(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Kitchen Table Kibitzing 3/11/2025: SNL Part 2 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-11
I assembled this diary of Saturday Night Live sketches at the same time as part 1 from a couple of weeks ago, but then we took a week out for Mardi Gras. This one exists mainly because I started the first one and had twice as many must-haves as could reasonably fit.
I feel bad that they’re all sick, but they don’t seem to be dangerously so, and they are keeping an eye on one another. I am fine down here, except that moving anything heavy will have to wait. It’s all just another layer of crappiness in this crappiest of all timelines.
The bad news is, everyone upstairs has Covid now, which apparently my brother picked up at a funeral he went to the day before he brought me to the ER. I’ve tested negative several times, and continue to have no symptoms, but I am old so I’ve had many more shots than those guys have. And luckily, we both wore N95s the whole time he sat with me in the emergency room.
So, the good news is, I am continuing to recover from my ten (10) broken ribs. I still feel bad, but I feel better than I did. Mostly, it’s hard to sleep because I can’t lie flat and I am not good at sleeping sitting up. Other than that, I emit a lot of little yelps as I go about my business, but there’s no one to hear them so they don’t count.
There are only so many diaries of Saturday Night Live clips I’m willing to write, so the previous one was the first couple of years, and this one is “all the other 48 years, during which I watched much more sporadically”. I’ve only kept up with it (sort of) in more recent years because YouTube exists. I’m not going to even try to arrange these chronologically. Surely I’ll have missed some of your favorites, so please feel free, as always, to add them in the comments.
To start off, here are the intros for every cast member ever, all 167 of them, including quite a few I certainly either forgot about or never saw. I initially had the official SNL video here, which is in chronological order, but it flips through the slides at quite a clip — see it here if you like. This one takes the time for Don Pardo or whoever to say each name, so you have time to focus your eyes on the person. It’s arranged alphabetically. [5:52]
More Cowbell: Christopher Walken as fictional music producer Bruce Dickinson, working with Blue Öyster Cult (and their fictional cowbell player, Gene Frenkle — the other band members represented are real). From 2000. [5:43]
Coffee Talk: Mike Myers as host Linda Richman, with Madonna, Roseanne Barr, and a cameo by Barbra Streisand that was a genuine surprise to all the actors. Talk amongst yourselves; I’m all verklempt. From 1992. [8:35]
Schweddy Balls: Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon create a pitch-perfect NPR show, where their guest is Pete Schweddy (Alec Baldwin). From 1998. [6:14]
Bronx Beat: Yet a third entry in the “women with a talk show” theme (which I didn’t even realize I was developing): Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph as two Bronx women welcome their guest, Tina Fey as a woman from Philadelphia. As a woman from New Jersey, this cracks me up. There’s not a lot of joke beyond the way they talk, but they’re very good at it. From 2015. [5:50]
Olya Povlatsky: Obviously, I could do a whole diary on Kate McKinnon’s characters and not get to them all. Here’s Olya, the sad Russian woman. From 2013. [3:54]
Sean Spicer: I’m trying to keep this upbeat, but the show did so much brilliant work on political figures in the last era of evil insanity, I couldn’t leave it all out. Here’s Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, driving the lectern to New York to talk to Trump. From 2017. [8:00]
Election week 2016 cold open: This is the one I was going to finally be able to watch all the way through without crying, you know, after last November. I thought then and think now it’s exactly what was called for that day, and the fact that she came so close to crying herself was everything, but don’t watch it unless you want to. [3:02]
Roy Moore and Jeff Sessions: This is also here because of McKinnon. Her portrayal of Jeff and his daddy — :chef’s kiss: From 2017. [4:41]
Stefon: When Bill Hader was about to leave the show, they wanted a spectacular exit for his character Stefon. And they wrote one! It’s a callback to The Graduate as if it had been directed by John Waters, and featuring Anderson Cooper as the jilted fiance. Compare the presumed budget for this to the one for that King Tut number from 1978 we saw in Part 1, which was a huge deal for them at the time. From 2013. [6:26]
The Californians: I can’t totally account for my affection for the early-20-teens Fred Armisen/Bill Hader franchise. It only has like two jokes, but they milk them so relentlessly and shamelessly, episode after episode! (Also, there are people in New Jersey with the “how did you go?/why did you go THAT way??” obsession so it’s funny to me.) This is the big finale, more or less, from the 2015 40th anniversary show, with guests including, but not limited to, Betty White and Bradley Cooper. That’s Laraine Newman as the mom; modern SNL stars are apparently vastly bigger than those of yore. [9:48]
Diner Lobster: When Pete Davidson orders the lobster at a diner, it triggers a whole Les Misérables production number to talk him out of it. (Properties note: the flag being waved on the barricade is the menu.) The sketch’s writers, John Mulaney and Colin Jost, discuss its development here. There were several contenders for diary finale, but this is the clear winner. From 2018. [4:51]
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/11/2309116/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-3-11-2025-SNL-Part-2?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
