The Worst SNL Sketches of All Time: Part 2 - Runners Up

I apologize for not getting this posted before tonight; real-world commitments and a few other changes related to the future of my blog take precedence over these posts. I admit that I have also been pretty burned out on the show for a little while, which may be another factor in why I've put off work on this list. Unlike the winners for "worst recurring sketch", many of these sketches have not been posted online; some likely due to music licensing issues.

Third Runner Up

• Rookie Cop - SNL had already aired a few sketches centered around people vomiting before, notably 1980's Roman Vomitorium and 1993's Bad Taste Sketches, but both prior examples wrote sketches around the vomiting.  This time, vomiting is the sketch, as it systematically gives every cast member and featured player (aside from Al Franken) a chance to spew out incredibly watery-looking puke.
• Hot Plates - A one-joke premise where, despite the waiters' warnings, diners touch the hot plates at a restaurant.  The whole thing is done too cartoonishly broad: as if having Horatio Sanz and Rob Riggle screaming "HOT PLATES!" didn't seem like enough cover for a weak premise, the gags involving Hilary Swank's hand fusing to a plate and Amy Poehler turning into a skeleton from just looking at her plate felt desperate.
• Van Morrison Concert - Much of the distaste towards this otherwise weak sketch about a woman's obnoxious dancing blocking the other patrons' view of a concert is because Melanie Hutsell plays the dancing woman, and adds an extra layer of obnoxiousness to the character with her facial expressions.  One voter says "It's a pretty bad sketch but she makes it unwatchable".  Whether the antipathy towards Hutsell on SNL is deserved or not, many still consider her a sketch-ruiner.

Second Runner Up

• St. Kat's Middle - Another one-joke premise, where middle school kids take their teachers' lessons on positive thinking to heart and try to apply them to their friend with a broken knee (Kenan Thompson).  The audience could tell where this was going to go before the first fall, but what makes this one excruciating is the extended sequences involving Thompson's character's face in close-up, delivering agonized damnation of his friends in such an overwrought manner that it's plausible that someone just told Thompson to stretch out the sketch and milk it for all it was worth.
• Sunken Submarine - The worst thing to make it to air while Dick Ebersol ran the show: a ten-minute-plus sketch that plays to light chuckles at the very most; it's like they built the set first and only then decided to write a sketch around it.  So much of this sketch is a succession of attempted gags that just fail: Robert Culp eating oatmeal without a spoon while wearing a dress and gloves is a perfect metaphor for the pointlessness of the whole thing.

First Runner Up

• Jack The Stripper - In their 1986 book Saturday Night, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad mention that some considered this sketch about women on the streets of London being terrorized by a stripping heir to the throne of England "the most disastrous sketch ever on the show".  Even the lighting contributes to the sketch's problems, as this sketch is so dark, foggy and murky looking that the cast might as well have performed it in shadow.  Better lighting still wouldn't have fixed this sketch's aimlessness.
• Miracles Of Science - The Tom Arnold show from 1996 was an unusually bad show right in the middle of SNL's last major comeback year, and this sketch (which originally aired in the plum post-Weekend Update slot) is as unfunny as anything the show churned out during its low points.  Arnold plays a janitor who, following a nuclear accident, had his brain size, arrogance and physical pain grow instead of his intelligence, and new player Will Ferrell interviews him.  I wonder how much the sketch would have improved if the casting was reversed, but as a whole, this sketch dies early and hard, and both Arnold and Ferrell seem to know it.
• Rear Window - It's bad enough this sketch is little more than Grace Kelly farting; what's worse is that it feels like the writer thought that if the audience wouldn't laugh, it's because there weren't enough fart sound effects.  Even still, what brought an already terrible sketch to new depths of awfulness was host January Jones (easily the worst host the show's had in recent years) and her inability to finish the sketch without giggling.  One voter's comment said it best: "Jones gave a dreadful performance and actually ruined a sketch about the film 'Rear Window' that revolved around a fart joke. Think about that for a second."

The Worst SNL Sketches Of All Time: The Results, part 1: Recurring Sketches

The results are in, and so begins my series of weekly posts on the worst Saturday Night Live sketches. Unlike the vote for the worst individual sketches, there was no single recurring sketch that got a significantly higher number of votes than the other nominees; many sketches received one vote apiece, and there were considerably fewer nominees (and votes) in the recurring category than in the worst overall sketches.  In the end, there was a three-way tie for worst recurring sketch, with a clear second place winner.

