Was Will Ferrell’s first season on SNL a bomb or a breakthrough?
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Twenty-five years ago today, Saturday Night Live introduced America to what was almost an entirely new cast of Not Ready For Prime Time Players. Stagnation and declining ratings (not to mention being painfully unfunny for much of the time) had almost doomed SNL the previous season, and Lorne Michaels (who considers that 20th season the closest he’s ever come to being fired) responded to the latest close call with cancellation by letting go of the majority of the cast, including some now considered iconic, like Adam Sandler and Chris Farley.
In their place, the sketch-comedy Svengali presented the world an assemblage of brand-new talent. Cheri Oteri, Darrell Hammond, David Koechner, Nancy Walls, Jim Breuer, and more were among the new faces of the show, and Molly Shannon, previously only a featured player, was upgraded to full cast member status. It was the biggest overhaul of onscreen performers since the show’s 1985 nadir season, and the group was eager to prove its comedic chops. But let’s be honest: When the history books recall that 21st season, it will mostly be known for introducing Will Ferrell to the world. That may seem like an obvious coup in retrospect, but at the time, things weren’t so cut and dried. In fact, the entire season is remembered in very different ways, depending on how you look at it. A.V. Club staffers Alex McLevy and Erik Adams debate the quality of this noteworthy season—and have some pretty significant disagreements.
Alex McLevy: Look, Erik, let’s get the obvious out of the way: No one disputes that Will Ferrell is one of the best SNL cast members in history. Along with Darrell Hammond and Molly Shannon, the 21st season of SNL brought the series some of its most talented performers in years, people who would go on to shape the comedic style of the late-night show in memorable ways. And behind the scenes, the change was just as momentous—this was the season that saw Adam McKay and Paula Pell join the writing staff, after all. McKay is arguably the biggest creative voice behind the subsequent half-decade of the show, including a two-season stint as head writer. These were enormously skilled comedians just coming into the zenith of their powers (it’s surprising to learn that McKay and the perpetually middle-aged-seeming Ferrell weren’t even 30 yet when they started), and they helped bring about precisely the kind of creative rebirth Michaels had hoped for.
Eventually, anyways. Because honestly? That season kind of sucked.
At least, the first half of it sure did. As a kid whose obsession with comedy rivaled your own (didn’t you memorize facts about comedians as a boy, or something?), I remember excitedly tuning in to the season premiere, thinking I was watching history in the making. A brand-new cast! What wonders would they unveil? What classic new characters would they introduce to the world? Which sketches would I memorize off the VHS tape I used to record the episode, in order to show up at school Monday morning and spout off quotes to my classmates, because I oh-so-naively thought that was a cool thing to do? My mind raced. After the cold open (O.J. trial, of course) and a brand-new credits sequence, I was greeted with an opening monologue of Mariel Hemingway passionately kissing the new women cast members as a “joke.” Even as a kid, it seemed weirdly gay-panic-heavy. No matter; I shrugged it off, and eagerly focused on the first live sketch of the night.
It may seem now like an early taste of Ferrell’s signature straddling of the line between wildly over-the-top and casually understated, but as the audience reaction demonstrates, it just didn’t seem very funny. There were maybe three laughs there, tops. And Ferrell’s overbearing hectoring suffused the episode. By the end, I didn’t even bother memorizing any sketches—there was nothing worth repeating. I was far from alone in finding it underwhelming: Entertainment Weekly voted Ferrell the “most annoying newcomer” and called out his performance as “intolerable.” They were right, at the time.
That continued through the entire first half of the season. Flop sweat seemed to drench every other sketch, performers often staring directly and hungrily at the audience as though begging them to laugh. The cheerleaders routine, a recurring sketch with Ferrell and Oteri now considered a beloved staple of the era, annoyed the living shit out of me. You know what’s not funny? A pair of overgrown cheerleaders making up clumsy routines with shouty, uninspired chants.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This season began with almost nothing to suggest the show was going to improve. Yet apparently I, and the others who lambasted it at the time, are in the wrong. Erik?
Erik Adams: “Get Off The Shed,” unfunny? This quintessential display of Will Ferrell’s ability to jackknife between milquetoast pleasantries and searing rage? The bit that got him a laugh during an SNL audition, notoriously one of the toughest rooms in comedy? Sure, Hemingway never quite finds the register her scene mates are playing in (something that was less of a problem when the concept was revived for Christine Baranski’s episode later in the season), but as far as introductions to one of the show’s defining voices go, this is about as direct as John Belushi cocking an eyebrow, miming a heart attack, and pinwheeling to the floor. To quote a different, shouty character who was still in Ferrell’s future at this point: I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
I also feel like I should back up a bit to illuminate the divergent paths that delivered us to these sketches, episodes, and new cast members. In the fall of 1995, I was a few years off from my peak SNL-viewing years—I was still young enough that watching it on Saturday nights (live) was something I only got to do as an occasional treat. But I was still following the show to a certain extent, even if that just meant learning about its uptick in quality from the same publications that, one year prior, had their knives drawn as the Bad Boys era came to its ignominious end. (I don’t know if I’m the youthful trivia-memorizer you’re thinking of, Alex, but I was reading more showbiz news than the average preteen.) I don’t think I actually got my first look at the repertory players responsible for those reversed fortunes until 1996’s Rosie O’Donnell-hosted Christmas episode, by which time the Spartan Cheerleaders, Mary Katherine Gallagher, and The Roxbury Guys—season-21 introductions, one and all—had become near-weekly fixtures on the show.
