Top 10 ‘Saturday Night Live’ Sketches Of Season 41

Boom.

Short, powerful, effective. This fake ad for Donald Trump for president was less an ad than an accusation, and one in a series of efforts by the show to redeem itself for allowing Trump to host after his racism and xenophobia had been made clear.

Like a typical “word of the people” political ad, we see ordinary, everyday people doing ordinary, everyday things – ironing, painting a house, taking paper out of a printer, gathering wood – as “real Americans” counter the media by giving us their thoughts about the presidential candidate. They tell us that “he’s a winner,” and that “he can make this country great again.”

As we pull back to a see a resplendent sunrise, the voice-over announcer, Cecily Strong, says, “So when people ask why you support Donald Trump, you just tell them…”

Cut to Taran Killam: “He’s gonna take our country from here…(raises arm to reveal a swastika)…to here.”

Vanessa Bayer, ironing: “He’s not some cautious politician. He says what I’m thinking.” (Raises the item she’s been ironing to reveal a KKK robe and hood.)

Bobby Moynihan, painting: “Don’t know what it is. I just like the guy.” (Camera pulls back to show what he’s been painting on the house -the words “White Power.”)

And the same with Aidy Bryant, an office worker who has an anti-Muslim wall, and Kyle Mooney, bringing firewood to fuel a burning cross.

It’s worth asking, if the show perceived Trump as such a racist, why they let him host. But if anyone thought SNL was going soft on the Donald for good, this ad showed they had no problem calling it like they saw it in an unvarnished manner.   

One frequent fault of SNL is to repeat a character or premise, and make the repeat appearance little more than a predictable carbon copy of the original. Because of this, it was a joyful surprise to see where they took Totino’s, which got its first commercial parody in early 2015.

The original ran during the J.K. Simmons episode, highlighted football widow syndrome, offering wives a Super Bowl Activity Pack for Women to keep them busy while the men watched the big game. Vanessa Bayer brought food and beer to her “hungry guys” while they had fun, and she played with demeaning, childish toys as she waited on them hand and foot.

Bayer and Totino’s returned during the Larry David episode, and at first, it looked like more of the same. Bayer touts the greatness of Totino’s as her “hungry guys” – David and several of the male cast members – watch the game, occasionally letting loose with a rousing “Aw, fumble,” or, “Go go go go go Touchdown!”

She continues, and the bellows become more and more frequent – too frequent for an actual game. Teams don’t score touchdowns every ten seconds, do they?

As the studio audience laughs in anticipation of a big punchline, Bayer, realizing the disparity, brings another tray of delicious Totino’s to her hungry guys, saying she hopes she’s not interrupting the big game, when suddenly, we see what she sees – the TV, which is not on.

The mood shifts, and ominous music plays. Screams of “Touchdown!” and “Fumble” continue, faster and more frequent, and as Bayer realizes what’s happening, the camera closes in on the lifeless, dead-eyed faces of Beck Bennett, Jon Rudnitsky and the rest. What we’re watching is not a football scene, but a zombie or horror film of some sort, the men driven by an unseen force.

Bayer is now consumed with fear, trying to speak to them, asking, “What have you been screaming at this whole time,” but there are no people in those bodies, no souls to answer, just hallowed out husks dedicated to their two repetitive chants. The Totino’s hit the floor in slow motion as Bayer grabs scissors, and screams for her daughter to get in the car.

The men, their eyes now fully black, change their chant to “no no no, aw fumble,” as they stare menacingly at Bayer. The scene ends with a terrified Bayer sinking to the ground, screaming, word by anguished word, “What’s happening to my hungry guys!!!”

The screen then shifts to an ad for The X-Files, which was airing its revived episodes around this time.

There’s a lesson here in subverting expectations for comedy that SNL would be wise to heed on a larger scale. The results are worth it.

The sketch starts with a porn title card, indicting we’re about to watch Hot for Teacher 8. The mood is set from the start as we view the sketch through the grain of old film. Amy Schumer plays a school teacher dressed in high heels, a tight pencil skirt, white blouse with too many buttons open and a black bra.

