There Would Be No Tina Belcher Without Mary Katherine Gallagher

In the ramp-up to Saturday Night Live‘s fortieth anniversary celebration, I found myself going through the SNL archives and watching a lot of my favorite sketches. Of all of my faves, one regular character stuck out as the on that still cracks me up: Molly Shannon‘s Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine Gallagher. In the week leading up to the fortieth season’s premiere, the Decider team ranked the best characters in SNL‘s history, and I lobbied to make sure Mary Katherine Gallagher made it in the top ten. Appearing sixteen times during Shannon’s seven-season run on the series from 1999 to 2001 (and once again when Shannon hosted the show in 2007), Mary Katherine Gallagher is a rare case of a teenage girl who is as unabashedly shameless, competitive, and overconfident as she is socially inept and super, super horny.

Sound familiar? In rewatching some of the Mary Katherine Gallagher clips, I couldn’t help but see a parallel between Shannon’s clumsy character and Bob’s Burgers‘ Tina Belcher, who is one of the best characters currently seen on a TV series. Stuck in a perpetual adolescence (as is the way with cartoon characters), Tina Belcher is a socially awkward weirdo who can’t help but express her, well, overwhelming horniness and shameless love of male butts at every chance. As Laci Green of MTV’s webseries Braless says in the clip below, Tina “is keenly aware of her own desires” and openly lusts after her neighbor and classmate Timmy Jr. and chats about her sexual dreams about zombies and unicorns.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xhYNcbz4]

You might think Bob’s Burgers‘ heightened comedic (and refreshingly honest) take on adolescent female sexuality through the eyes of the socially inept and half-heartedly self-possessed Tina Belcher is the first character of its kind, but look no further to Molly Shannon’s beloved character throughout the years as she attempted to steal the spotlight and the cute boy all at the same time — before she inevitably flung herself backwards into whatever set dressing happened to be behind her. An oversharing, smell-obsessed teen whose off-putting nature was as endearing as it was unsettling, Mary Katherine Gallagher was an icon for weird teenagers everywhere — a prototypical Tina Belcher for those who us who grew up in the late ’90s.

Check out some of Mary Katherine Gallagher’s best moments below.

 

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Photos: Everett Collection