorne Michaels, Kaufman’s bit was an integral part of that first episode saying in the terrific Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller: “I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early ’70s. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to ‘Mighty Mouse’; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do.”

Kaufman would appear on ‘SNL’ 15 more times between 1975 and 1983, when the show ran a bit where Kaufman would either keep appearing on the show or be voted off forever. Votes were taken via a phone line and Kaufman was dumped by a 195,544 to 169,186 vote. He never appeared on the show again, but it was never admitted whether this was purely a gag or not; true to Kaufman’s style.

Kaufman would die a year later in 1984 of cancer at age 35, although there have always been claims that he faked his death. Today he’s criminally unknown by many, despite his iconic television moments on ‘SNL,’ “Late Night with David Letterman” and “Fridays.” He was honored in 1999 with the terrific biopic “Man on the Moon,” in which Jim Carrey portrayed the legend in arguably his finest film performance.   
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23. Charles Rocket's F-Bomb
“Saturday Night Live” may be a late-night comedy show, but it still airs on NBC, a broadcast network. This means there are certain standards and rules that must be followed. The word “fuck” has been uttered on ‘SNL’ a handful of times over the show’s run, but never more brazenly and intentionally so as on February 12, 1981, in the sixth season of the show, when cast member Charles Rocket, the breakout star of the show’s sixth season (the first without Lorne Michaels as producer), broke the rules in a big way in a running sketch parodying the popular television drama “Dallas.” The episode was hosted by “Dallas” actress Charlene Tilton, and throughout the episode, there was a running gag based on the titillating storylines of “Dallas” in which Tilton and Rocket flirted with each other to the jealousy of the show’s other cast members. At one point, Rocket is shot by a sniper in a moment parodying the famous “Who shot J.R.?” plotline of “Dallas.” During the episode’s goodnights segment, Tilton asked Rocket how he felt about being shot. In character, Rocket ad-libbed: “Oh man, it’s the first time I’ve ever been shot in my life. I’d like to know who the fuck did it.” Tilton and the show’s cast members burst out in awkward laughter. Due to declining ratings, NBC would replace the show’s new producer Jean Doumanian after one more episode, with Dick Ebersol taking over the show. Ebersol would put the show on hiatus for one month, during which he fired Rocket, several of the show’s writers and a few other cast members. Ebersol would only have one episode in season six before the show ended abruptly due to the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike. Ebersol used the off-time to retool the show further, and by the next season only Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo had been retained from season six.  
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22. Norm Macdonald Owns Weekend Update & Gets Fired
Weekend Update has been the centerpiece of “Saturday Night Live” ever since the show debuted 50 years ago. The fake news segment has seen numerous fantastic fake news anchors over the show’s five decades from the very first one Chevy Chase to Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, Seth Meyers and the duo of Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. But the one guy who did the fake news better than anybody else in the show’s incredible history, in my opinion, was Norm Macdonald.

Macdonald is considered by many to be an acquired taste, and some never seemed to have acquired that specific taste. For this reason, this selection on this list might be controversial. Macdonald had an incredibly dry and sarcastic wit and tone to his Weekend Update delivery that just worked for mocking the news. He took those witty jokes, many of which he collaborated on with legendary ‘SNL’ writer Jim Downey and put his own unique brand of “I don’t give a damn” on top of it that just sent the jokes through the sarcasm stratosphere. I think it’s the closest it has ever gotten to if David Letterman, another comedy hero of mine, had been tasked with anchoring Weekend Update.

Macdonald was at his best when he was telling jokes where you couldn’t quite believe he actually went there with the punchline, even though you were well aware he had done similar things time and time before. This shock factor made his version of Weekend Update the most fun it’s ever been on the show. I don’t think there will ever be a more entertaining version of Weekend Update again, and I doubt anything really even comes close. Update will certainly never be that dangerous again.

It was the dangerousness of Macdonald that made him so brilliant, but it’s also what got him fired from anchoring Update when NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, a first class idiot, deemed that Macdonald was “not funny.” Many speculated over the years that it was Macdonald’s frequent shots at O.J. Simpson during his mid-90s murder trial that got Macdonald canned, as Ohlmeyer and Simpson were friends. I believe this is a more likely reason, because Ohlmeyer is an executive and what do those guys know about being funny anyway.

Macdonald turned the firing into a classic late night talk show bit when he went on the “Late Show with David Letterman” just days after getting his pink slip.

He recalled this in the fantastic anthology Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller saying: “I thought it would be funny to go on ‘Letterman’ and talk about it, because I knew that Letterman had been fired from NBC and stuff like that. I got fired on a Monday, so I called up the people at ‘Letterman’ and said, ‘Hey, you should have me on, because I got fired. It would be funny if I just said on the show that I got fired, you know?’ And so they booked me and I went on. And I remember Letterman during a break goes, ‘This is like some Andy Kaufman thing with fake wrestling, right?’ And I go, ‘No, no. It’s serious.’ Like he thought it was just a gag. Then the next day there was like some big reaction at ‘SNL.’ All of a sudden people didn’t want me to get fired, because they saw it as some sort of big network president against the little guy. So then they pretended like they liked me the whole time.”

21. Choppin' Broccoli 
Dana Carvey has already appeared on this list multiple times, which pretty much proves he’s one of the all-time greats when it comes to “Saturday Night Live” cast members. Perhaps his funniest moment ever as a cast member on the show actually came on his very first episode. Is there anybody else in the show’s history that can say that?

Carvey had a bit he did in his stand-up routine that mocked the vapidness of pop music at that time as if the lyrics to many of the most popular hits were being made up right on the spot at the time of their recording. This became the song “The Lady I Know,” which had come to be known to fans more over the years as “Choppin’ Broccoli.”

The first episode of season 12 of ‘SNL’ was a new era for the show as it marked the debut for not only Carvey but also Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson and Kevin Nealon – all who’d become longtime members of the show. Actress Sigourney Weaver hosted the episode, and she and Hartman played a couple of record executives looking to sign the next big music star when an English singer-songwriter by the name of Derek Stevens comes into the studio to go over his demo. There’s just one problem. Stevens has yet to record it. He says that he’d prefer to play his songs for them live. When they insist on him doing so he gets behind the piano and starts coming up with wacky, nonsensical lyrics about a woman going downtown to a grocery store, purchasing some broccoli, taking it home and then chopping it up.

The lunacy of the lyrics, coupled with the effort in which Carvey’s Stevens tries to sell them, really makes the bit work. “Choppin’ Broccoli” is also incredibly infectious and will literally get stuck in your head for days at a time upon hearing it, which is alright because you’ll laugh the entire time.

Carvey probably had the greatest first episode of ‘SNL’ in the show’s 50-year history as he also debuted his iconic Church Lady character that night.