The worst recurring SNL sketch or characters of all time are: (tied) The Californians, Garth & Kat, Gilly

The Californians - One of the voters summed it up best: "Every time I see some promo of SNL that lauds that piece of skit sketch I want to break things".  James Anderson and Fred Armisen wrote this sketch revolving around the characters'  accents and tendency to give driving directions, which likely would have been a forgotten one-off sketch had it not been for Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader breaking character at Armisen's exaggerated line delivery.  Like with Debbie Downer, the producers and writers decided it was going to be one of their new signature bits, but where they found ways to put Debbie Downer in different situations, the very format of The Californians limited any potential to develop beyond such a thin premise.  By the time Armisen and Hader left the show, they had done the sketch 6 times in the space of 13 months.

Garth and Kat - This Weekend Update segment featuring an unprepared musical duo in matching vests is little more than Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig playing an improv game where one leads and their partner has to match what they're doing.  The whole thing is very self-indulgent and seems designed to kill 5 minutes of airtime more than anything else: like their characters, Armisen and Wiig don't rehearse their songs, and the result is more amusing to them than it is to the studio audience or home viewer.

Gilly - A polarizing character that even Wiig's own mother hates, Gilly seems to be the ultimate example of the bad SNL recurring sketch: one voter referred to it as "Kristen Wiig and the writers simply cashing paychecks".  I've said before the sketch reeks of Wiig and Paula Pell cynically coming up with a cash-grab character to be put on a T-shirt, because this sketch is neither's best work.  To Pell's credit, she did manage to put a genuinely funny moment in the first sketch (Casey Wilson's dialogue with Will Forte), but the sketches are tedious after the first run-through of the beats, which are limited variations on a set formula: if you see one minute of a Gilly sketch, you've seen the rest of the sketches in the series.  Inexplicably, NBC and SNL figured this was enough of a beloved character to warrant being used as a framing device for a compilation of Christmas sketches that aired in prime time (A Very Gilly Christmas).

Runner-up

Ching Chang (later Ching Change) - Saturday Night Live was arguably at its best during the late 80s, which is why this Dana Carvey character sticks out as especially bad: a stereotypical Chinese man who is emotionally attached to the live chickens he sells, insisting in Chinese Pidgin English that "chicken make lousy housepet!"  This rightfully attracted flack when it aired; at one point, SNL addressed the controversy by having Ching's sister Loose (Nora Dunn) criticize him for acting like a cartoon compared to her "positive ethnic role model" boyfriend (Phil Hartman).  This character is considered one of the most racist things the show has aired, and becomes more painful to watch as time passes on.

The Worst SNL Sketches of All Time: My own nominations

I've come up with a list of my own choices for worst sketch of all time, which will be factored into the overall vote (which closes at 11pm ET tonight):

• Commie Hunting Season - 11/22/1980 This easily makes my all-time worst list; many of the reasons have already been cited in my review of the Malcolm McDowell episodes, particularly that one line followed by the silence as if they were expecting to get a laugh. Knowing this was intended as a comment on the acquittal of a few Klansmen for their role in the Greensboro Massacre makes it that much worse, but there really isn't anything good about this sketch to begin with. Poorly lit, poorly scripted, poorly paced, poorly acted.
• Sunken Submarine - 04/24/1982 Easily the worst thing on the show during the Dick Ebersol years: a bloated, pointless and unfunny mess that plays to mostly silence. By the time Neil Levy comes in pretending to be a dog, you just want the sketch to be over with.
• The Limits Of The Imagination - 11/09/1985 The later live "Limits" sketches were better, but this one, while high in production values, seems to be more an excuse to show off the new SNL's film unit than anything worth the time in the show. The main joke is that it's "he's calling from inside the house" in a car. Lovitz's nasal whine as the maniac is only funny now that his voice is so recognizable.
• Brace Steele: Greenpeace Photographer - 04/20/1991 The most irredeemable part of the already bad Steven Seagal episode: this sketch about a Zen nature photographer happening upon an Exxon conspiracy feels like something he pushed to get on the show, and it plays like they're indulging him.  Points deducted for one of the most cringe-inducing endings in an SNL sketch.
• Disneyland Runner - 03/12/1994 The three Nancy Kerrigan at Disneyland segments really felt like the show was short on material and the writers were scrambling to use a host they knew to be a dud.
• Fortune Cookie Factory - 11/12/1994 The transition point where the 1994-95 season goes from just bad to joyless. This is also the first in a string of consecutive episodes where Mike Myers plays an accented character while donnning yellowface or race makeup.
• The ESPYS - 02/18/1995 Take a thin premise, a terrible host (even for a non-actor), a bunch of impressions by people who barely resemble or imitate their targets, repetition of the same gags that were barely funny to begin with (I'm looking at you, stock footage clip of Lou Diamond Philips), and pad it out to 10 minutes: you have this sketch.
• Miracles Of Science - 02/17/1996 SNL was on the comeback in 1995-96, but this particular sketch with Will Ferrell playing straightman to Tom Arnold as Brainiac (complete with oversized prosthetic brain-head) is painful to watch. You can smell the flop-sweat in the studio.
• Dr. Mrs. Frankenstein - 10/30/2004 One of many "the joke is he's gay" sketches that SNL has done in the last 15 years, with no real twist beyond that. Even more annoying is that this is one of the instances where Maya Rudolph plays a character in a period piece with an anachronistic "sassy black woman" voice.  I wouldn't be surprised if this was the handiwork of James Anderson, who is openly gay but behind so many sketches where homosexuality is the punchline.
• Rear Window - 11/14/2009 Grace Kelly has gas. That's the sketch.