Talking with more exaggerated vocal fry than should be legal, Schumer dismisses her class except for Ricky (Kyle Mooney), a bad boy who needs to be taught a lesson.

Schumer intentionally overplays the traditional porn acting style – which is to say, making the acting as flat and horrible as possible – and her every physical move is designed to highlight an erotic body part, turning suddenly with her ass sticking out, turning back to stick out her chest, etc. Mooney matches her awfulness as the two prepare to “get it on.”

Suddenly, before they can undress, Aidy Bryant walks in as a student in the class – a real student who believes she’s in a real class. Bryant is all earnest positivity, and as she explains to Schumer that she needs help understanding the material from today’s lesson, the fictional and the real collide. Schumer’s porn star has no idea how to react, and watching her try to figure it out is like watching a robot in an old sitcom self-destruct when asked a question it cannot answer.

The sketch takes every opportunity for a double entendre, digging deeper as the weird combined reality – Ricky is obviously a porn actor, but also, to Bryant, her real classmate – grows. All three actors throw everything into this (plus Vanessa Bayer, who shows up as Bryant’s mother, adding to the confusion), and the build of the reality/porn divide keeps the big laughs coming. When Bryant professes a desire to be a teacher when she grows up, she asks Schumer how she got the job. “I moved to Hollywood when I was 14 and got tricked,” she replies.

Sometimes, the biggest laughs make no damn sense. This sketch is weirdness for weirdness’ sake, and boy does it work.

General consensus has Kate McKinnon as this season’s MVP, but a reasonable case could also be made for an actor who’s not a member of the cast – and, in a greater irony, is one of the show’s most notorious cases of someone who bombed at the show, only to hit greater success later.

Larry David got almost nothing on the air during his too-brief writing stint for the show in 1984, and has made clear that he and SNL were not a match. And yet, David, brought on to play Bernie Sanders, nailed that impression several times, then expanded on it with his tremendous “Bern Your Enthusiasm” sketch. (More on that soon!)

But he didn’t stop there. David’s episode was one of the season’s best due to its depth, and Kevin Roberts was an out of left field smash that only he could have pulled off.

The scenario is an FBI training seminar, where the cadets take situational target practice against a lifelike series of simulated people. One of those is David as Kevin Roberts, a hipster douche from the 90s with an orange suit, close-cropped blond hair and tinted sunglasses to match, holding a large, brick-sized cell phone.

For the simulation, a panel rises on the wall to reveal the human surrogates, played by various cast members. Some are criminals brandishing guns. Some are kind little old ladies. Then there are some, like Kevin Roberts, that fall in between. As the panel rises for the first time on Roberts, David, brick phone in hand, says, “I’m Kevin Roberts, and I’m the coolest bitch in town. Where’s the party?” FBI trainee Kenan Thompson, baffled, shoots him.

There’s little more to the sketch than this, just building on this insanity. Later, Roberts pops up again, and says, “I got a very important question. Can a bitch get a donut? Now let’s dance!” David’s enthusiasm here makes the bit, and he appears to be having the time of his life. (The writers, realizing a winning line when they had it, managed to get the donut line repeated twice for building laughs.)

Add in winning cameos from various cast members as the criminals and civilians in the windows – Leslie Jones is on screen for about two seconds, and maximizes her opportunity – and this sketch is a delicious bit of strange that rewards repeat viewings.

A gorgeous glimpse into Ryan Gosling’s dark side and a chance for Vanessa Bayer to show an uncharacteristic edge, “Santa Baby” pulls from Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction to create a demented crime couple to be feared as you’re laughing.

The filmed bit features Gosling and Bayer as a couple attending a Christmas party at the home of Beck Bennett and Aidy Bryant. They brought cookies, and when Bryant thanks them, Bayer says, “Uh uh uh, those are for Santa.” Bennett continues the jokey banter, explaining that they’re out of milk, so Santa will have to settle for bourbon instead.

