The Best SNL Sketches of All Time

Debuting December 7, 1996, the format found its best outing in the May 16, 2009 season finale hosted by Will Ferrell. Darrell Hammond's Connery, Norm Macdonald's Turd Ferguson and Tom Hanks playing himself as a man who keeps getting stuck in things share one board. The category reads Catch These Men, and Connery reads it aloud as something else entirely. Ferrell's Trebek has stopped hosting and started grieving.

Aired December 13, 1975, the seventh episode of the first season, with Richard Pryor hosting and Gil Scott-Heron on music. Chevy Chase's interviewer escalates a job screening into slurs, and Pryor answers each one flatter and quieter until he lands on dead honky and simply looks at him. Sources still disagree over the writing credit, naming Paul Mooney and Chase both. Nothing since has been this dangerous.

Written by Will Ferrell and aired April 8, 2000, with Christopher Walken hosting and Christina Aguilera on music, the Blue Oyster Cult studio bit works because Walken refuses to play any of it big. He announces that he has a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell, in the voice of a man reading a weather report. Consensus number one, parked at three deliberately.

Bob Odenkirk built the character at Second City, and Chris Farley detonated it on May 8, 1993, with Christina Applegate hosting. The premise is thin, a motivational speaker berating two teenagers, and the commitment is everything. He is divorced and he lives in a van down by the river, and then he hauls David Spade off the couch and goes straight through the coffee table.

Michael Che and Bryan Tucker wrote it, and it went out October 22, 2016, weeks before the election, with Hanks hosting and Lady Gaga on music. Doug, in a red cap, keeps agreeing with Kenan Thompson's Darnell Hayes about scratch-offs and skinny women. Then the next category comes up as Lives That Matter, the room goes silent, and Darnell says it was good while it lasted.

Kate McKinnon's Ms. Rafferty tells an abduction story that keeps getting worse for her and funnier for everyone else. Broadcast December 5, 2015, with Ryan Gosling hosting and Leon Bridges on music, it is the rare piece where the host is useless by the second answer and the thing improves. Cecily Strong reports light and warmth; Rafferty reports being full Porky Piggin' it in a drafty dome.

Jim Downey's script for the October 27, 1990 episode hosted by Patrick Swayze, with Mariah Carey on music, has been called mean by Chris Rock ever since, and Bob Odenkirk went further than that. The criticism is fair and the piece survives it, because Farley dancing to Loverboy's Working for the Weekend is genuinely precise footwork nobody credits him for. Swayze never once breaks.

Rachel Dratch and Paula Pell wrote it, and on May 1, 2004, with Lindsay Lohan hosting and Usher on music, the cast lost control completely. A wah-wah sting nobody had heard in dress rehearsal lands after the feline AIDS line, Dratch flubs, and Fallon goes first. What holds it together is Dratch continuing to play the scene straight while the table around her disintegrates.

Julio Torres wrote the piece for the September 30, 2017 season 43 premiere, hosted by Ryan Gosling, and built it like a thriller that has mislaid its crime. Gosling's Steven cannot accept that a designer set the Avatar logo in a default font and went home. His therapist asks whether he means that movie from nine years ago, and the flatness of the question is the joke.

A Digital Short, and the one that rewired how the show reached people: after December 17, 2005, with Jack Black hosting and Neil Young on music, SNL clips lived online whether NBC wanted that or not. Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap about Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and MapQuest with total conviction. Site traffic rose 83 percent that week. Mr. Pibb and Red Vines remains the best couplet.

December 12, 1998, Alec Baldwin hosting: Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon murmur through a public-radio cooking show while Baldwin's Pete Schweddy explains his holiday specialty. Everything rests on two hosts who cannot hear a double entendre, and on the line that no one can resist Pete's Schweddy balls, delivered in the cadence of a pledge drive. Baldwin plays the man as sincerely, ruinously kind.

Prefilmed rather than performed live, and broadcast December 15, 1984, with Eddie Murphy returning to host after leaving the cast and The Honeydrippers on music. Andy Breckman's script sends Murphy undercover in makeup to learn what white people do alone, and the answer is that they hand each other things for nothing. At the newsstand the clerk waves off his money: go ahead, take it.

Mikey Day, Bobby Moynihan and Streeter Seidell wrote it for the same October 22, 2016 episode as Black Jeopardy, which is an absurd night of work for one show. Nonsense delivered with total confidence is the whole method: two dancing skeletons turn up on 73 of the elevator's 100 floors, and every time the doors open he shouts any questions. Nobody understands him and that is the point.

Eight years in a drawer: John Mulaney and Colin Jost wrote it for a 2010 episode hosted by Zach Galifianakis and it died at the table read. It finally aired April 14, 2018, with Mulaney hosting, on a set the show clearly paid real money for. Kenan Thompson rises from the tank in costume and the fight over one man's order proceeds entirely in Les Miserables numbers.

Seth Meyers wrote the cold open that started the 34th season on September 13, 2008, with Michael Phelps hosting weeks after Beijing. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler take adjacent podiums and let the two impressions do opposite jobs: Fey's Palin says she can see Russia from her house, sunny and untroubled, while Poehler's Clinton corrodes beside her until the smile comes apart.

Directed by Dave McCary and written by Julio Torres, the toy commercial for sensitive sons aired December 3, 2016, with Emma Stone hosting and Shawn Mendes on music. The joke lives in the product copy rather than the performances: the well ships with a balcony and a shattered mirror. Cecily Strong's voiceover offers the thing as an alternative to buying him Barbie dolls.

Border case, and flagged as one: a desk segment rather than a sketch in the strict sense. Bill Hader and John Mulaney built the character together, and Mulaney rewrote the cue cards after dress so Hader met the jokes cold. October 20, 2012, Bruno Mars hosting, Seth Meyers anchoring. Hader hides behind his hands at Sidney Applebaum, the Jewish Dracula, and the collapse is the payoff.

April 17, 1976, and the host is Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford's actual press secretary, with the Patti Smith Group on music. Dan Aykroyd sells a blender by dropping a whole fish into it, in the cadence of a man who has done a thousand of these. He promises you'll never have to scale, cut or gut again, and then the result is poured out and swallowed on camera.