Saturday Night You: The Best of Mario Lanza

February 9th, 2002

The Best of Mario Lanza

With "Saturday Night Live" on hiatus for Winter Olympics broadcasting, we at Saturday Night You didn't want to let the site (or ourselves) sit idle for three weeks. Instead, we decided to begin a series of tributes to our fan sketch writers, in an attempt to acknowledge their greatest writing achievements, as well as to learn the sick, twisted inspirations behind these sketches.

Spelling Bee: 6/16/01
Comments: This sketch is basically one big Will Ferrell tribute. I made a webpage last year called Will Ferrell's Greatest Moments on SNL, and I am one of his biggest fans. I usually go out of my way NOT to write sketches for Will, since it is so easy to make him funny, but this is the one time I went out of my way to write in the tradition of Will Ferrell yelling. So I decided to make him a heckler. Something where it would be in character for him to randomly yell things. I used to be a big time abusive heckler at high school and college basketball games, so I know what kind of stuff people yell. Of course, I had to set it somewhere inappropriate, to make it funny. I debated doing it at church, at a funeral, or at the Special Olympics. The Special Olympics would have been funny, but in keeping with good taste, I set it at a spelling bee for little kids. When the hecklers yell "Noonan!" at one kid, that's a reference to Caddyshack. And all the cities where the kids are from are cities that I have been to on vacation or have lived in.
Crack That Nut!: 8/11/01
Comments: This was my assault on political correctness. I hate PC, and go out of my way to use as many non-PC terms as posible in my sketches. Words like "retard," "whore" and "midget" show up many times. One term that was once acceptable, but is now banned, is the word "crazy." You just aren't supposed to use it. So of course, I had to use it as many times as possible in one sketch, along with its variants "insane" and "nuts." I wanted to write a game show for crazy people. My original idea was to have Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Insane Week, and only have insane people play the game. But I hate recurring sketches, and WWTBAM has been done to death. I debated writing Insane Hollywood Squares or Insane Wheel of Fortune, but those were too predictable. So I just invented a game show where you try to match answers with a nut. I just kind of made up the rules as I went along, and I think it came out pretty funny. I intended on using Mariah Carey all along, because she is a raving loon in real life. The character of Balthazar the insane wizard also showed up in my Dungeons & Dragons sketch, because he was fun to write. Oh and contestant "Scott Lange" is a real friend of mine from Atlanta. I may write a sequal to this sketch someday, because it is fun to brainstorm possible mental illnesses.
McDonaldLand Election: 8/25/01
Comments: This is my favorite of all my sketches. I don't even know if they still have them, but when I was growing up, McDonald's had all these characters that supposedly lived in "McDonaldLand." My favorite was Mayor McCheese, because I always wondered how the hell he got elected, and what platform he ran on? Was there ever a challenger? That was the premise behind this sketch... to take something pure and good like McDonaldland and give it all sorts of problems, like serial rape, rampant crime, and an overlord clown running everything behind the scenes. I wanted to make it a nasty campaign, with lots of angry accusations between the two sides. I had an idea once to have an Ultimate Street Fighting tournament, with only fast food mascots, and I worked that into this sketch, with Ronald McDonald fighting Phil O'Fish. Ronald's line "I will spin-kick you in the throat!" is one I wanted to use for months. I just had to find the right place and sketch to use it. And Will Ferrell was born to play an angry Ronald McDonald. There's lots of little inside jokes in this one, like how Mayor McCheese adds "Mc" before a lot of words, and an implication that Ronald McDonald killed Colonel Sanders of KFC fame. The sketch is a little long, but I loved writing it and I don't think there's anything I would have cut out. Especially the fact that Grimace is a fat, bloated junkie in real life.
The Road to Wimbledon: 11/03/01
Comments: Every guy in America knows who Anna Kournikova is. I wanted to write a sketch where tennis announcers talk about her the same way that normal guys talk about her. This one is pretty raunchy, but I swear this is the way that guys actually talk when you women aren't around. I probably crossed the line when I had Costas splooge in his pants, but you gotta push the limits sometime. The line "She looks like Bea Arthur's retarded daughter" cracked me up when I wrote it and still does when I read it now. Martina Navritalova is a famous tennis star and lesbian in real life, so you could see that joke coming a mile away. It's fun to write for Dennis Miller, because you can use obscure references to the movie Weird Science. And Olga Uffbrot is NOT a real tennis player. I didn't have the heart to write about how ugly a real tennis player is, so I just made one up.