Carvey has been performing “Choppin’ Broccoli” for more than 40 years, and it remains an essential part of his stand-up routine. In 2014, Carvey performed a brilliant orchestral version of the song on “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.”
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20. Adam Sandler's Songs
Some “Saturday Night Live” cast members are great team players where they are flawless whether they are the star of a sketch or playing the straight man in the sketch. Most of the legendary cast members throughout the show’s history like Will Ferrell, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman and so on have been like this. But there are also those who seem to truly shine when they are doing their own special thing. Adam Sandler is probably the biggest and brightest example of this.

Sandler always seemed to be at his best on ‘SNL’ when he was alone and doing his own zany and wacky characters, often guests on Weekend Update like Opera Man and Cajun Man. But he was at his absolute peak when accompanied by his guitar and performing his comical songs that would later become huge hits on his comedy albums.

Sandler’s two funniest performances on ‘SNL’ were “Lunchlady Land” and “The Chanukah Song.” “Lunchlady Land” was co-written by Sandler, Bob Odenkirk, Tim Herlihy and Allen Covert and would appear on Sandler’s debut comedy album They’re All Gonna Laugh At You! released in the fall of 1993. Sandler would debut “Lunchlady Land” on ‘SNL’ with his close friend and cast-mate Chris Farley hilariously portraying the role of the lunch lady and other cast members portraying cafeteria food dancing around Sandler while he performed on an episode hosted by Sara Gilbert on Jan. 15, 1994.

During a Weekend Update segment, Sandler would debut “The Chanukah Song” in his final season on ‘SNL’ on Dec. 3, 1994. The song, co-written by Sandler with ‘SNL’ writers Lewis Morton and Ian Maxtone-Graham, was written about how Jewish children are alienated by the incredible number of Christmas songs but lack of Chanukah songs. “The Chanukah Song” is essentially a name-dropping list of famous Jewish people to pump up Jewish children during the holiday season and make them proud of their heritage. Sandler would record the song for his second comedy album, What the Hell Happened to Me? released in 1995. 

Sandler wrote and released “The Chanukah Song, Part II” for his fourth comedy album Stan and Judy’s Kid in 1999. Then, in 2002, when Sandler did the animated holiday film “Eight Crazy Nights,” he recorded a third version of the song, which he debuted on “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 16 in an episode hosted by late actress Brittany Murphy.
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19. Samurai Futaba 
The late, great John Belushi is one of the most iconic cast members in the 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live” and was named the greatest cast member of all-time by Rolling Stone magazine in its extensive ranking of every cast member.

Belushi had a lot of great characters on the show, from Jake Blues to one of the Killer Bees to his exquisite Joe Cocker impression, but his greatest character on the show was likely Samurai Futaba. According to one of the original ‘SNL’ writers, Alan Zweibel, the samurai character was one of the original ones that Belushi auditioned with for the show. Samurai Futaba made an incredible 16 appearances on the show from the first season in 1975 through 1979. The setup was that Belushi was a samurai who wielded a katana and could only speak mock Japanese and was put into many different occupations which a samurai might have difficulty doing, like psychiatrist, doctor and T.V. repairman.

The two most memorable Samurai Futaba sketches involved host Buck Henry in 1976. The first was Samurai Delicatessen in January of 1976, only the second time the character had ever appeared on the show, in which Belushi’s Samurai Futaba works at a deli. Henry’s Mr. Dantley orders a sandwich, and Samurai Futaba hilariously makes the sandwich by splitting the ingredients with his katana.

Unfortunately, ingredients wouldn’t be the only thing Belushi’s Samurai Futaba would split open. 

During the second season of the show, in October 1976, Henry would appear as Mr. Dantley again in the Samurai Stockbroker sketch. At one point during this sketch, Henry got a little too close to Belushi, who struck the host in the head with the katana. The blow physically knocked Henry back a little, but the veteran host (the first member of the five-timer’s club) finished the sketch with a bloodied forehead.

Henry recaptured the moment for the book Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller: “On the Samurai sketches that I did with John, one never knew where it was going because John’s dialogue could not be written. You never knew what was going to happen next. In “Samurai Stockbroker,” he cut my head open with the sword, but it was really my fault; I leaned in at the wrong time. And I bled all over the set. It was a very amusing moment. You would not believe how much blood from a forehead was on that floor. We went on with the show. It didn’t require stitches, darn it, but it required a clamp for the rest of the show.

Henry finished the remainder of the show with a Band-Aid covering the cut on his forehead. Weekend Update anchor Chevy Chase appeared on the fake news segment with a bandage on his head about 10 minutes following the samurai sketch, and in unison, the remainder of the cast finished the show with Band-Aids on their foreheads, as well.

This sketch was proof that live television can occasionally be dangerous, too. 
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18. James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub 
You could argue that there’s never been a more important cast member in the 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live” than Eddie Murphy, because without Eddie Murphy this show wouldn’t have even lasted 10 seasons.

After the original cast and creator/executive producer Lorne Michaels left the series in 1980 the show went into a severe downward spiral that very nearly resulted in its cancellation. Then Eddie Murphy showed up as the youngest cast member in the show’s history at the time and almost single-handedly saved the show from extinction with his incredibly humorous and hilarious characters and impressions in his four years on the show from 1980-1984.

One of Murphy’s most memorable impressions during his tenure on the show was the “Godfather of Soul” James Brown. Murphy’s impression of Brown was spot on, not only in voice, but also in mannerisms and dancing style.

Good impressions on ‘SNL’ have been plentiful over the show’s long run, but what gets Murphy’s James Brown on this list is the hilariously absurd sketch James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub. The idea to put Brown as the host of his own variety show set in a hot tub was wildly genius and the fact that the entire sketch just involves Brown singing about hosting ‘James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub’ sends the sketch over the top.

The call and response with Brown’s band: “Should I get in the hot tub? Will it make me sweat? Should I get in the hot tub? Will it make me wet?” was a perfect send up of Brown’s performance style, but the real kicker of this sketch and one that makes me almost bust a gut every single time I see this sketch (and that number is rather high) is when Murphy as Brown says he’s going to get in the hot tub, places his foot into the hot tub, does the quintessential James Brown scream and sings, “It’s too hot in the hot tub.” Writing about the greatness of this sketch simply won’t do it justice. It absolutely must be seen and heard to comprehend the hilarity and greatness of it all.

Eddie Murphy is remembered for a lot of memorable moments on “Saturday Night Live” from Buckwheat to Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood to Gumby, dammit, but his performance as James Brown is my all-time favorite.
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17. George W. Bush/Al Gore Presidential Debates
Political humor has always been one of the highlights of “Saturday Night Live” over the show’s legendary 50-year run. The main focal point of the ‘SNL’ political humor comes every four years when the country is engaged in another presidential election, and the two candidates are going mano-a-mano in televised debates. These faux-presidential elections staged by ‘SNL’ are always highlights of the show every four years, and you can’t help but think that they at least play a minor role in shaping how the audience views each candidate.