Thing is – Bayer wasn’t joking. Gosling, fully serious, says that Santa doesn’t drink, because he has to drive the sleigh. When Bennett’s son asks when Santa is coming, Bennett, who has a Santa suit upstairs, explains that he’ll be down soon.

For Bayer and Gosling, this is revelatory news. “What?” she whispers. “He’s upstairs?” says Gosling. And as the hosts realize that their new neighbors are not joking, things get weird, then scary, as Gosling and Bayer shift into classic criminal-lovers-on-the-run mode. Kissing and talking simultaneously, the news of Santa’s presence fills them with a blend of childlike anticipation and primordial lust. And when it’s broken to them that they will not meet the real Santa, all hell breaks loose.

SNL rarely embraces dark comedy in the current era, but this is a brilliant display of it. As Gosling terrorizes the party and Bayer gets off watching it, the viewer feels the menace, yet the laughs are non-stop. Given how SNL often has top actors on the show yet gives them no material that capitalizes on their specific talent – the recent Brie Larson episode comes to mind – this was an amazing crafting of material toward that week’s host, and the sort of thing, given the caliber of constant talent in the hosting spot, the show should be striving for on a far more frequent basis. The other revelation here was Bayer, ditching her nice girl/suburban mom persona for someone with an evil core. Here’s hoping she explores this side of her acting in greater depth down the line.

Premise-wise, this sketch is a home run before it begins – Peter Dinklage and Leslie Jones, paired up to survive for 21 days in the wild without clothes. Each of us could probably write our own bizarre script in our head based solely on the description, and SNL’s writers clearly had a blast examining the possibilities, and making the most of the mismatched physicality on display.

Dinklage arrives first, tentative and nervous, wondering, to the camera, when they’ll be getting naked. A car pulls up, the door opens, and there’s Leslie, already letting her naughty bits fly unencumbered in the brisk spring air. “The cool breeze feel good on my ass, man!” she yells, setting the tone for a match as disparate in personality as it is in appearance.

What follows is everything we’d hoped from this unlikely duo.  For their one allowed survival item, Dinklage brought a fire starter kit; Jones brought hot sauce (which she later tried to sprinkle on Dinklage as he slept). Things get hostile quickly, and she insists on calling him Tyrion. Meanwhile, Jones goes full horndog on Dinklage, cradling him a bit too hard as he tries to sleep, but the physical site of Jones and Dinklage, naked together, her almost devouring him as they spoon, is a classic comedy visual. As the days progress, Jones loses it, ultimately having points deducted for violating the show’s no drugs policy, and for trying to eat her partner.

If there’s any justice in the world, someone’s working on the buddy comedy script for these two right now.

While the show’s large cast boasts several bright lights, it’s hard to argue against Kate McKinnon as the show’s biggest star right now. She rarely fails to nail down the funniest aspects of an impression, character or sketch. Her well of invention on the show appears to be bottomless, and her upcoming starring role in Ghostbusters (along with castmates Leslie Jones and Cecily Strong) will almost certainly propel her into a film career in a huge way. Last but not least, she’s the one doing the always-funny impression of our most likely next president.

As such, it’s not surprising that she could pull off what she did here.

The ad parody begins simply and predictably, with “A Message from Hillary Clinton” on the screen, and McKinnon as Clinton talking to millennials over a soaring bed of music. The spot features her nakedly pandering to millennials in response to that group’s strong preference to Sanders over Clinton in the polls. She says, in voice-over as we she her meeting young people, that she shares their beliefs, noting as she does that there are, “so, so many of you.”

Now on camera, she reinforces what she’s always been saying, that, “We need a revolution in the streets,” and that, “America should be for everyone, not just for millionaires and billionaires.” These are Sanders’ lines, of course, and as she says those last three words, she suddenly takes on a hint of Sanders’ Brooklyn-based inflection.