The quality of those recurring sketches is debatable (and I’m sure just such a debate is about to ensue), but their popularity was crucial to keeping Saturday Night Live afloat in the wake of its near-cancellation the previous spring and MADtv’s entree into the weekend late-night arena that October. They might not have passed your quotability test, Alex, but the cheerleaders scored with the SNL audience in a manner unseen since the heyday of “Wayne’s World.” And when I was finally able to catch up with season 21 in cable reruns, it turned out that the characters with the biggest merchandising and spin-off-movie potential weren’t even the funniest parts of these episodes. Not to trifle with you and the Hal Boedeker column linked above, but I’ve always loved the way Tim Meadows applies his smiling straight man routine to the cold open with O.J. Simpson’s confession-by-Telestrator. That episode, which aired four days after Simpson was found not guilty of killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, also features one of Norm Macdonald’s all-time great Weekend Update openers: “It’s finally official: Murder is legal in the state of California.”
But those are timely zingers. Comb through the first part of the season, and you’ll find enduring commercial parodies like “Grayson Moorhead Securities,” “Petchow Rat Poison,” and “Old Glory Insurance.”Are you really trying to tell me that this season “kind of sucked” when it has Sam Waterston earnestly warning elderly viewers about the imminent threat of robot attack? If so, I implore you to revisit the David Alan Grier episode from a few weeks later, which gave us “Wake Up And Smile,” an unhinged morning-show send-up whose Lord Of The Flies meltdown is temporarily paused so Jim Breuer can play the star of a sitcom who “can’t get those pots put away.”
The rebirth you alluded to is written all over these sketches—is it just being clouded by your memories of “Spade In America,” the season’s transitional sop to the rowdier, snarkier times that preceded it?
AM: I think we’re about to wade directly into the problem with disagreeing about the quality of season 21—two problems, actually: One is that, should we choose, we can both happily cherry-pick examples of sketches to support our respective positions. You want to throw the admittedly excellent “Old Glory Insurance” at me as proof of how awesome the season was? I will gladly retort with another commercial parody from that exact same episode. “Cydney” finds the guest host (Melrose Place’s Laura Leighton) stopping the black-and-white commercial they’re filming to complain about the “midget” staring at her. Cut to: all the male cast members on their knees, playing little people, for an extended bit where the entire “joke” is that it’s… funny to watch little people be insulted? This is dire stuff, Erik, so bad that it seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, but I have the transcript if you need proof it happened. In the meantime, here’s another godawful sketch indicative of the first half of that season, from the Quentin Tarantino episode:
But cherry-picked examples aside, the second problem is demonstrated by our differing positions on “Get Off The Shed”: Sometimes, we’re going to see the exact same thing and it’ll generate two very different reactions. Part of the issue with that sketch may have to do with the timing of when it appeared on the show; this is the kind of sketch that would probably work once Ferrell’s distinctive comic persona had been better established. The fact is, once you’re familiar with an SNL performer and have honed in on their particular sensibility, things can become funny that weren’t when they were being shouted at you by what was then still effectively a stranger. Hence the “most annoying new cast member” label that would slowly dissolve as the season progressed—once audiences could get on Ferrell’s uniquely warped wavelength, it became clear just how damn funny he was. (“Wake Up And Smile” was a good pull, I grant you.)
But since you mentioned the cheerleaders, let’s talk about those damn Spartan Cheerleaders (Ferrell and Oteri). Your claim that they helped keep the show afloat during this time—and that they “scored with the SNL audience”—doesn’t negate the fact that it’s only a mildly funny premise to begin with, and it got stretched into painful oblivion through the endless rehashed iterations that followed. “Hey, 10 million late-night TV viewers can’t be wrong!” is untrue; they can be, and are, quite wrong. If anyone wants to dispute that, feel free to sit through the following, where the studio audience laughs so uproariously at the randomness of the flailing performance, I’m half-convinced it’s a cheerleader-induced version of Stockholm Syndrome.