There have been many truly strong faux-presidential debates throughout the history of “Saturday Night Live.” The ones in 2012 featuring Jay Pharoah as President Barack Obama and Jason Sudeikis as Republican nominee Mitt Romney were particularly strong, but the greatest ‘SNL’ political debate of all-time is, without a doubt, the first debate between Republican nominee George W. Bush (played by Will Ferrell) and Democratic nominee Al Gore (played by Darrell Hammond) that aired on Oct. 7, 2000, the season 26 premiere.

Ferrell’s impression of George W. Bush as an utter buffoon would go on to become one of the best and most memorable portrayals of a president in ‘SNL’ history and a lot of the beginnings of this legacy came during this first presidential debate, which marked Ferrell’s sixth appearance as Bush. Ferrell picked up brilliantly on the real Bush’s aloofness and ignorance, especially when mispronouncing certain words. This was the bit that famously introduced the world to the word “strategery,” which many people today probably actually think the real President Bush used in real life because they’ve heard so many people impersonating Ferrell’s impersonation of him using it.

Hammond did a fantastic job portraying Gore as the boring, fuddy-duddy that many have always viewed him as. He hits this point home very well by constantly bringing up his lockbox plan, which would keep all of America’s finances safe.

Hammond, being an excellent impressionist, was probably the better of the two at accuracy, whereas Ferrell did a hilarious job at embellishing upon Bush’s stupidities. However, it was Ferrell’s embellishments that actually made his portrayal of Bush the better or funnier of the two and, in a strange way, actually wound up making much of the country realize the embellishments of Bush were closer to home than many of us would be comfortable admitting.
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16. Church Lady
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There have been a few iconic recurring characters in the legendary history of “Saturday Night Live” that stand out as the most memorable. One of those is Dana Carvey’s portrayal of the holier-than-thou Church Lady who hosts her own talk show on religion called “Church Chat” that mostly just bashes those she views as sinners and uses the platform to remind them that they’re going to burn in Hell.

Many people may not realize this because Carvey’s classic character is typically referred to as “The Church Lady,” but the character actually has a name – Enid Strict. Carvey’s character may be the only one in ‘SNL’ history that actually has three memorable catchphrases: “Well, isn’t that special?,” “How convenient?” and “Could it be … SATAN?” that have entered the pop culture lexicon.

Carvey is easily one of the greatest cast members in the 50-year history of ‘SNL’ and one could certainly make the argument for him being the best cast member of all-time (though my money’s on Will Ferrell). The Church Lady might be the original character Carvey is most known for playing. He portrayed her an incredible 24 times on the show, including six times after leaving the show when he’s returned as the host or guest. The Church Lady has the honor of having appeared in five different decades (’80s, ’90s, ’00s, ’10s and ‘20s) and the only character that I know for a fact that has ever appeared on the show more often was Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella (25 times).

If one had to pick the all-time best Church Lady appearance, it would likely have to be her ninth appearance on the show on Oct. 24, 1987, when she invited actor Sean Penn (the week’s host) to be her guest. The Church Lady’s interview with Penn hits a hilarity high-note when she mistakenly refers to him by the name “Sin.” The Church Lady then begins to question Penn on his then marriage to pop star Madonna and her overt sexuality until Penn finally gets so angry that he punches The Church Lady in the face. It’s probable that Penn, a future two-time Oscar winner, was such a good actor that he was playing “angered” at The Church Lady, but at times it feels like the jokes might be getting to him. 
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15. The Blues Brothers
The Blues Brothers were originally something “Saturday Night Live” cast members and best friends John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd did as a hobby to have a little fun during after-parties on Saturday night. The duo wasn’t intended as something to be broadcast on the show or meant as something comical. It was an act built out of a shared bond the two had of old blues and soul music. During these after-party gigs, Aykroyd got the idea for a ‘Blues Brothers’ movie.

The name “The Blues Brothers” was offered up jokingly by then ‘SNL’ band leader Howard Shore, and it just stuck. The duo would first appear as The Blues Brothers on ‘SNL’ on April 22, 1978, as musical guest for host Steve Martin. The duo performed “Hey Bartender” and “I Don’t Know” on that episode. The two had performed together once before on the show before becoming The Blues Brothers in a 1976 episode hosted by Buck Henry performing “King Bee” in a Killer Bees bit. The Blues Brothers’ second and final appearance on the show as musical guest came on Nov. 18, 1978, in an episode hosted by Carrie Fisher. This appearance would feature their most iconic performance on the show, their cover of the Sam & Dave classic “Soul Man,” as well as performances of “Got Everything I Need (Almost)” and “B Movie Boxcar Blues.” All five musical performances by The Blues Brothers on ‘SNL’ in 1978 appeared on their Briefcase Full of Blues album, which became a Billboard No. 1 album that year. “Soul Man” would even become a top 15 Billboard single.

The Blues Brothers act would propel Belushi and Aykroyd from ‘SNL’ cast members to national superstardom. In 1980, their movie, directed by John Landis, became the first in a long line of films based on ‘SNL’ characters and is to this day one of the most successful. The Blues Brothers movie gave us the full backstory of Belushi’s “Joliet” Jake Blues and Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues.

Belushi died of a drug overdose at age 33 in 1982, but Aykroyd would continue on with The Blues Brothers legacy in a 1998 sequel “Blues Brothers 2000” that saw frequent ‘SNL’ host John Goodman attempting to fill Belushi’s shoes. More adequately filling Belushi’s shoes, however, is perhaps his younger brother, Jim, who frequently performs with Aykroyd’s Elwood as “Brother” Zee Blues.​
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14. Elvis Costello Hijacks 'SNL'
Elvis Costello made his American television debut on “Saturday Night Live” on Dec. 17, 1977, and did something that nobody watching that night will ever forget. It’s a moment that will live on forever in the annals of ‘SNL’ and music history.

Interestingly enough, though, Costello wasn’t even supposed to be the musical guest that night. The Sex Pistols were supposed to perform, but the various criminal records of band members made it hard for the group to get visas in time. ‘SNL,’ wanting a punk group, tried to replace them with The Ramones, but according to Joey Ramone’s autobiography, “We don’t substitute for anybody.” So, Costello, who had just released his debut album My Aim is True, was tasked with filling the bill. It was an interesting show, to begin with as an elderly 80-year-old German immigrant woman named Miskel Spillman, who had zero acting experience, had been chosen to host the show through an “Anyone Can Host” contest started by producer Lorne Michaels. She would be the oldest host of the show until 2010, when Betty White would host at age 88.

The image of an elderly woman hosting a show with a sneering young punk singer as musical guest was interesting. It would get even more interesting by night’s end.

Everything had gone as planned during Costello’s first performance on the show, with him performing “Watching the Detectives” off of his debut album.