As the ad proceeds, she slowly turns into Sanders. First, her speech becomes a full-on Sanders impression, and watching McKinnon appearing as Clinton but sounding like Sanders is disorienting. Then, discussing her upbringing “as a young boy in Brooklyn,” she suddenly appears with glasses, then in a ill-fitting suit, and then, finally, with Sanders’ white hair. Playing off Clinton’s reputation for pandering, and how she began picking up Sanders’ talking points mid-run, the sketch reinforces how smart the show’s political comedy can be, and as well as how strong a comedic force  McKinnon has become.

The controversy surrounding Beyonce after this year’s Super Bowl, where she and her dancers wore outfits inspired by the Black Panthers and the performance included shout outs to black heroes, was intended as a statement of support for the black community and the #blacklivesmatter movement. While many were thrilled with Beyonce’s powerful stance, others took offense, believing that the Super Bowl was no place for politics, or just perceiving the performance as racist itself.

SNL seized on this ridiculous controversy in a way that showed not only how silly it was, but exactly why.

The horror-film trailer parody, starting out with the trailer-guy voice intoning, “For white people, it was just another great week.” We see white people enjoying their lives when the music grows ominous, and we see news anchors talking about how Beyonce’s new video “embraces her black heritage.”

The moment the horror sinks in – the point where, in a real horror trailer, the pleasant people would realize the killer was in the house – is when Aidy Bryant tells her husband, the terror inching up her throat, “I think Beyonce…is black!”

Soon, we have chaos in the streets, as the white people realize that the song – unlike, well, everything – isn’t for them.

The horror is played to a tee, and the show’s black cast members accentuate the insanity by standing calmly by as white people lose their minds. The sketch also takes apart more specific forms of racism, such as white people who profess not to see color. When Sasheer Zamata tells her friend, a panicked Vanessa Bayer, that she’s black, Bayer doesn’t believe her, because to Bayer, Zamata is “my girl.” Zamata tries to make the point that black people are everywhere, but when she points to Jay Pharoah in a long coat and hoodie, Bayer, in a conspiratorial whisper, says, “I know he’s black.”

The sketch then shows whites destroying everything in a panic, as the news is heard reporting that other celebrities are black as well. Given how our current presidential campaign has been partially fueled by racism and an us-against-then mentality, the message – that black people are a segment of society gaining more and more power, and white people had better get used to it – while sadly obvious to many, still couldn’t be more timely.

The first touch of genius was noticing how close Bernie Sanders was, personality-wise, to Larry David. The second, realized in this sketch, was understanding how perfectly David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm would work with Sanders as its star.

This sketch is exactly that, a Curb episode starring David-as-Sanders, with the Curb castmates transposed to people working on the campaign. If David decides not to return to HBO with new Curb episodes, I hope he’ll consider this, because his Sanders persona can be exactly as kvetchy and funny as David playing himself.

Written and directed exactly like a Curb episode – David co-wrote with several SNL writers – as it melds Sanders’ talking points with Curb-style dialogue, David’s Sanders alienates African-American voters by failing to shake supporter Leslie Jones’ hand after she coughs into it. This becomes a controversy, and the arguments start flying.

Bobby Moynihan plays Jeff Garlin, here a Sanders staffer, debating whether Jones’ cough was a cough and shake, or a cough and a wipe and a shake – exactly the same sort of argument Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander might have had on Seinfeld, or David and anyone might have on Curb. Cecily Strong nails Susie Essman as David’s aggressive foil, calling Sanders an asshole at every turn. Jay Pharoah plays J.B. Smoove setting him straight, saying, “You need the black vote, Bernie. You need to shake as many black woman’s hands as you can. I don’t care if the hand got dookie on it, you shake that hand.”

Along with matching Curb’s rhythms, Sanders gets a chance to fail to help someone, just as David always did, and the sketch ends with just the sort of full-circle plotting we see on Curb. “Bern Your Enthusiasm” is a searing comedy mash-up with a pronounced degree of difficulty that the show cleared with ease.