And that endless recycling of throwaway trifles—the Roxbury Guys aren’t far behind, to name but one—is a big part of the problem. There was just so much dross surrounding the gold. True, you could level that accusation at any season of Saturday Night Live, but the rose-tinted glasses through which this particular season is now viewed make me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Let’s go ahead and grant a couple of your points: Norm Macdonald is bulletproof. The season eventually found its footing. And there were some great commercial parodies. But can you honestly say you don’t find the recycling of increasingly unfunny bits across the season a bit excessive, even by SNL standards?
Erik Adams: You’re placing a lot of strain on that caveat: This is Saturday Night Live we’re talking about, and if a sketch gets laughs one week, odds are it’s going to book several return trips to Studio 8H. And while the show’s reputation is (somewhat incorrectly) staked to a sense of surprise and spontaneity, it was aiming for something viewers could rely on in season 21. “When executive producer Lorne Michaels set out to form a new cast before the current season got underway,” says one contemporary Chicago Tribune report, “one of his missions was to get people who could create characters the public could ‘get into’ as they did in the good old days.” After the hole the preceding season dug, coming up with any concept that people wanted to see a second time must’ve felt like the ultimate victory. And reading what was written about SNL in at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996, I’ve been struck by just how many of the recurring segments are credited with that victory.
And it doesn’t stop with cheerleaders Craig and Ariana, who were as divisive then as they are now—that aforementioned Tribune article dubs Craig and Ariana’s popularity “one of the mysteries of this television season” shortly after marveling at Mary Katherine Gallagher and Molly Shannon’s seeming invulnerability while playing her. Tom Shales, who’d been tracing SNL’s ups and downs from the very beginning, praised Darrell Hammond’s Ted Koppel and Bill Clinton impressions in a broadcast-season-in-review column. Before this conversation, I’d kind of forgotten about obsequious, powdered-wig fops Lucien Callow (Mark McKinney) and Fagan (David Koechner), but they received their share of fawning in the press, too—not bad for the the closest thing to a Kids In The Hall sketch McKinney ever got on the show (the off-model Chicken Lady sketch that closed the Hemingway episode doesn’t count).
This was SNL in survival mode. And while it might read as desperation to you, Alex, when I see the perspiration in those cheerleader sketches, or watch Shannon careening through the St. Monica’s scenery, it comes across as a group of performers not taking their spotlight for granted. Again, from that Tribune article:
Ferrell says the show’s writers have told him that the tightly choreographed cheerleader bit is “the type of piece that just wouldn’t have happened last year, because no one would have spent that much time getting that sort of thing down.”
With three new cast members coming from The Groundlings (Ferrell, Oteri, and mid-season addition Chris Kattan), two from The Second City (Koechner and Nancy Carell), and two from stand-up (Hammond and Jim Breuer), there’s an interesting mix of live comedy styles at play in these episodes, representing different approaches to fighting for an audience’s attention and affection. I think that combined exertion was necessary for getting noticed by viewers who’d turned their backs on SNL; it’s little wonder that the big, brassy personas favored by the Groundlings alumni—accustomed to honing characters in the same on- and off-stage tradition that produced Pee-wee Herman; Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark; and Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar—were the ones that broke out. (It’s here I should note that January 20, 1996 marked the first time the words “Bill Brasky” were ever bellowed on air.) Season 21 has Big Theater Kid Energy, and I love it for that.
That energy found its ideal match—and its fitting payoff—in season finale host Jim Carrey. Look at it this way: At the beginning of the season, the pool of SNL guests had been reduced to returning cast members (Chevy Chase and Phil Hartman), returning hosts (Madeline Kahn, Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin), or stars of other NBC shows (David Schwimmer, Anthony Edwards). Things had turned around so much for SNL over the course of 20 episodes that by May of 1996, it had regained the cachet to book the biggest name going in big-screen comedy. Watching the episode now, it’s so clear why this iteration of SNL hit when it did: Ferrell was destined to succeed Carrey at the multiplex, but he, Shannon, Oteri, and Kattan were doing late-night sketch comedy for a post-Ace Ventura world. Watch how readily the host plugs into the cheerleaders and Roxbury sketches (the latter of which might not have graduated to recurring status without his participation), or how much his high-pitched, very In Living Color Jacuzzi lifeguard matches season-21 oddballs like the vocationally hopscotching T-Bones (Koechner) or Winston Graff (Meadows), the jazz pianist who can’t stop spouting other people’s catchphrases during a recording session. I’d compare this season to the string of hits that had boosted Carrey to the $20 million Cable Guy payday he clowns on during the monologue: It wasn’t all Dumb And Dumbers (or “Wake Up And Smile”s), but it made an impression way back when, it’s fun to revisit now, and it set the stage for the more varied, interesting, and ambitious work that followed.