Toward the end of the show was Costello’s second performance and his band, The Attractions, began to play their scheduled second performance “Less Than Zero,” a song critical of English politician Oswald Mosley, leader of the Union of Fascists. Costello didn’t feel like the song made much sense to perform on an American television show – and he was right – and halted the performance on live television just 10 seconds in, stepped to his microphone, and said, “I’m sorry, ladies and gentleman, but there’s no reason to do this song here” and began to play “Radio, Radio,” a yet to be released song that was highly critical of the broadcasting industry. 

The performance of “Radio, Radio” almost instantaneously became one of the most legendary performances in the history of rock music and signified the birth of a new star.

According to some, the incident would get Costello banned from performing on ‘SNL’ for 12 years. He would return as musical guest in an episode in 1989. The incident would be memorialized at the “Saturday Night Live” 25th anniversary special when hip-hop/rock group the Beastie Boys started performing their hit “Sabotage” before ultimately being sabotaged by Costello, who joined the group for a raucous performance of “Radio, Radio” more than 20 years after he initially rocked the ‘SNL’ stage with it.

Costello’s defiance and legendary performance is the single greatest musical performance in the 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live.”​
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13. Celebrity Jeopardy
Celebrity Jeopardy is the greatest and funniest recurring sketch in the 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live” in my opinion. It wasn’t a sketch that ever changed too much. Still, it always had me in stitches with the ridiculous antics of the celebrity contestants, led by Darrell Hammond’s perverse Sean Connery and Norm Macdonald’s wacky, juvenile Burt Reynolds, and the woe-is-me response to those antics by Will Ferrell’s Alex Trebek. Connery’s perverted mangling of categories like ‘The Pen is Mightier’ and ‘Therapists’ were also always good for gut-busting laughs.

Macdonald created the sketch in the mid-90s and it was a brilliant idea for him to take the game show sketch, which is often the show’s most tired sketch idea, and infuse life into by adding incredible celebrity impressions, but skewed impressions rather than accurate ones. For instance, Hammond’s Connery being a perverted jerk rather than trying to be an actual Connery impression makes it hilarious. Macdonald said on the 2007 NBC special “Saturday Night Live in the ’90s: Pop Culture Nation” that he created the sketch simply to bring his Burt Reynolds impression to the show.

Macdonald said there was a plan for the real Reynolds to appear on the show and punch him out, but he was fired from the show before they had that opportunity. Following his departure from the show, the sketch would continue to become a stalwart of the late-night sketch comedy program, with Ferrell and Hammond being joined by two other celebrity impressions (one often being done by great impressionist Jimmy Fallon).

There have been 15 Celebrity Jeopardy sketches (Hammond has portrayed Connery in 13), with the most recent one appearing in the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary special on Feb. 15, 2015. It was the third time the sketch has returned to ‘SNL’ since Ferrell left the show as a cast member in 2002. During Ferrell’s last episode as a cast member in 2002, the real Alex Trebek memorably made a cameo appearance to congratulate the fake Trebek on a job well done.

The most incredible Celebrity Jeopardy sketch, which most people seem to remember, would have to be the one that aired on Oct. 23, 1999. Macdonald returned to host the show, his first time coming back since his firing two years previously, and he reprised his role as Reynolds. This is the sketch in which Reynolds memorably asks Trebek to refer to him by his new name, “Turd Ferguson,” an even larger-than-life version of Reynolds who wears a comically large cowboy hat. 
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12. First Show After 9/11
Eighteen days before “Saturday Night Live” was supposed to begin its 27th season in the fall of 2001 was the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11 that brought down the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The terrorist attacks which included locations that day in Washington D.C. and a plane downed by passengers in Pennsylvania to stop further destruction killed nearly 3,000 people.

It was the largest tragedy in the history of the United States and less than three weeks later the cast and crew of ‘SNL’ had to go on television live from the city most affected by the attacks and try to be funny.

The opening of this episode is one of the greatest and most emotional openings in the 50-year history of this legendary television show.

The camera centered on then New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani surrounded by members of the New York Police and Fire Departments in a show of unity and a sign that they would not be defeated or brought to their knees by cowardly terroristic actions.

Part of Giuliani’s statement read: “Our hearts are broken, but they are beating, and they are beating stronger than ever. New Yorkers are unified. We will not yield to terrorism. We will not let our decisions be made out of fear. We choose to live our lives in freedom.”

Following his statement the camera panned to another stage where the legendary Paul Simon, good friend of ‘SNL’ creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, performed his Simon & Garfunkel classic “The Boxer,” a fitting ballad of a man refusing to give up amongst hard times and adversity.

Simon’s performance of “The Boxer” is the part of the opening that really stands with me all these years later. It’s an incredibly emotional song, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen or heard a better performance of it.

After “The Boxer” the camera went back to Giuliani center stage where he was joined by Michaels who asked the mayor, “Can we be funny?” Many had wondered if ‘SNL’ shouldn’t postpone its season premiere for a while as jokes in a time of somberness might come off as disrespectful. Giuliani joked, “Why start now?” and opened the season with the famous “Live, from New York! It’s Saturday Night!”

The rest of the show did not disappoint and hopefully gave people of New York and the rest of the country a chance to laugh for the very first time in weeks.
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11. Schweddy Balls
​Raunchy humor always seems to walk a fine line between being over-the-top and disgusting and actually funny. “Saturday Night Live” has seemingly done a good job over the years at walking that line and coming out on the funny side more often than not – like with Colonel Angus and the “Dick in a Box” digital short from Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake.

Perhaps the funniest example of raunchy humor ever on ‘SNL’ in the show’s 50 years on television was the Delicious Dish sketch that aired on Dec. 12, 1998, in an episode hosted by Alec Baldwin. Baldwin has hosted ‘SNL’ more than any other celebrity at 17 times, but his appearance as baker Peter Schweddy on NPR’s Delicious Dish that night stands out as his greatest moment on the show.

Delicious Dish was a faux-NPR radio show dedicated to talking about food co-hosted by Molly Shannon’s Teri Rialto and Ana Gasteyer’s Margaret Jo McCullen. The recurring sketch, which appeared a whopping 15 times on the show, was always hit-or-miss for me, but always seemed to lead toward raunchiness with the guests discussing some kind of food product that was always either phallic or easily led to double-entendres.

The talk radio show with Pete Schweddy started relatively tame, but the raunchiness and humor picked up when Schweddy started talking about how people loved eating his Christmas balls during the holidays. Terrific double-entendre after double-entendre is let loose for the remainder of the sketch, hilariously culminating in Baldwin’s Schweddy exclaiming, “No one can resist my Schweddy balls.”