Before the sketch gets going, there are two easy-to-miss clues that something strange and unexpected is on the way. First, after introducing the contestants for this game show parody, the voice-over announcer says, ”They may not know it yet, but they’re all guests on America’s favorite new show, Meet Your Second Wife.” Why wouldn’t they know it?

Second, when the hosts, played by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, introduce themselves, Poehler starts, “I’m Helen Walsh,” and Fey follows with, “and I’m Tina Fey.” Intended as such or not, it’s an appropriate introduction for a sketch where reality is malleable, and time and identity are skewed in unfathomable ways.

Despite long-time criticism from viewers that SNL wildly overuses the fake game show format, it does allow for brilliant and incisive work at times. This, the slyest and funniest SNL game show parody since 2011’s “Who’s on Top” and my choice for SNL’s best sketch of the 2015-2016 season, is the perfect example.

A large part of Fey and Poehler’s widespread appeal is their seamless ability to make feminist stances funny, and they tackle the subject here as brutally and hilariously as they’ve ever done.

Taking on men who toss over age-appropriate wives for much younger women, the sketch leaves its purpose a mystery until a stunning reveal.

As Poehler tells the three male contestants that the show is “where happily married men get a chance to meet the person who will one day become their second wife,” the men look confused. Their wives (all firsts, we assume) are all in the audience.

We then meet contestant Brian, played by Bobby Moynihan. After saying hello to his wife, played by Vanessa Bayer, Fey says, “She seems great. For now.” Poehler then says, “Brian, let’s meet your second wife,” and the sketch’s premise is revealed as 8th grader Helen walks out.

Surprise is an important and powerful ingredient for comedy, and this moment marked one of the show’s best uses of it in years. Implying what it does, the appearance of a child feels dangerous in a way SNL used to, back in its early days, but rarely does anymore. In its journey to respectability, SNL has become firmly establishment. Shocks within the comedy are rare; dangerous shocks, which make one believe the show has gone too far, rarer still. But a shock of this sort with a message behind it can seem a relic from the days of Michael O’Donoghue.

At that moment, the sketch became a punishing reminder to men who pursue much younger women that compared to their own experience, they’re pursuing children. It’s more than a message, in fact – it’s a display. Like all great storytelling, it shows instead of telling.

At first, Moynihan is incredulous. But when Fey informs him that the novel he’s working on will be a best-seller and perhaps even a movie, he pivots immediately, saying, “Oh yeah, I get it now.” After a brief, awkward get-acquainted conversation with the girl – he asks what kinds of things she likes and she replies, “horses” – he says, “Alright, well, guess I’ll see you in 20 years.” Fey: “Actually, it’s seven.”

It gets worse. Taran Killam’s second wife turns out to be five. We know this because when she’s asked her age, she holds up five fingers. Final contestant Kenan Thompson gets it worst of all. With wife Leslie Jones looking on with steam practically rising out of her head, he says, “Don’t be white. Don’t be white. Don’t be white,” as his second wife is introduced, and he doesn’t get his wish, as Cecily Strong comes out. But race turns out to be the least of his problems, as we learn that his second wife will not be Strong. She, it happens, is three months pregnant with Thompson’s second wife.

In addition to a killer premise and spot-on execution, the sketch has great lines throughout. When Aidy Bryant, as Killam’s wife, says, “I thought this was a home makeover show,” Fey answers, “In a way, it is.” After Killam learns that he’ll meet the now-five-year-old because she’ll be his daughter’s college roommate, he cluelessly responds, “I mean, that’s kind of nice, right? At least then my daughter and she can stay friends.” Fey replies, with just the right touch of sarcasm, “Oh yeah. Your daughter’s gonna love it.”

There’s not a wasted word, moment, or facial expression in this sketch, and everything that happens carries laughter and meaning in equal measure. Aspiring sketch writers should study this to see how it’s done.

[Watch Saturday Night Live on Hulu]

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. His greatest wish is to see Stefon enjoy a cheeseburger at John Belushi’s diner. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.