AM: I’m glad we’re ending in agreement. I’ve said this before, but the transition from the Bad Boys era to this big-and-broad time of outsized characters (to match the national Ace Ventura mood, as you rightly note) is very much in keeping with the cultural transitions of the time, as the slacker-and-sarcasm dominance of the grunge era gave way to a brighter, sillier—and yes, often cornier—pop culture. (Is it a coincidence that season finale musical guest Soundgarden broke up less than a year later?) (Yes.) That shifting public attitude was becoming more willing to go along with such lightheartedness without feeling the need to simultaneously mock it for being so frivolous—the way that, say, Adam Sandler’s characters often seemed to contain an element of too-cool-for-this-nonsense detachment, scorning the idiocy of their very existence. And by the back half of season 21, SNL’s new players had managed to hone in on a mentality and playfulness that stopped seeming so frantic, and became ebullient instead. It is, as you say, fun to revisit now.
So let us celebrate our similarities, Erik, and not belabor our differences. We may have started out in opposing camps (sorry, kids who won’t get off the shed, I’ll never like you), but we wind up in the same place—giggling at Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell demonstrating why they were two of the most compelling names in comedy. And marveling at how SNL, time and again, keeps bouncing back.
98 Comments
And not one mention of Mr. Peepers, you bastards.https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/mr-peepers-father/n11322
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fuck, what are you trying to do? You think Kattan won’t come running right now if he thinks someone wants to so much as think about Mr. Peepers??
I’m trying to bring about the apocalypse and Chris Kattan will lead the Four Horsemen!
Get Off the Shed actually has something that’s kinda rare in SNL sketches where it takes its time getting to the joke. There’s a LOT of dialogue that’s just them being affluent suburbanites before it sinks in that the Shed is what this is really all about, and that’s a pretty slow burn for SNL. I think that makes it work.
That’s a solid point, usually SNL sketches (especially in that era, IIRC) get to the joke in the first 20 seconds and then just hammer you with it over and over.That said, Get Off the Shed feels like a watered-down Chris Farley bit to me. A more experienced Ferrell might make that work a little better, but it just kind of falls flat for me.
I agree, but I feel like any vintage of Ferrell would sell “As you can tell, someone didn’t forget to take their stupid pills this morning!” in a totally jocular suburban way that Farley couldn’t have, which is so much of what makes that sketch work.Farley is just so off-the-block hilarious that there’s no way he could pass for your neighbor who seems normal enough to come over to their house for dinner only to witness them snap and go absolutely crazy.It’s Ferrell’s ability to play in that tension between straitlaced and psychotic that also makes Mugatu and “Stepbrothers” work. But now that I think of it, a more mature Ferrell, able to snap more quickly and forcefully between golf talk and threatening his kids, would have been overkill for that sketch.
That’s more than fair, and I wholeheartedly agree about his ability to play in that tension. I was actually thinking, when I rewatched the sketch before making my comment, that Ferrell with his current level of experience would probably get a lot more out of it. I think that’s a big part of why my favorite performance of his was as Bob Oblong — it’s not as drastic of a switch, but half the time he’s basically the classic ‘Leave it to Beaver’ dad and the other half of the time he’s that dad decked out in bondage gear and casually describing the weirdest possible stuff and he can sell that.
This gets refined into some classic sketches, especially one where he threatens Pierce Brosnan (I think?) that he will smack him in the nuts with a car antenna. Which still makes me laugh.
That same episode, I thought the “give me an excuse to get off the phone” sketch was funnier, and the better intro-to-Will-Ferrell as far as my memory of his first episode goes.
To the article’s point, it also helped to establish Ferrell’s unpredictability within a sketch to the point you knew what was coming in this (superior) sketch involving poor Brandon:
I was in my college dorm lounge watching this episode kinda half paying attention when the Get Off the Shed sketch came on. I couldn’t stop laughing, the loudest I had laughed at SNL in years. I turned to my best friend, beaming, to see if he got it, too (thankfully, he did). It honestly felt like discovering The Beatles, I knew then what apparently– shockingly– critics didn’t know yet: that Farrell was going to be the breakout star.
I have yet to see a performance by WF that is not excruciatingly painful to watch. Sorry. Seems that many who bomb at SNL end up in this club. That “class clown” we all knew had to find an outlet. Most didn’t. Some, like Murray, Chase, etc., etc. DID. Yeah, Dan Aykroyd too. They take up all of the air in the room.
Bomb?
(whispers) He doesn’t know what that means…
Forget it, he’s rolling.
What
If I’ve ever seen Get of the Shed, I don’t remember. I just watched it now, it’s freaking hilarious.
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I WILL DOUSE YOU IN GASOLINE AND LIGHT YOU ON FIRE LIKE THAT BUDDHIST MONK IN VIETNAM!
Yeah. I don’t know how it would have played at the time, but god it is just about as perfect as an SNL sketch can get.
They were right, and not just at the time. He’s the definition of a try-hard. He’s like a social experiment designed in a lab. “My theory is that if we just insist this person is funny, other people will begin to insist so as well.”