Baldwin would hilariously reprise his Pete Schweddy character on another Delicious Dish sketch in a 2001 episode, with Rachel Dratch’s Lynn Vershad replacing Shannon’s Teri Rialto as co-host; this time, Schweddy was pitching his hot dogs or Schweddy wieners. It was the exact same premise but just as funny as the first time around. 
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10. Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker
Chris Farley is one of the most iconic cast members in the 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live” and is one that many fans will still recall as their all-time favorite on the show. His most famous recurring character during his five seasons on the show was the supremely hilarious Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker – a down on his luck, clumsily abrasive character trying to be a motivational speaker to make what little living he could scratch out.

Matt Foley made eight memorable appearances on ‘SNL,’ seven during Farley’s tenure on the show and once more in 1997 when Farley made his lone hosting appearance on the show less than two months before he would die at age 33 from a cocaine and morphine overdose (nearly the same thing that killed fellow ‘SNL’ legend John Belushi, whom Farley was often compared too, at the very same age).

The greatest thing about the recurring Matt Foley sketches was Foley’s catchphrases and Farley’s incredible readings of them. The two catchphrases that appeared in nearly every Matt Foley sketch were “I live in a van down by the river!” and “Well, la-dee-frickin-da!” Both lines have since become a part of the pop culture lexicon.

The most memorable Matt Foley sketch was likely the debut of the character in which Foley was tasked with giving a motivational speech to a couple of teenagers (David Spade and the week’s host Christina Applegate) who have been misbehaving. The sketch is memorable for Applegate and particularly Spade, a good friend of Farley’s off the screen, being unable to control their laughter during the live show at how hilarious Farley’s character was. The character breaks by those two just made the whole thing even funnier.

There were plans in the works for Farley to bring his beloved Matt Foley to the big screen for a major film adaptation that would have featured Spade in a supporting role, but these plans were obviously canceled upon the comedian’s untimely death.

9. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin
Political humor has been one of the main draws for “Saturday Night Live” since it first debuted with Chevy Chase doing a non-impersonation of then President Gerald Ford as a complete dimwit in season one. Over the years the show has seen some truly great political impersonations, and some of them appear on this list from Dana Carvey as George H.W. Bush to Will Ferrell as George W. Bush and both Phil Hartman and Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton. One of the genuinely fantastic political impressions in the show’s grand history came from a cast member who had already left the show but returned in multiple cameos and owned every episode she appeared in – Tina Fey as then Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Fey appeared on ‘SNL’ from 2000-2006 as Weekend Update anchor and head writer and made her first appearance as Palin in a cameo appearance on Sept. 13, 2008. She would return that season to portray Palin an incredible five more times, including once with the actual Palin in attendance (Oct. 18, 2008).

Fey owned the Palin impression hitting every nuance in her mannerisms and voice and brought out the wackiness of Palin probably before anybody else did, and Palin was/is so wacky she’s basically a caricature of an already wacky politician. The interesting thing about Fey’s perfect impression of Palin is that Fey is not an impressionist, in fact her Palin impression is her only stand-out impression or sketch, for that matter, from her time on ‘SNL’ as she was primarily an excellent Update anchor. But, she thoroughly became Palin for her six appearances leading up to the election in 2008 and then twice more as host in later seasons and perhaps let the country in on a side of the Vice President candidate they hadn’t previously noticed – kind of like Chase might have done with Ford in the ’70s.

It’s almost impossible to think that a ‘SNL’ political impression or sketch could sway an entire election, but I’m sure the show has managed to change the minds of certain voters over the years – for better or worse. Fey likely made some people wonder whether they could vote for a ticket that included someone as out there as Palin. 
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8. Sinead O'Connor Rips the Pope
There is little doubt that the most controversial musical performance in the 50-season history of “Saturday Night Live” occurred on October 3, 1992, when Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor performed an acapella rendition of Bob Marley’s “War,” and when the song ended she held a photograph of Pope John Paul II up to the camera, tore it to pieces and said, “fight the real enemy,” before the show went to commercial.

​In an interview a few weeks after her performance, she said she held the Catholic Church responsible for physical, sexual and emotional abuse she had suffered as a child.

The performance took place nearly a decade before Pope John Paul II would publicly acknowledge the extensive child sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests.

At the time of O’Connor’s protest, she took a lot of grief from those within the pop culture world. Her protest garnered hundreds of complaints via phone and mail to NBC. She was even mocked twice on ‘SNL’ that season by Joe Pesci, who hosted the next episode, and Madonna. 

‘SNL’ producer Lorne Michaels had shown he wasn’t a fan of people going off-script on his show before, but in Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, he said: “I think it was the bravest possible thing she could do. She’d been a nun. To her, the church symbolized everything that was bad about growing up in Ireland the way she grew up in Ireland, and so she was making a strong political statement.”

O’Connor’s career undoubtedly suffered and began to wane following her stance, but she never regretted the decision.     

7. Chris Farley Auditions for Chippendales 
Chris Farley was one of the most legendary cast members of “Saturday Night Live” in the show’s legendary 50-year history, but his shining moment on the show came in his first year on the program. He, along with Chris Rock, was introduced to ‘SNL’ in early 1990 to introduce some young flavor to a show that had become full of great veterans like Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon.

On Oct. 27, 1990, Patrick Swayze, who was arguably the biggest movie star on the planet at that time hot off the heels of “Dirty Dancing,” “Road House” and “Ghost,” came to New York to host ‘SNL.’ The idea for the sketch to pair the incredibly fit Swayze with Farley, who had to have weighed at least 300 pounds, as dancers hoping to score a job with Chippendales was simply genius.

Watching a topless Farley do his thing on the dance floor, with his fat jiggling all over the place and his butt crack gloriously visible to all, is sheer comedy gold. It might seem like a comic going for cheap laughs, but I don’t think many comedians would have gone to the lengths Farley did in this sketch to make the audience laugh.
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Farley’s dance moves for a man his size, were rather spectacular. He really keeps up with the professionally trained Swayze reasonably well throughout the bit. Farley was always known for his “awe-shucks” demeanor, especially in sketches like the iconic recurring “The Chris Farley Show,” but he showed here that he was quite the physical comic too.

The Chippendales Audition sketch frequently appears on lists of the 10 greatest “Saturday Night Live” sketches of all time, and with good reason. However, many might not realize that the dance sequence most of us have seen is actually edited in from the dress rehearsal version because the dance moves by Swayze and Farley were accomplished better than they were during the live episode.

As great as the Chippendales sketch was, there might be an unfortunate dark side to it. Chris Rock claims the sketch played a significant role in the eventual untimely death of Farley. In Farley’s biography The Chris Farley Show Rock said, “‘Chippendales’ was a weird sketch. I always hated it ... The joke of it is, basically, ‘We can't hire you because you’re fat.’ There’s no comic twist to it. It’s just fucking mean. Chris wanted so much to be liked. As funny as that sketch was ... it’s one of the things that killed him.” This, of course, is merely Rock’s opinion.
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6. Wayne's World
Wayne’s World debuted on the Feb. 18, 1989 episode of SNL, hosted by Leslie Nielsen. Before long, it would go from being an end-of-show time killer to one of the show’s most popular and successful sketches. It would appear on the show 20 times, including most recently in 2011, when Carvey returned to host an episode and Myers made a cameo appearance.