Worst recurring sketches:

• Ching Chang/Ching Change One of the most racist things the show's done; this seems like it could have been written for a 1950s variety show.
• Trina There are a lot of Wiig characters I've been tempted to add to the list (Surprise Sue, Gilly, Secret Word, Dooneese). This stands out.  As much as Gilly comes across as a cynical attempt by Paula Pell and Kristen Wiig to create a marketable character, it at least had a few funny portions (OK, just Casey Wilson's part in the first sketch). Trina is Kristen Wiig as a wacky mental defective saying "Thomas!" over and over.
• Elinda Nade, Stenographer It was down to this and Regine, but where the latter is annoying and has enough telegraphing to keep Marconi busy, Elinda Nade is Fred Armisen trying to be Kristen Wiig. It's more aggravating when you realize what Armisen does well and compare it to this.
• Garth and Kat Another Fred Armisen / Kristen Wiig bit; this just feels like an excuse to eat up as much airtime as possible while making something mainly for them, James Anderson and Kent Sublette to get songwriting royalties from whenever the show repeats.

Dishonorable mention:

• Debbie Downer / The Californians Both are sketches that weren't much on paper, but through a fluke of corpsing, they ended up being more memorable and better than they should have been.  Of course, Lorne and the writers figure they might as well keep bringing both back, thereby tainting the originals.

It's sad how most of these nominees for worst recurring sketches feature Wiig and Armisen; maybe it's just because both are better performers than this dreck that even they can't save allow them to be.

The Worst SNL Sketches of All Time: A Poll

A few years ago, I did a poll where readers could vote on the best and worst episodes of SNL of all time.  Despite only getting eleven votes, the results page has become my most frequently accessed post.  Since then, I've been considering doing a poll about individual SNL sketches, but I wanted to come up with something slightly different.  There are so many "greatest SNL sketches" posts on the web, usually with a lot of the same contenders, so I want to focus on the other side. When discussing bad SNL, it's so easy to talk about how bad the show gets from time to time without getting specific, or just mentioning the show's tendency to milk a sketch or character for all it's worth.  This isn't just a "10 most irritating characters" poll: I want specific examples of the most terrible sketches the show's ever brought to a network audience.

My primary focus is going to be a list of the worst individual sketches, but because of the show's reliance (or over-reliance) on recurring material, I'm going to have a separate category for the worst recurring sketches.  I will also allow votes for individual sketches featuring a recurring character, but the main reason for having a separate category for the recurring stuff is because there have been some truly terrible one-offs that the show never felt necessary to bring back.

To have your voice heard, submit your picks using the form at the bottom of this post.  I also prefer if you also give a good rationale behind your choices, so tell me why you thought these sketches were terrible.   You can submit as many or as few choices as you want.  The more people that pick something, the better.

I will keep the voting open until March 1, 2014, at 12:00 am Atlantic time.  Once all the votes are tabulated, I'm going to do a series of weekly posts based on the results; the number will depend on how many votes come in.

EDIT: VOTING HAS NOW ENDED.