What Thats shame!https://onic.design
“Your son’s a witch.”
I remember finding Will Ferrell especially grating, more so than other cast members, when he debuted on SNL, but I became a fan at about the same pace as everyone else: if not by the cowbell sketch, then by Old School. His schtick has gotten a little old at this point, but Anchorman and Ricky Bobby were really, really funny at the time (I hesitate to rewatch anything these days).
Will Ferrell is generally the least funny thing involved in a Will Ferrell project.
Ive often argue he is better as a supporting role or as a costar than the lead. What makes Anchorman work, imo, is that EVERYBODY commits. Everybody is on similar wavelengths of lunacy. Whereas semipro is ferrell being in a completely different movie than everybody else. He needs a partner(s) who can match and combat him. That’s why stepbrothers is so good. Reilly has his own energy, it’s not just the will Ferrell show.
And of course Richard Jenkins is the real star of that movie. When he tells the boys Steenburgen and he are getting divorced, then cuts her off when she tries to reassure them it’s not their fault (“what are you talking about? It’s entirely their fault!”) I about fell out of my seat.
God, Steenburgen and Jenkins are tremendous in their roles. Adam Scott is obviously fucking glorious too.
The Boats n Hoes dinner scene where Scott and his friends can’t believe the gift Ferrell and Reilly are giving them is just glorious. “Who’s steering the boat?!!”
Idgaf if it’s triteI love randomly shouting “it’s the fucking Catalina wine mixer!”
don’t do this
Stepbrothers is awful. the only things I found funny were the misbehaved seeing eye dog and Richard Jenkins.
Gator don’t play!
I viscerally feel the same way, but Step Brothers channels all that I normally find grating into something transcendent.
Rewatching these clips where he’s so young and lanky, I’m surprised Ferrell’s career didn’t lean more physical comedy, he really works it in the Spartans sketches (and less obviously, in More Cowbell), but his film careers are almost totally vocal comedy.
He’s always best when surrounded with other off-kilter weirdos.
I ONLY watched both of those films in the past couple years. I disliked ferrel enough I actively avoided them until some friends convinced me. Rewatch them in peace. They are delightful.
If you don’t chew Big Red then FUCK YOU.
Not everyone else. His schtick was old before it was new and has only gotten more annoying with time.
I gave Ricky Bobby a rewatch – there are actually tons of little bits of scattered gold that I forgot, even if a lot doesn’t hold up. But the biggest surprise was how thunderously STACKED the cast is. Gary Cole, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jane Lynch, Andy Richter, Molly Shannon, Jack McBrayer, Dave Koechner, Sacha Baron Cohen, Leslie Bibb, Amy Adams, and John C Reilly.
I remember finding him alternately funny and annoying early on, but he eventually won me over once the cheerleader thing died down. His Harry Caray Jr. interviewing Jeff Goldblum is still one of the funniest things ever.
I was 17 at the time and a huge SNL fan and comedy nerd. I’d been staying up to watch it live since I was 13. I remember my friends and I really enjoying the early episodes of season 21, at least partly because of how weird the show had suddenly become. Will Ferrell yelling “I am Skeletor, spawn of the hellbeast!” still sticks in my mind 25 years later, even though I can’t even remember the premise of the sketch. I think this new SNL felt like it was more in line with the stuff I’d been watching on Comedy Central and MTV, like The Kids In The Hall, MST3K, Exit 57, The Vacant Lot, The State, etc. I do think a big part of the difference between SNL seasons 21+ vs SNL seasons 12-19 is that most of the performers were improv theater actors instead of stand-up comedians. That definitely gave the new version of the show a feeling of freshness.
I may have the timing slightly off, but I think in 1995 Dana Carvey Show, Mr. Show and The State were all doing more interesting sketch comedy. I love Will Ferrell, and really liked this cast after Fallon, Fey, Parnell joined.
And the first two seasons of Mad TV were arguably better, as well.But: live, from New York City, future A list movie stars, celebrity guests, and hot musical acts? That’s the magic, that’s why it survived the dredge years.
MadTV, Kids in the Hall, In Living Color, Strangers with Candy were all better than SNL at the time.