What made Wayne’s World genuinely iconic in the history of ‘SNL’ is that it spawned off into a successful movie in 1992 and then a sequel in 1993. At that time only John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Blue Brothers characters from ‘SNL’ had been transformed into a film and that was less of a sketch than something Belushi and Aykroyd did on their own as a hobby. The success of “Wayne’s World” started the ‘SNL’ film franchise, for better or worse, that would see movies like “Coneheads,” “It’s Pat,” “The Ladies Man” and “A Night at the Roxbury,” almost all bombs, hit the theaters based off of ‘SNL” characters.

The most excellent Wayne’s World sketch in the minds of many, appeared on the Feb. 17, 1990 episode hosted by Tom Hanks (the seventh Wayne’s World sketch in less than a year) when Aerosmith guested and joined Wayne and Garth for a jam session of the “Wayne’s World” theme song in Wayne’s basement. In the E! Channel special “Saturday Night Live: 101 Most Unforgettable Moments” this was listed as the most unforgettable moment in the show’s history.
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5. Stefon 
Every generation of “Saturday Night Live” seems to have its all-time greatest character. That one that stands out above the rest. The only issue is it might not always be the same character for everybody. For instance, was the standout character of the early ’90s Chris Farley’s Matt Foley or Mike Myers’ Wayne Campbell?

When it comes to the ‘SNL’ era of the last 20 years, the best character is, without a doubt, Bill Hader’s Stefon.

Hader is likely one of three greatest impressionists in the great 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live” along with Dana Carvey and Darrell Hammond and so it might come as some surprise that a guy known mostly for his impressions ended up with not just the greatest ‘SNL’ character of his era, but one of the greatest of all-time.

Stefon, as created by Hader and ‘SNL’ writer John Mulaney, is a New York City club aficionado who is tasked by Weekend Update anchor Seth Meyers to tell the audience and viewers at home about New York’s best vacation spots, but always ends up discussing the hottest new clubs. The crazy clubs, which have been described on the show as: “nightmares of a crystal meth addict” and “a coked-up gay Candyland” always have extremely weird inhabitants or attractions and Hader’s reading of these as Stefon are what truly made these bits because he’d always struggle to keep from cracking up while reading his cue cards. This was intentionally manufactured for laughs by Mulaney who would insert jokes into the cue cards last second so Hader would read them on-air live without ever having previously seen them.

Stefon has appeared on “Saturday Night Live” 22 times, which makes him one of the most recurring characters ever on the show. However, most people probably don’t realize how close the Stefon character came to never making a second appearance on the show. The first Stefon appearance was actually in a sketch in a 2008 episode hosted by Ben Affleck and not during a Weekend Update segment. Stefon didn’t work in sketch form and he didn’t appear on the show again until Hader and Mulaney brought him back as an Update character in 2010. He instantly became one of the show's best characters, and fans tuned in every week, hoping the character would appear.

On Hader’s last episode as a cast member (May 18, 2013) Stefon memorably gets married to Meyers, whom he’d flirted with during his appearances for many years. It was one of the greatest Stefon appearances on the show and a great moment for his fans as the wedding scene features many of the crazy creatures from the many clubs described by Stefon over the years.

4. Weekend Update 
There has likely never been a more important decision in the history of “Saturday Night Live” than the one to add a fake news segment to the show just to poke fun at actual events going on in the world. Weekend Update has been a stalwart of ‘SNL’ ever since its very first episode on Oct. 11, 1975 and will no doubt continue to be the midpoint of the show until it finally one day goes off the air (hopefully that will be a long while away).

Some may think that it was ‘SNL’ creator and producer Lorne Michaels’ decision to include a fake news segment in the middle of each episode, but the idea for the longest recurring sketch in the history of ‘SNL’ was that of original cast member Chevy Chase along with ‘SNL’ writer Herb Sargent.

Weekend Update was initially going to be anchored by Michaels. In 2014 he told Deadline: “As we got closer to air, I began to realize that I didn’t think I could be the person who cut other people’s pieces and left my own in. So I gave Weekend Update to Chevy [Chase], who was not a cast member, but a writer at the time. And that’s how all that happened.”

Weekend Update immediately made Chase the face of ‘SNL’, and he made Weekend Update the most important aspect of the show.

Weekend Update is so fantastic because it’s always the most relevant segment of the show to what’s going on in the real world. It is literally the last thing to be completely finished prior to the show and sometimes even during the show.

Former ‘SNL’ writer Alan Zweibel said in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s great anthology Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live: “We worked on ‘Update’ to the very last minute. Between dress and air on Saturday nights, I would go up to my office and I would watch the 11 o’clock news and if something hit me, I’d write it and it would be on television a half-hour later. You know, there were two shows where I was literally under the ‘Update’ desk writing stuff and handing it up to Chevy while he was actually on the air.”

Chase was only a full-time cast member on ‘SNL’ for the show’s first season (1975-76) but created a lasting classic that will always live on. He also created a few catchphrases that live on in ‘SNL’ history like beginning the ‘Update’ broadcast with the memorable: “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not,” which was a perfect representation of his snide and superior (at least in his head) sense of humor. He also would end the ‘Update’ broadcasts with “Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow” which would start a legacy of anchors ending the show with their own special catchphrases. In my opinion, the best one is Kevin Nealon’s “I’m Kevin Nealon, and that’s news to me.” Many anchors would go back to Chase’s “Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow” like Tina Fey during her tenure as co-anchor.

All in all, 22 cast members (Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Charles Rocket, Gail Matthius, Brian Doyle-Murray, Mary Gross, Christine Ebersole, Brad Hall, Christopher Guest, Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, Norm Macdonald, Colin Quinn, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Cecily Strong, Colin Jost and Michael Che) have anchored or co-anchored Weekend Update on a full-time basis. Some have been more memorable than others and every fan of ‘SNL’ seems to have their list of personal favorites – my all-time favorite was Norm Macdonald.

At 11-plus seasons, Jost is the longest tenured ‘Update’ anchor in the show’s history.

Weekend Update is an essential part of “Saturday Night Live” and every fan of the show owes a bit of gratitude to Chase and Sargent for their fantastic creation 50 years ago.
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3. Dick in a Box
Andy Samberg’s Digital Shorts, with his Lonely Island buddies Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, which appeared almost weekly on “Saturday Night Live” during his seven seasons on the show helped to bring a new group of fans to the show when the videos started becoming widely popular on the Internet thanks to new streaming sites like YouTube. In an era where ‘SNL’ wasn’t quite always at the top of its game humor-wise, these Digital Shorts were often the highlights of each episode. 

