Segments are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars
SIMPSON JURY FIELD TRIP
O.J. Simpson (TIM) sways jurors during a field trip to his house
— Tim’s O.J. letting Ellen keep his Heisman Trophy is pretty funny.
— Ha, Mark takes over Mike Myers’ Judge Ito impression. Something about that re-casting cracks me up, for some reason.
— Just now, the party music was cued up too early and then quickly stopped.
— Not all that much to laugh at here overall, but I guess this had kind of a charm to it and was harmless enough. Maybe I’m just being somewhat lenient towards this because I know what tonight’s episode has in store for me.
STARS: **½
MONOLOGUE
(no synopsis available)
— My god, Deion’s exaggerated, corny delivery of “About a week ago, Lorne Michaels calls me up!!!” was CRINGEWORTHY.
— Deion equating SNL to a football team is awful.
— Hmm, interesting how during his “SNL is a football team” analogy, he calls SNL “a rebuilding effort”. I see SNL is acknowledging the rough year they’ve been having.
— Overall, not a single laugh to be had here, thus beginning the pure hell that is this episode.
STARS: *
MAJOR LEAGUE PLAYERS ASSOCIATION
other sources of income allow host to promote baseball strike solidarity
— My god, EVERY SINGLE TIME Deion lowers his hand on the podium (which he does at the end of EVERY sentence), his wristwatch makes a loud and distracting “clunk” sound on the podium’s wood. Every single time. The fact that there have been zero laughs in this sketch so far makes the “clunk” sounds even more noticeable.
— Boy, is Deion fumbling through his lines throughout this.
— Enough with the running gag with Deion’s ringing cellphone.
— This sketch is DEAD so far.
— Not even Farley’s John Kruk is doing anything for me here.
— Deion, in one of his many line flubs: “…..do what we can to make men’s ends meet.” Closest I’ve come to laughing at this whole damn sketch.
— Now we get a lousy newspaper headline ending, one of SNL’s laziest go-to sketch-ending tropes.
STARS: *
THE 1995 ESPY AWARDS
sports honors with John Goodman (CHF); Manute Bol cameo
— I love Chris Elliott and I love what he’s been bringing to SNL this season, but he’s no impressionist, as his take on Chris Berman is showing.
— The bit with Elliott’s Berman doing gimmicky variations of athlete’s surnames is just plain stupid, and not in the funny way.
— Speaking of lousy celebrity impressions, Farley as John Goodman.
— The constant cutaways to the same stock footage of a laughing Lou Diamond Phillips sums up season 20’s habit of relying on one joke over and over. Same goes for Farley-as-Goodman’s constant “The Mets suck” jokes.
— Speaking of lousy celebrity impressions, Adam as Bobcat Goldthwait.
— Random casting of Jon Bon Jovi, who looks almost unrecognizable here.
— Speaking of lousy celebrity impressions, EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS SKETCH.
— Oof, Manute Bol should’ve just left his SNL camoes one-and-done with his funny Majestic Caribbean Cruise commercial from the preceding season. He could barely get through his one line in tonight’s sketch without stumbling over practically EVERY SINGLE word.
— This sketch is death personified. How long can this overlong, laughless tripe continue to go on?
— Oh, now we’re getting insulting and sexist, with Jay’s Dick Vitale screaming angrily about how women’s basketball is “not a real sport”. This is another bit in this sketch that sums up some of the problems of season 20. Oh, and even better, we soon end up getting an entire fucking sketch based on the “who cares about women’s basketball?” sentiment, when Paul Reiser hosts a few episodes later.
— The bizarre award show categories are just plain dumb, even if that’s the point. “Biggest stadium”??? WTF? This ain’t funny.
— Janeane’s Susan Sarandon, regarding a list she and Mark’s Tim Robbins are about to read off: “If you think sitting through this list will be excruciating torture…..” No, Janeane, excruciating torture would be sitting through this sketch.
— Overall, a quintessential example of SNL’s poor track record with award show sketches. Probably the all-time worst award show sketch in SNL history.
STARS: *
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “Always”
WEEKEND UPDATE
Operaman sings about Colin Ferguson, Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, more
— Here comes Norm to give me my first big laughs of the whole night.
— TONS of O.J. jokes tonight, most of them gold.
— Our first instance of what would go on to be a recurring Norm gag, with the punchline of a joke being Norm flashing a whole bunch of money while greedily saying “Don’t I know it!”
— Operaman makes his first appearance in a year, and his final appearance during Adam’s tenure as a cast member. Feels odd seeing him in a Norm Macdonald Update, as I’m so used to seeing him in Kevin Nealon Updates.
— Operaman is on fire tonight.