I was one of the viewers who had stopped watching in the last few years of the “Bad Boys” era. I had little knowledge of the show’s casting decisions at that time, so I just tuned in again one time in 95-96 and saw that they had a new cast. I have warmed toward him as the years have passed, but at the time, I did find Will Ferrell very one-note, annoying, and overexposed, with lots of shouting and a side dish of homophobia. Chris Kattan and to a lesser degree Molly Shannon also got on my last nerve much of the time (oddly enough I never had the same problems with Cheri Oteri, although the Cheerleaders were incredibly irritating to me). I gravitated more toward performers like Tim Meadows and Nancy Walls (one of my favorite memories of this season is the Gail Lafferty sketches, where she plays a regular at the church bake sales who gets into vicious brawls with other pious ladies). I think I first tuned in when Madeline Kahn hosted, as I was a fan of hers from Clue…and also Teri Hatcher’s episode, which is pretty strong. When I later had a full rewatch of the season (many years later), I was, overall, impressed. There is some really shitty stuff in regards to the usual SNL problems about race and homophobia (among other things), but the writing for women and giving them a voice again was addressed quickly and forcefully (admittedly, just one type of woman, and still in a limited capacity, but this was a big leap from the dregs of 93-95 where women were lucky to even appear in a sketch), and there were a number of standout sketches in most episodes, even the weaker episodes, and it doesn’t take that long before you start getting some mostly good installments (Anthony Edwards is probably the first). The main difference with this season and what is to come (if you can track down the Tom Hanks premiere of 96-97 watch it and see what I mean) is for all the recurring pieces, they would often have dark or experimental pieces alongside them. They didn’t always work, but they were still attempted, and some (like a fake ad about a nativity scene that uses a loud, alien-like echoing wail as a “realistic” baby Jesus cry, playing 24/7 and slowly driving the family who bought it around the bend) have stuck in my head for a long time. The other big difference with that season and what is to come is David Koechner. While I can grudgingly say that the superb Ana Gasteyer was able to replace Nancy Walls (even if she never should have been replaced and they should have both stayed in the cast – not that this was Ana’s fault), none of the men hired ever really got what David brought to the show. He was capable of quieter comedy and sheer goofiness, an effortless lead and a solid support player. His Gary Macdonald (brother of Norm) character is one of the show’s most underrated, with painfully real anxiety and insecurity…soon to be replaced by ass-slapping and shouting about “da Mango.” Once he was fired (not by Lorne, but reportedly by Don Ohlmeyer), Mark McKinney is also sidelined, and with Tim Meadows entering his last few years as a player and Norm also fired, the male cast becomes worse and worse, less cohesive, with Ferrell basically carrying huge portions of most episodes on his shoulders (likely another reason he was so divisive). This decline would continue, hitting rock bottom until they hire Andy Samberg/Jason Sudeikis/Bill Hader 9 years later.
Don Ohlmeyer, what a quisling.
Jesus, Kattan. How Mango and Mr. Peepers became recurring characters is beyond me, and was IMO the perfect representation of the show’s laziness during that stretch.
To this day when we get together outdoors with other families with kids, you’re guaranteed to hear at least one “GET OFF THE SHED!” That sketch was definitely an acquired taste but it worked for me from day one. I never liked a lot of the other, more popular stuff like the cheerleaders and Mango.
Honestly, I was just so relieved that it wasn’t as bad as the 94-95 season that I enjoyed it more than I had in a long time at that point. It was obvious to me that they had lightning in a bottle with Ferrell but I thought most of the cast was pretty strong at what they did. I still didn’t last too much longer as a regular watcher of the show after that season (firing Norm really threw me off), but it still ended that era on a high note, rather than quitting watching in disgust like I was tempted to the previous season.
THE ORDER OF THE HAND WILL RULE!
Also: “Well, you know that song that says, ‘You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger’? Well, it could have also said you don’t get drunk and break into the zoo looking for rough sex.”
The morning show sketch looked like it was just going to suck until they finally let things go completely off the rails. I imagine it’s not far off what would happen IRL.
Man, the audience doesn’t even chuckle at the “Order of the Hand” bit. People in the 90s had no idea what funny meant.
Well, I was laughing at home. I remember watching it when it first aired and I thought it was brilliant.
Seeing him on SNL was the biggest reason I hated Will Ferrell for a long time. I just hated his schtick, it was tiring. It wasn’t until I saw him in Talledega Nights, and more importantly Stranger Than Fiction that turned me around on him, as he actually showed some range for once, where his previous work was, to me, pretty one note. He was quite good in Lego Movies.
This was 25 years ago today?!?
13 year old me had just come home from an REM & Radiohead concert in Hershey PA and rewound the VHS I’d recorded of the show, staying up until 4am to watch and parse what I’d just seen.
25 years ago today.
And I’m with you, Erik. “Get off the damn shed” is still genius to my close inner-circle of comedy nerd friends.
Holy crap, the Jim Carrey episode. I taped that and must have watched it at least thirty times. Among the funniest shit ever. God, so good. he and ferrel in the weight loss sketch. “I’M THE DEVIL!”“OH YEAH? SCAN ME!”
Ride the Snake
RIDE THE SNAKE
I sleep in my oven! My hair falls out in clumps! I cry when I see a tree! And I burn symbols into my housepets with a curling iron!
Nancy Walls is terribly underrated.
I agree, her imitation of newscaster Bobbie Bautista was INSANE!