The Digital Shorts really took off after the second one Samberg, Taccone and Schaffer did, a rap called “Lazy Sunday” in which Samberg and Chris Parnell rapped about their daily routines on a lazy Sunday aired in December of 2005 and became huge on the Internet.

The most famous, and without a doubt the funniest, Digital Short ever made has to be “Dick in a Box” from the Dec. 16, 2006 episode hosted by fan-favorite host Justin Timberlake in which Samberg and Timberlake portray two singers performing a ballad about not having anything to give their significant others on Christmas, until they come up with the genius idea to give their girlfriends their junk in a box.

The lyrics of the song, especially the ones in which the duo explain the steps in which they go about putting their privates in the box and having their girlfriends open it, are among the funniest ever written and, believe it or not, would end up earning Samberg, Taccone, Schaffer and Timberlake an Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics on a television show.

“Dick in a Box,” like “Lazy Sunday” before it, would go on to superstardom in the days after its live airing on ‘SNL’ when it hit the Internet, and probably became even bigger because online it was uncensored. In the Digital Short’s initial airing on ‘SNL’ the word “dick” was bleeped all 16 times it appeared in the song. Since then, network censors have grown more lax and the uncensored version has aired in specials.

Samberg and Timberlake’s characters from the “Dick in a Box” Digital Short became so popular among fans that the two would reunite for two sequels: 2009’s almost as funny “Motherlover” and 2011’s relatively disappointing “3-Way (The Golden Rule),” which featured an appearance from Lady Gaga.

2. Word Association
​Richard Pryor, considered by many to be the greatest stand-up comedian ever, hosted just the seventh episode of “Saturday Night Live” during the show’s first season on Dec. 13, 1975. It’s still one of the most talked about episodes and is considered one of the ultimate classics of this legendary sketch comedy series.
Pryor, being a controversial comedian at the time, had censors quaking in their shoes. This led to the first seven-second delay in the history of ‘SNL’—something that would only be used two more times for Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay.

The most notable sketch from Pryor’s lone hosting appearance was the Word Association sketch he did with Chevy Chase – one of the greatest and most controversial sketches the show has ever done to this day. It’s incredibly hilarious in its ballsiness, as it takes on the subject of race – but there was much animosity between Pryor and Chase. It really comes across in this bit and only makes it funnier.

The plot of the sketch is that Chase is interviewing Pryor for a janitorial position and part of the interview process is a word association test. This word association test starts relatively innocent with Chase saying stuff like “Rain” and Pryor responding with “Snow,” but then things begin to take an ugly turn when Chase starts throwing out racial slurs for African-Americans, to which an increasingly angry Pryor retorts with slurs for white people.

‘SNL’ has often been considered an edgy comedy show, but never more so than in its infancy and this Word Association sketch was a perfect example of that. In the mid-70s, racial tensions in this country were still incredibly high (although one could argue not much has changed in the 50 years since), and this sketch did a good job at skewering those tensions. Unfortunately, though, while doing so, there was tension behind the scenes between Pryor and Chase.

As recalled in the Pryor biography, Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him, Pryor despised Chase according to longtime Pryor comedy writer/comedian Paul Mooney. Pryor had brought in Mooney to help guest write for ‘SNL’ that week and Chase kept begging Mooney to write something for the two of them to do on air. Mooney finally relented and wrote this classic sketch to show his displeasure for how NBC and Lorne Michaels treated him during an interview to guest write for Pryor that week. He claims it’s the easiest bit he ever wrote. It’s very likely the funniest.

Pryor and Word Association helped put this new show on the map in late 1975 and it has been a television legend ever since.  

1. More Cowbell 
Choosing the all-time most memorable moment in the great 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live” is not an easy task as there are literally dozens of deserving moments and sketches that deserve the honor. However, I think the spot should go to the funniest and greatest sketch in the show’s history and I believe that sketch to be the Behind the Music: Blue Oyster Cult, better known as the “More Cowbell,” sketch from the April 8, 2000, episode hosted by Christopher Walken. It’s a sketch that would likely top many a list of the greatest ‘SNL’ sketches of all-time.

The great thing about the More Cowbell sketch is that it could have been a bust had it not been for the improvisational antics of Will Ferrell – who, in my opinion, is the greatest cast member in the show’s history.

The idea behind the sketch is rather simple. Walken plays record producer Bruce Dickinson who while in the studio listening to the popular ’70s hard rock group Blue Oyster Cult lay down the track for their future hit “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” he realizes the song is missing a little something … more cowbell.

Dickinson demands that the group add more cowbell to the track, which is where Ferrell comes in as cowbell extraordinaire Gene Frenkle. Frenkle’s cowbell playing starts out rather simple and low-key, but Dickinson demands more from him. Walken’s exclamation that “I gotta have more cowbell” has become one of the most memorable lines in ‘SNL’ history and a part of the pop culture lexicon.

Ferrell begins to explore more space with his cowbell playing on future takes that becomes wilder by the take to the chagrin of his bandmates, particularly lead singer Eric Bloom (played by Chris Parnell). 

Ferrell’s raucous cowbell playing though soon takes this sketch from a funny one to the greatest in ‘SNL’ history when his antics begin to make everybody else in the sketch break character and crack up on live television. Jimmy Fallon, Horatio Sanz, Chris Kattan and Parnell as the other band members all lose it completely at points during the sketch, which causes the audience to laugh even harder than they had been at Ferrell’s wild gyrations while pounding the cowbell.

Fallon attributed the sketch being hugely popular and hilarious to a last second wardrobe change on Ferrell’s part saying, “The cowbell sketch in dress [rehearsal] wasn’t as funny. And then Will changed his shirt, he wore a smaller shirt.” This smaller shirt allowed Ferrell’s large belly to protrude from under it when he really got to gyrating during his cowbell playing and truly does ratchet up the funny in the sketch tenfold.

After Bloom finally freaks out on Frenkle about his cowbell playing Frenkle goes on an absolutely terrific impromptu speech which leaves everybody, both those in the sketch and those watching from home in hysterics: “Can I just say one thing? I'm standing here, staring at rock legend Bruce Dickinson! And if Bruce Dickinson wants more cowbell, we should probably give him more cowbell! And, Bobby, you are right - I am being selfish. But the last time I checked, we don't have a whole lot of songs that feature the cowbell. And I'd be doing myself a disservice and every member of this band, if I didn’t perform the HELL out of this!”

During this speech Ferrell even cracks himself up, which was something fans didn’t see too much of on the show. Ferrell’s break of character forces Fallon to lose it so much that he literally turns away from the camera and bites down on one of the drumsticks he’s holding.

It’s quite unbelievable now, but this funniest sketch in ‘SNL’ history actually had trouble making it to air. Ferrell, who had written the sketch with ‘SNL’ writer Donnell Campbell, said on the TV special “Saturday Night Live in the 90s: Pop Culture Nation”: “The cowbell sketch, I'd written it early in the first half of the year ... it just didn't get picked for whatever reason.”