Infamously Bad SNL Musical Performances

Last night's performance by Lana Del Rey on Saturday Night Live received a lot of attention, but it wasn't exactly what the singer or her label wanted: within minutes of Del Rey's American television debut, Twitter exploded with biting comments.

One likened her performance to a real-life example of what they were making fun of minutes earlier in a sketch called "You Can Do Anything", where people who have never been given honest reactions to their lack of talent perform.  Even more tellingly, the likes of Juliette Lewis, Eliza Dushku and Rachel Dratch had pithy zingers of their own directed at Del Rey's wobbly singing.  One article even surmised this might be a career-killer.  Her second performance in particular reminded me of an obscure Victoria Jackson character from the late 80's: Nancy Maloney, a lounge singer who goes from high-pitched screeching to a forced deep, husky voice all in the space of a single song.

The last time a musical guest bombed this bad on the 'SNL' stage was in April 2010.  Ke$ha performed "Tik Tok" with an American flag cape a bizarre laser show and astronaut-suited backing band, with a pause to ask "Did anyone ever stop to think we were the aliens?", which seemed to be an attempt at invoking Robert Plant's "Does anybody remember laughter?" while just looking even sillier.  Her second number, "Your Love Is My Drug" was even more bizarre, with her and her band covered in day-glo body paint.  I wrote at the time that Ke$ha came off as a half-assed Lady Gaga impersonator: I stand by that assessment.

Some other SNL musical moments of note, for all the wrong reasons:

• Kanye West's attempt to replicate his autotune album "808s and Heartbreak" on the SNL stage with a giant video screen behind him.  There were a few times when the autotune "glitches" weren't able to cover West's weak singing ability, and the whole stage presence felt completely underwhelming.  I actually don't mind West's other performances (despite his braggadocio) and actually thought his 2010 performance art style numbers were a significant bounce back from this misstep.

• Ashlee Simpson's appearance in 2004 has been the subject of enough commentary already.  When she was booked on the show, I just thought it was weak to have someone best known for riding the coattails of her more successful older sister (who by that point was better known for being an airhead on an MTV reality show than any music she put out beforehand).  For a brief moment, Ashlee did eclipse her sister...but only as the subject of scorn and derision.  Once her second number began with her vocals from the first song playing, while her mic was at hip level, she realized what was going on, did a little jig to save face and then left her band on stage to play out.  The show had to scramble to fill time because her aborted performance threw the timing off that night, and Simpson blamed her gaffe on her band playing the wrong song during the goodnights.  Post-script: Simpson got a do-over performance for her next album a year later to mass indifference.

• Brian Wilson appeared on the show in 1976, during one of his low ebbs.  Overweight, bearded and with hair resembling that of a Fisher-Price man, Wilson was there to promote the Beach Boys' "comeback" 15 Big Ones, but despite able backing from the SNL band, he was not in any shape to perform.  His missed high notes in "Love Is A Woman" are painful enough to watch even without the tragic biography, but even sadder is a solo piano "Good Vibrations" in a giant sandbox at the end of the show.

• Laura Branigan had a big hit with "Gloria" in 1982, and was booked on the show in December of that year.  Unfortunately, it seems she was under the weather that weekend because her voice was shot.  She resorts to speak-singing for much of the song, but at one point her voice gives out and squeaks a high note.

• Spice Girls received much criticism when they performed "Wannabe" and "Say You'll Be There" in 1997: their vocal performances left much to be desired, but their dance moves bordered along the territory of the Juul Haalmeyer Dancers from SCTV, without the intentional comedy.

• Backstreet Boys' appearance in March 1998 had a dance break where with the Boys doing this bit of choreography with folding chairs.  Even watching this with the benefit of hindsight and a bit of distance from when they were all over the radio playlists, it wasn't a very good performance to begin with, and the chair dance just made them look stupid.

• The Go-Gos' appearance in 1981 was completely flimsy, slippy and lethargic at the same time.  Belinda Carlisle has admitted in her autobiography that this is due to being coked and boozed up that particular night, even going so far as calling it the worst performance the band ever did.

Much has already been written about Sinead O'Connor's well-intentioned but overly-strident protest of Catholic sex abuse at the end of her performance of "War", and Rage Against The Machine being tossed out of the studio for hanging down an upside-down flag on their amps (which was torn down before showtime) but I didn't really find too much fault with either performance.

Anyone who has their own nominees for infamously bad SNL performances, please leave a detailed comment.