Leave it to Beaver: 01/19/02
Comments: This is based on an old joke: Q:"What's the most erotic thing ever said on TV?" A:"Ward, you were a little rough on the Beaver last night." I just expanded that into a sketch. I love taking things that are pure and innocent and defiling them with dirty jokes. Leave it to Beaver was pretty easy to do. I just brainstormed as many vagina slang terms as I could, which is pretty easy to do on the internet. Some of them I just made up. See if you can guess which ones. This one is pretty dirty too, I hope my grandma doesn't read it. I wrote the part of Chip Chambers specifically for Jack Black. I also got to use the word "swell" as many times as possible, which is always fun. The last line by Ward, "The Ward-dog is gonna get him some of that fine honey pot" is based on an inside joke between me and my brother, where you add "-dog" to the end of any name and try to make it sound cool.
Elmo Roast: 11/17/01
Comments: I get mail and comments about a lot of sketches, but the Elmo Roast has had the biggest response. I think it's pretty clearly the funniest one I have written. It's also by far the dirtiest, which is pretty impressive compared to the Rain Man, Wimbledon and Beaver ones. On Comedy Central, they had those celebrity roasts of Drew Carey, Jerry Stiller, etc., and I am always amazed at how DIRTY those shows are. It's amazing how much they can show on TV now. Because even if you bleep the words, you still know what they are saying. So I decided to write my own celebrity roast, and make it as inappropriate as possible. I thought, what would be funny about the roast? And I decided I had to do one for a kids icon, on a TV channel that kids would watch it. I debated using Barney, Big Bird, Mister Rogers and the Teletubbies. But I decided on using Elmo because he is a puppet, and you can make lots of "hand up your ass" jokes about a puppet. That's where the Elton John joke came in. I tried really hard to make the celebrity parts sound like the actual celebrity would say that, and I think I did a good job with Norm MacDonald and Chris Rock. In fact, I think the Rock section sounds EXACTLY like he talks in his stand up act. My brother came up with the line about eating pork for Chris Rock, and it worked well. Drew Carey would just make a sex joke, and Triumph would just be as abusive as possible. I had a part written for Ellen DeGeneres (Rachel Dratch) as well, but had to cut it for space reasons. I still think this sketch is really funny. I wonder if SNL could get away with the "cock" line. I bet they could, if it runs late enough. The line "He looks like a shaved Kate Winslet" still makes me laugh. And it is well known that I can't stand Drew Barrymore or Tom Green, so it was a given that I would throw in a joke at their expense.
AFI Top 100 Films: 7/28/01
Comments: This was a simple one. The only problem is that if you don't know what the Goonies is, or know who Corey Feldman is, you won't get the jokes. I always hate those stuffy movie "Best of" lists, because the movies that the critics like are never the same ones that the public likes. So I thought, what if one of the AFI (American Film Institute) judges was holding out for a movie that no one else liked. I picked the Goonies because I like it, and because it has a goofy sounding title. By the way, "Clarke Devereaux" was the name of Corey Feldman's character in the Goonies. I just thought it would be funny if one guy would hold out for a film other than Citizen Kane, especially if he were a dick about it. The word "jagoff" makes an appearance here, and it is one of my favorite insult words. The subplot at the end about the guy being obsessed with Corey Feldman came out of nowhere. I didn't expect it to end that way, it just kind of developed in that direction. Corey Feldman is just a funny punchline, and has made a lot of memorable and goofy films, so it worked and I kept it in. The line "My life for you!!!!" is a reference to the Stephen King book THE STAND (my favorite book of all time). And let it be known that any movie without pirates, by definition, sucks.