When it finally got picked Ferrell made damn sure that it’d never be forgotten.
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Comedian Shane Gillis hosted the 13th episode of the milestone 50th season of “Saturday Night Live,” and I can easily say it was one of the worst episodes of the long-running sketch comedy series I’ve ever seen, an embarrassment for the show.

Gillis has a controversial history with the show. He was hired as a cast member in 2019 and fired before he even appeared in an episode after clips surfaced from his podcast in which he used Asian ethnic slurs. Gillis’ firing from the show likely led to his becoming a star in the world of comedy, as perceived “cancellations” from “woke” media have a way of turning average celebrities into stars.

In a shocking decision for ‘SNL,’ Gillis was brought in to host an episode last season. It was the first episode of the show I’ve ever boycotted as a fan. I would’ve done the same with last night’s episode, but I decided to review every episode for the 50th season.

Watching Gillis on ‘SNL’ last night was eye-opening. Not in a good way. He was worse than I ever imagined. Sure, there was the dancing around racial issues that I figured would happen, especially in his monologue when he joked that most white men have at least wondered if their girlfriends/wives have ever had sex with a black man (I don’t think many of us care because this isn’t fucking racist segregationist America, as much as it hopes to be).

One horrifically noticeable aspect of Gillis’s eight-minute monologue is how little the live studio audience laughed. Even if I’m not digging something from the show on my couch at home, there are usually still folks in the live studio enjoying it—not Saturday night. The response from social media was just as critical. Gillis bombed.

The sketches featuring Gillis throughout the episode were among the most immature, sophomoric humor I’ve ever seen from ‘SNL,’ whether he helped pen them himself or the writers of the show realized they could hit home to the atypical audience he might be bringing to the show for the evening with the lowest forms of comedy. These sketches included a doctor whom his patient remembered from high school because he could perform oral sex on himself, a wedding interrupted by an ex-boyfriend wanting to use his “one free hand job” coupon and the faux medication commercial “CouplaBeers.”

Saturday night’s episode gave me some insight into what an episode may have looked like had Larry the Cable Guy hosted during the Blue Collar Comedy craze of the ‘00s, except the show then wouldn’t have stooped that low.

I don’t know if ‘SNL’ executive producer Lorne Michaels feels guilty that the show had to let Gillis go because of his past, though it’s certainly been better off for it, or if he’s just in search of outside ratings from different fan bases but this was an embarrassment to his show celebrating a grand history this season.

Academy Awards – Sunday, March 2 (ABC)
The 97th annual Academy Awards, hosted by comedian Conan O’Brien, will be at 6 p.m. (CST) on ABC Sunday, March 2. It’s a must-watch for lovers of film, but frankly, O’Brien’s monologue is really the only thing I’m excited about, with most of the major award winners being obvious – except for the biggest prize of the night, Best Picture – at this point. “Emilia Perez” leads all nominees with 13 nominations but is probably only the favorite in Supporting Actress and Original Song.  

Dark Winds: Season 3 – Sunday, March 9 (AMC/AMC+)
AMC’s crime drama “Dark Winds” has been one of television’s most underrated shows over its first two seasons, but its addition to Netflix in 2024 has hopefully boosted its fan base. The series' third season, which follows a group of Navajo tribal police officers in the ‘70s American Southwest, premieres on AMC on Sunday, March 9, and can be streamed by AMC+ users. Zahn McClarnon has given one of TV’s best performances over the last few years with his Joe Leaphorn character, which hopefully will begin gaining recognition by TV award shows.  
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Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party – Tuesday, March 11 (Paramount+)
In 1983, filmmaker Cameron Crowe followed rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as they did a film intended for MTV. The film, which MTV yanked after only one airing, was pretty much lost to time until Crowe pulled it out of his archives, restored it, added 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage, and released it as a one-weekend-only exclusive theatrical event last October. Crowe told Variety: “’Heartbreakers Beach Party’ occupies a special place in my heart. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers leaned into the making of the film with a kind of hilarious music-filled honesty that still feels fresh 40 years later. It was also my first experience as a director.” “Tom Petty: Heartbreaks Beach Party” makes its streaming debut on Paramount+ on Tuesday, March 11. 
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Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney – Wednesday, March 12 (Netflix)
Last year, one of the freshest things on television – well, streaming – was comedian John Mulaney’s one-week live talk show extravaganza during Netflix’s annual comedy showcase in Los Angeles. The show received such an enthusiastic response from viewers and critics alike that Netflix and Mulaney decided to turn it into a weekly variety series for 12 weeks, beginning Wednesday, March 12. It’ll be like last year’s show but on more of a “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” programming schedule. Look for it to be a potential Emmy Awards threat.

Dope Thief – Friday, March 14 (AppleTV+)
I’ll watch anything with Brian Tyree Henry in it, and his latest performance comes in creator Peter Craig’s AppleTV+ limited series “Dope Thief,” premiering Friday, March 14. The series, based on Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel, sees two Philadelphia friends posing as DEA agents to rob a house and the consequences when it turns out to have been a large narcotics operation. The supporting cast features Wagner Moura, Marin Ireland, Kate Mulgrew, Amir Arison and Ving Rhames. 
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Opry 100: A Live Celebration – Wednesday, March 19 (NBC)
Country music’s oldest and most legendary home, the Grand Ole Opry, is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2025 and will be celebrated on Wednesday, March 19th, with a three-hour live celebration starring current and past country music superstars on NBC. The special, hosted by former “The Voice” coach Blake Shelton, will feature performances from Garth Brooks, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Luke Combs, Reba McEntire, Vince Gill and more stars of the genre.  

The Residence – Thursday, March 20 (Netflix)
“The Residence” is a mystery drama created by Paul William Davies and produced by Shonda Rhimes. It premieres on Netflix on Thursday, March 20. “The Residence” stars Emmy-winning actress Uzo Aduba as an eccentric detective tasked with solving a murder at a White House staff party. The supporting cast also includes Giancarlo Esposito, Susan Kelechi Watson, Jason Lee, and Ken Marino.  
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The Studio – Wednesday, March 26 (AppleTV+)
“The Studio,” a comedy from the minds of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, premieres on AppleTV+ on Wednesday, March 26. The series focuses on the struggles of a fictional studio head, played by Rogen, attempting to keep it from going under in an industry undergoing many changes. The supporting cast includes the hilarious Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn and Ike Barinholtz. 
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The Conners: Final Season – Wednesday, March 26 (ABC)
“The Conners,” which began as a reboot of the classic ‘80s/’90s ABC sitcom “Roseanne,” before that actress couldn’t control her mind and mouth, has been one of network TV’s best comedies of the last decade. Its six-episode seventh season is its swan song, which will reveal how the story of one of television’s greatest families wraps up. It’ll be emotional seeing these performances we’ve loved over many decades, from John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and Lecy Goranson, come to an end.