Definitely the highlight of that episode.
It was pretty funny, but the highlight of the episode? Carrey’s impression of Jimmy Stewart imitating Carrey in the ‘Joe Pesci Show’ sketch begs to differ.“I’m Jim Carrey and I’ll do anything for a laugh! I need attention 24 hours a day! Look at me! Look at me! Haw-hee-haw-hee-haw!”
That was funny (for a “Joe Pesci Show” sketch), but the weight loss sketch had a weirdness and insanity it couldn’t match. Plus, that recurring bit (Breuer’s Pesci Show) itself was not a favorite of mine.
EDIT: Just realized this is in the article.
If you’d asked me yesterday “Do you remember the 1995-96 season of SNL?” I’d have said, “Nope.” But that’s just because these jokes are so linked to 1997-98 (ie, the tail end of junior high) in my memory. And while I’ve never been a huge fan of Will Ferrell, my god did his material occupy a lot of my brain when I was 13.
“Get Off the Shed” doesn’t work. I can see the version in Alex’s head, and THAT works, but not the actual sketch. It’s too down the middle on both sides; Ferrell seems to somewhat repel his guests even with his pleasant banter, and his reaction to the kids spends 90% of the sketch extremely moderate. Slow-burning the anger might work in another sketch, but not in one where the joke is the contrast with his pleasantries. There’s got to BE a contrast.If he was being actually charming with his guests while whipsawing into a rage monster screaming increasingly outlandish threats at the kids, that would’ve been funny. The joke should be in the guests and their increasing bewilderment as the emotional tone keeps jumping from extreme to extreme and they have no idea how to react.
I fully identify with the Off the Shed sketch now as a 42 yr old father of 3 boys (11, 12, 13) living a decidedly comfortable middle class life.
It is funny. I didn’t want to yell, but you made me yell at you.Plus, I was 17 yrs old when it aired and I was a less than cooperative teen with a father who had a slow burning, but not particularly long ‘wick’.
I definitely remember being disappointed by that season premiere. “Get Off The Shed” didn’t play as well as it does now, and by the time the cheerleaders came on, I was already annoyed by Will Ferrell. I must have watched at least part of the season, because I remember my dad announcing how much he couldn’t stand Cheri Oteri every time the cheerleaders came back.But I had checked out long before the Jim Carrey episode, and I think it was several years before I got back into the show. By that time Chris Kattan’s Mango and Mr. Peepers were so annoying that Ferrell seemed almost subtle in comparison.
I loved the Cheerleaders — super embarrassing cringe comedy but they totally sold the parts.
From what I understand was that Ferrell had a weird energy that helped him stay and then as male cast members dwindled he took on an expanded role. He never struck a chord with me, The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is the only movie I enjoyed and that was more due to supporting cast than anything else. He’ll never be a comedic genius to me but an acquired taste that suits some folks but he always felt one-note in a way that just wasn’t endearing. I can see where Jim Carrey and him share some basic overtones but Carrey has genuine charisma and heart to carry him through, Ferrell relies on flop sweat and increasing volume which isn’t effective beyond SNL…
Of all the Ferrell sketches from the first season, it’s Jimmy Tango’s Fat Busters that sticks with me.
Also, playing the guy who can’t make a good segue for his wife to get off the phone in the first episode.
“HONEY, THE COPS ARE HERE! QUICK, HIDE THIS BALLOON FULL OF HEROIN UP YOUR RECTUM!”
I love the spartan cheerleaders. As a kid that was 12-14 during these early Ferrell years the spartan sketches were easily the most copied sketch for assemblies and skits at school and they were still funny. The commitment to the character and silliness is still funny to me.
I’m gonna go ahead and say it: For most of the late ‘90s, MadTV was better than SNL. I think peoples’ current perceptions of it are really colored by later seasons, when it was basically just endless permutations of Michael McDonald’s “Stuart” persona. But from ‘95 to about ‘00, I would earnestly click over from Mad to SNL at 11:30, only to inevitably switch back for most of the next half hour. At midnight I’d return to SNL, as it was the only show going.As always, a big part of that weakness was simply baked into SNL’s big, bloated, 90 minute live format that has been endlessly debated and dissected elsewhere. And yes, they became especially reliant upon reoccurring characters during the late ‘90s. But that trend had been going on for quite a while. Really, ever since John Lovitz’s pathological liar became a rare bright point in the otherwise disappointing 11th season.
I really think it was about 2000, with the election and Ferrell’s Bush impression, when SNL started regaining the upper hand. Even then, I’d say MadTV and SNL were roughly even for two or three seasons, at which point MadTV began abusing the recurring character sketch crutch even worse than SNL.
ever since John Lovitz’s pathological liar Not, like the Coneheads, or Doug and Wendy Whiner, or Todd and Lisa?