Terminator 3: SNL: 7/28/01
Comments: This was written for our Arnold Schwarzenegger show. I wanted to do a Terminator parody, and I came up with this pretty complex sketch. This one took some thinking, because I had to work out the whole space-time continuum debate, as well as throwing as many SNL inside jokes in that I could. I have no idea why Tracy Morgan is on SNL, so this explanation was as good as any. Note that I very rarely use Tracy Morgan in a sketch I write, because I don't like him. By the way, there's no way Lorne Michaels could play this sketch in real life. He is a terrible actor and this would be way too many lines for him. The beginning and ending of the sketch are word for word off the real Terminator 2 movie, I watched it to make sure. Fans of the early history of SNL will probably like this one, for all the inside jokes. And Dan Aykroyd did indeed lose all artistic credibility when he appeared in Caddyshack 2.
Dungeons & Dragons Rehab: 6/30/01
Comments: I can proudly say that I was a D&D nerd growing up. I'm still a nerd, there's just no D&D anymore. If you don't know Dungeons & Dragons lingo and terminology, you probably won't get this sketch. It's got a pretty specific audience. But I got a lot of positive feedback about this one from those who know what I was talking about. My friend Jeff Forst and I used to have a running joke at work about how a D&D nerd would try to pick up a girl, "Hi baby, what's your THAC0?" so I used that here. 2d4 means to roll 2 4-sided dice. 18 charisma is the best you can get (scale of 3-18), so Francis was pretty charming. And a doppelganger is an old German form of shapeshifter, those show up in literature from time to time. Balthazar was also in my CRACK THAT NUT sketch. True D&D nerds will know that you can't dispel a shapeshifter, and "negating" doesn't mean anything that I know of. I just made that up. Ok, I will shut up now :)
Rain Man Makes A Porn Film: 6/16/01
Comments: I thought this one would get a better response, but apparently a lot of people haven't seen the movie Rain Man. It won Best Picture back in 1988, go rent it! Raymond Babbitt is an autistic savant, who has to follow certain rituals and procedures, or he freaks out. He starts reciting "Who's on First" to himself when he is losing control. A lot of times I think of a punchline, and write a sketch backwards, from the punchline to the start. That happened here. I had the line "Wrong hole, that's definitely the wrong hole" in mind and I wrote the whole sketch just to get Raymond to say that line. The porn star "Sapphire" is a reference to an old episode of the TV show, Get a Life, which featured a male model by the same name. And it was fun writing all the bad porn puns, like seamen and going down on the ship. If you know the movie Rain Man, this is a pretty funny sketch. A lot of the dialogue is lifted right from the film. If you don't know the movie, the sketch makes no sense. Go watch the movie!
The Last Karate Kid: 12/1/01
Comments: The Karate Kid is one of my two favorite films of all time (along with the Bad News Bears.) I have used numerous Karate Kid references in sketches (especially the Hawkman one and the Spelling Bee one) but this is the first direct tribute I wrote to the film. I always wondered what Mr. Miyagi did after his relationship with Daniel-san ended, so that's how this sketch came about. I wanted to make it as dark and morbid as possible, and the line where Miyagi wants to take his own life is about as dark as it gets. Like the Rain Man one, this started as one punchline, and I worked towards getting the characters to that point in the sketch. In this case, the line I thought was funny was "Get the hell off Miyagi's lawn," so I wrote with that eventual line in mind. "Ken Bollens" is a real friend of my brother who worships the film. Like the Rain Man one, this sketch is pretty specific to knowing one film. But if you know the Karate Kid, this one is pretty good. A lot of inside jokes to the film, and the scene with Miyagi whacking Ken with the cane fits right in. Once again, go see the movie if you haven't!
Don't Upset Grandma!: 10/13/01
Comments: This idea was simple. Have a sick and frail old lady in the hospital, and have a dysfunctional family unload all their problems in front of her. All while the angry father yells at them NOT TO UPSET GRANDMA! I think family dysfunction is funny, and really easy to write. In a way, this is another Ferrell tribute, just because he is so easy to cast as an angry person. I just brainstormed to think of all the reasons a family would have to fight, and used them all. I thought I went a little over the line when grandma threw her bedpan at the son, but everyone liked that part, so I kept it in. The line "Grandma got a knife, grandma gonna cut you" was a throwaway filler line, but I got a lot of comments about that line being funny. This is the nicest I have ever treated Drew Barrymore in a sketch, I was in a nice mood that day. The line "Lucifer himself will wince when he sees what I do to you!" is kind of a reference to the movie TOMMY BOY. I'm sure I will write another dysfunctional sketch in the future again, they are a blast to think up.