Sucking the air out of the room: 10 ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketches that bombed
A staple of the small screen since October 1975, Saturday Night Live serves to function as both a fixture of episodic comedy, and a proving ground for the next generation of comedic stars.
Some former cast members don’t even find success in that genre – with Robert Downey Jr. the first SNL alum to win an Academy Award for acting – but the list of former performers who’ve gone on to achieve great things is nothing short of remarkable.
Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kirsten Wiig, and Andy Samberg barely begins to cover the tip of an iceberg that’s been churning out Hollywood’s next wave of big names for multiple generations.
With well over 900 episodes in the can stretching back almost 50 years, though, there’s inevitably been some stinkers along the way. Playing to a live audience can be unforgiving at the best of times, but few sketches in SNL history have bombed as badly as these ten.
10 SNL sketches that bombed:
10. ‘Song For Daddy’ (2013)
This sketch didn’t even make it past the dress rehearsal stage and onto the airwaves, which says everything about how badly Bill Hader struggled to extract anything even halfway decent from Justin Bieber.
The gag is that Hader’s veteran country singer is trying to remain relevant by incorporating an array of new instruments into his act. But the crowd being densely populated by Beliebers does nobody any favours, matters that aren’t helped by Bieber looking visibly uncomfortable, and a piece of the wall falling off encapsulates how badly things were bombing.
Ever the professional, Hader approached the writers after the skit and asked the rhetorical question of; “So, this sketch could be described as a trainwreck, right?” He wasn’t wrong, but at least SNL viewers at home didn’t need to see it unfolding live.
9. ‘Sasquatch’ (2018)
An SNL Digital Short, the crux of ‘Sasquatch’ is that Mikey Day uncovers the myth to discover that the titular vaguely human-like creature is real, and proceeds to spend the entirety of the sketch sexually assaulting him in a number of ways.
Guest host Sterling K. Brown does an admirable job of trying to salvage whatever he can from the shambles, but his charismatic exposition was never going to be enough. It’s a one-note joke that shouldn’t have been used to begin with because nobody in their right mind is going to be splitting at the sides from sexual degradation with a folkloric spin.
Pretty much dead on arrival, ‘Sasquatch’ was ill-conceived from the start, although the makeup effects to create the monster are admittedly impressive.
8. ‘Commie Hunting Season’ (1980)
When Lorne Michaels briefly stepped away from SNL following the show’s fifth season, associate producer Jean Doumanian was brought in to steer the ship, which resulted in every single cast member and all but one writer – Bill Murray‘s brother Brian – following Michaels out of the door.
What followed was what’s widely regarded as the worst season in Saturday Night Live history, with ‘Commie Hunting Season’ its weakest sketch. The title is entirely self-descriptive and designed to capitalise on the fears of Russia becoming the United States’ biggest threat.
Rednecks go hunting for communists, casual slurs are bandied about with reckless abandon, the studio audience remained dead silent throughout, and it was clear SNL was in real danger of bottoming out in its first Michaels-less run on screens.
7. ‘The Tampon Prince’ (1993)
Dana Carvey won a Primetime Emmy during his hugely successful seven-year stint as a writer and performer on SNL, but his very last episode sent him out on the most deflating note possible.
One of the biggest news stories on the planet at the time was the divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, which included recordings of the former intimating his desires to be reborn as a feminine hygiene product so he could always be close to his new flame Camilla Parker-Bowles.
It’s a queasy mental image, to put it lightly, but Carvey decided to dive headlong into the stomach-churning revelation by playing a version of Prince Charles, who quite literally gets turned into a tampon. It was tasteless back then, but it wasn’t even funny, which is probably worse.
6. ‘Gen Z Hospital’ (2021)
It’s clear from watching Elon Musk in any public setting that the man believes himself to be utterly and unequivocally hilarious, which mountainous volumes of evidence suggest not to be the case.
He did at least put plenty of effort in during his SNL guest stint, but the overall sense of cringe that follows him everywhere he goes was plastered all over every second of ‘Gen Z Hospital’.
Musk plays a doctor who tries to converse with the youth in the terminology they’d understand, and the show’s efforts to try and relate to a younger demographic ended up falling painfully and pathetically flat.
5. ‘Flintstones Names’ (1994)
Only Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin have hosted SNL more times than 13-time frontman John Goodman, which, by extension, means his success rate is going to be far from 100%.
In this instance, the entire bit revolved entirely around the fact Goodman played Fred in The Flintstones movie released the same year, and all he does is bestow prehistoric-style names to an assortment of celebrities and musical acts.
There’s some tittering from the audience, but more in expectation of a punchline that never comes more than anything else. The whole thing fizzles out at the end, with the gathered crowd seeming completely bemused by whatever it was they’d just witnessed.
4. ‘Jennifer’s Date’ (1991)
Nothing can illustrate just how badly Steven Seagal bombed as SNL guest host better than the fact not even Chris Farley was capable of staving off the disaster of the action star’s abject apathy.
Named by Lorne Michaels as the single worst compere the series has ever seen, Seagal possesses not a single ounce of comedy chops, nor does it look as if he cares in the slightest that ‘Jennifer’s Date’ is sucking the air right out of the room.
Sleepwalking his way through, Farley plays a potential date for Seagal’s daughter, with the show’s established veterans appearing increasingly bewildered at the realisation the ponytailed martial artist is tanking them by default with his stony-faced disinterest.
3. ‘Rear Window’ (2009)
After rising to prominence with her Emmy-nominated run on Mad Men, January Jones regularly invited comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock‘s three-time leading lady Grace Kelly, so on paper, the sketch made sense.
Jones was stepping in for Kelly in the ‘comedic’ remake of Hitchcock’s classic movie, with Bobby Moynihan as the ‘Master of Suspense’ and Jason Sudeikis as James Stewart. However, the skit was nuked by what was supposed to be its main selling point; farts.
Comedy history has made it clear that flatulence is always going to be integral to its success, but Jones doesn’t have the necessary skills to make something so poorly-conceived – she can’t finish a scene without loudly farting – anything other than being dead in the water from the very start.
2. ‘Fart Face’ (2008)
As implied in the previous entry, comedy and farts go together hand-in-hand, but Josh Brolin did at least manage to enjoy his experience taking part in a flatulent skit that played out to almost eerie silence.
Bill Hader and Will Forte’s Gerry and Carl are interviewing Brolin’s Jim, but as much effort as the trio put in, ‘Fart Face’ is beyond saving. Years later, the star continued to state the case for the defence, but even people who enjoyed it were adamant he didn’t have a leg to stand on.
Brolin told Seth Meyers he was incredulous at ‘Fart Face’ only ever airing once, to which the former responded with the rebuttal of “maybe you were having too much fun to notice not a single human laughed during the whole sketch.”
1. ‘The Arguing Couple’ (2014)
Chris Rock and Leslie Jones are two talented performers with plenty of SNL experience, but one bungled line reading knocks them off their game in ‘The Arguing Couple’, and they’re never able to recover.
He wants to hit the town for a night out, and she’s not ready to go. It was one of Jones’ first episodes as part of the cast, and maybe nerves got the better of her, because things slide off the rails as soon as she stumbles over her very first line.
That seems to knock Rock for a loop, too, and the end result is a painful example of two pros trying their best to drag something out of an unfunny sketch that was doomed from the second they opened their mouths.