Of course there were plenty repeating sketches from the very start – The Killer Bees, or Land Shark, or Samurai [fill in the blank], or Nick the Lounge Singer, or the Olympia Cafe. With regard to the first, the cast members more or less detested it because the costumes were uncomfortable, and they thought it was a dumb joke with limited potential. But it was the first thing to connect with audiences, so Lorne had them do more.But, if you look at those early repeaters, there actually aren’t that many of them – they’d do like, two or three more. Coneheads might have been a bit higher than that. And they’d be sort of confined within a season or two. Pathological liar is the first sketch I can think of where they repeated on a semi-regular basis (as in every other week, or maybe two weeks in succession) over multiple seasons (and cast changes). “Church Chat” would be another.
I don’t know how many times the Coneheads appeared, but well-known characters like the wild and crazy Festrunk Brothers were only on four times. There’s no denying later-season SNL has abused the hell out of the recurring character concept.
God, that season was dire. Lovitz really was the only bright spot, and even then they made him lean so heavily on the Tommy Flanagan character that I really started to get sick of him. I much more enjoyed him as Evelyn Quince in “Tales of Ribaldry,” and my favorite Annoying Man. “You don’t have to yell.”
I do sort of have a soft spot for “Master Thespian,” as well as his depiction of the Devil. Of course, he wouldn’t hit his stride until the arrival of Phil Hartman the following year. Now there was a comedy team for the ages.
Even though I started watching in the show’s third season, the late ‘80s Phil Hartman – Jan Hooks – Mike Myers cast was “my” cast, the shows I watched in high school and shaped my comedic sensibilities. So when they all left and I was left with Spade – Sandler – Farley, I slowly lost interest in a show that I thought had gotten really juvenile. I don’t remember watching the first half of the ‘95 season until people started bringing up the Cheerleaders sketch to me, and I tuned in to watch. I remember Oteri was really the performer that popped out for me, she just seemed like a barely contained lunatic. I’m glad this cast brought me back, and I’ve been a regular SNL watcher ever since.
Having gone back and watched the late ‘80s / early ‘90s era recently after only really knowing that material from best-ofs, I was stunned by Jan Hooks’ versatility. One of the all-time greats.
Co-sign on Oteri. Whatever character she was playing, it was like a demented person trying to live within the expected rules of normal behavior.
Thank you both for writing this post, because *I* feel like I took the crazy pills when people reference this era of SNL as funny, Ferrell included.It was Peak Let’s Make Another Recurrent Character Movie from Lorne Michaels. The two Wayne’s World movies made too much money for him to resist.
It’s baffling to me that the Adam Sandler/ Chris Farley era of SNL is considered to be a low point. WTF. That’s MY SNL…
Not all of it, just the last year or two.
It’s like how in some way Roger Moore will always be my James Bond. Especially Octopussy & A View to a Kill.
Even though I’ve mellowed a lot on the actual players since, I was fully in favor of cleaning the decks that year, I had gotten sick of the clogged-up comedy sludge wad the show had become in the years just before. I even liked that they tried to shake up the format a bit (not just always doing the sketch-sketch-musical guest-Update-sketch pattern every episode) something Lorne always cites as a mistake that the audience hated. Well, not me.
This will never not be funny.
This was not a great season overall and the reason is that the recurring sketches were almost all bad. Or started ok and got worse. None of those breakout characters ever worked for me. On the flip side, Ferrell and a lot of the cast are great and you got some truly fantastic sketches like the Wake Up and Smile sketch above. That still slays. But as much as I ended up liking a lot of Ferrell’s recurring characters, like Robert Goulet, Harry Carey, and James Lipton, I never enjoyed the cheerleaders or the club dancing brothers. And those got SO much play.
When it aired, I thought that first Ferrell sketch was amazing. It was weird, shocking and disturbingly funny like the SNL of yore.
I honestly still find Will Ferrell pretty grating. Outside of Talledega Nights(and even that was spotty) I can’t watch him for more than 5 minutes before I have to turn it off. I always thought that Kattan and Oteri were pretty dire also. That’s not an era of SNL I look back at fondly. I really don’t think it was good again until the Tina Fey era.
Looking at season 21 I would ask a more pertinent question than was Will Ferrell’s first season on SNL a bomb or a breakthrough, especially as you quickly shifted gears to a more general critique of the overall cast and writer performances.
Instead my question would hearken back to the Twilight Zone episode “What You Need”, where the old man was able to give people basic items that allowed them to transition to sustainable positions going forward, perhaps a message of taking stock in dependable resources around us, instead of planning one’s future around longshots. In this sense, it doesn’t matter if Will Ferrell’s performances were a “bomb or a breakthrough”, as opposed to what SNL needed to transition from near oblivion to once again become a survivor.
Hopefully both of you can agree upon Ferrell’s role in SNL’s rejuvenation through season 21?