— Ha, Norm has a bad habit of often accidentally referring to Adam Sandler Update characters as “Adam Sandler” before correcting himself.
— I love hearing the audience reaction to Norm’s so-wrong-but-priceless “Best retard” joke about Tom Hanks and Jodie Foster.
STARS: ****½
JUGGERNAUT FORCE
mission into UFO leaves macho commandos naked, defensive, emasculated
— A particularly notorious sketch from this already notorious episode.
— Holy hell, there goes the famous blooper with Farley’s accidental mooning when his pants fall off (the sixth above screencap for this sketch). I’m certainly laughing, but it’s a sad day when the sight of Farley’s bare entire ass is one of the very few highlights of an episode.
— Speaking of which, when talking about this Farley mooning incident in his SNL book, Jay Mohr says that as Farley pulled his pants back up, Farley accidentally hit his head on the top of the spaceship’s entrance, resulting in him yelling “SON OF A!”
— Ugh at all the gay panic and typical season 20 homophobia in this sketch.
— My god (have I said that enough in this review?), the tedious, non-stop cutaways to newspaper headlines is driving me INSANE. I understand that SNL is probably showing all of those headlines so the cast can do quick changes, but at least make the headlines HUMOROUS.
— Now Elliott almost has an accidental mooning incident of his own, as his pants almost fall down as he’s running up the spaceship stairs, and you can almost see his crack.
— This sketch feels ENDLESS and just keeps getting worse and worse and worse as it progresses.
— I swear to God, if they show one more newspaper headline…
— Finally, this abomination is over.
STARS: *
RAP CONCERT
rappers (host), (TIM), (ADS) perform short songs with simple lyrics
— Hoo, boy. Every time it seems like a sketch is the lowest that tonight’s episode can sink, SNL manages to keep outdoing themselves by following it with a new worst sketch that would go to live on in infamy.
— Michael introduces himself as “JD Smooth”. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why that name is interesting in retrospect.
— Speaking of Michael, what the bloody hell is he, of all people, doing playing an urban, hip-hop character in a setting like this? Or is it an intentional throwaway joke that such a character is played by the oldest, whitest guy in the cast?
— This sketch was originally cut after dress rehearsal from the preceding season’s Martin Lawrence episode. In that version, I believe Rob Schneider played McKean’s role.
— What’s with the odd, awkward long pause just now before Tim spoke?
— “Peace, we outta here” as the only joke repeated a billion times in a four-minute sketch…… Goddammit, SNL. The only good thing about this is that it gave the That Week In SNL podcast their immortal sign-off line.
— Ladies and gentlemen, I am practically comatose by this point of tonight’s episode. The horribleness of tonight’s episode has officially broken me.
STARS: who gives a fuck anymore?
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night”
PERSPECTIVES
Lionel Osbourne & director of boys’ athletic club (host)
— Finally, a silver lining.
— Nice to see this sketch officially become recurring.
— Oh, dear. The awful character voice Deion is speaking in is threatening to derail this sketch. Don’t ruin my precious Perspectives, Deion!
— The whole bit with the five New York boroughs is really funny.
— Great bit at the end regarding an immediate rebroadcast of this episode of Perspectives.
— Overall, a solid sketch in itself, but Deion’s dreadful delivery in this (which I admit I might’ve considered “so bad, it’s good” in a better episode) made this not quite as strong as it otherwise would’ve been.
STARS: ***½
HOT DOG FOR JASON
to help a sick boy (CHF), host hotdogs & taunts opponents during a game
— Unlike many of the other atrocious sketches tonight, there’s nothing all that wrong with this sketch’s premise, but the resulting sketch is still a complete flop and is providing zero laughs. I’m sure an episode with better writing could’ve gotten SOMETHING out of this premise.
— I can’t find anything else to say about this. By this point of tonight’s episode, I’ve completely run out of negative things to say about bad sketches tonight.
STARS: blaaagh
RAPPING DEION
host performs “Must Be The Money” & “It’s On”
— OH. MY. GOD.
— Deion’s blatant lipsyncing, his ridiculous spastic “dancing”, his outfit, the attitude he’s attempting to pull off, the mere idea to even give him a segment like this… all of this is making this the unintentionally funniest segment of tonight’s entire episode.
GOODNIGHTS
IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
— …………………………………………………………………..Yeah, I got nothin’. I’m pretty much speechless after sitting through this unbelievable trainwreck of an episode. Worst episode ever? It certainly may be.
MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS EPISODE, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS
HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (Bob Newhart)
the biggest step down imaginable
My full set of screencaps for this episode is here
TOMORROW
George Clooney hosts. It’s also the abrupt end of the road for a frustrated Janeane Garofalo, as well as the beginning of the road for a certain new female hire.