Segments are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars
THE BLIZZARD OF ’96
Rudolph Giuliani & George Pataki [real] make apologies for tonight’s SNL
— For some reason, I like how they’re making such a big deal of that week’s huge blizzard.
— Some pretty good laughs from Giuliani and Pataki blaming the cast’s hard work in clearing the snow on why tonight’s show might be lackluster.
— Right from this very first SNL appearance of his, Giuliani is coming off as a total natural; a good sign of things to come for his future SNL appearances. But, boy, Pataki, on the other hand, has awkward and stilted delivery here. He and Giuliani have fun chemistry, though.
— I like the New York City/State debate between Giuliani and Pataki.
STARS: ***
MONOLOGUE
snowdiggers NAW, MOS, CHO join host as he dances & sings about snow
— Is Christopher’s hair redder than usual?
— I love Christopher mentioning his family complaining about the gruesome things he does as a movie villain.
— Christopher’s musical monologues are always very entertaining, and this Christmas medley is particularly fun, charming, and infectious.
— Cheri is coming off particularly adorable during her brief appearances throughout this.
STARS: ****
FRONT PORCH
Rita Delvecchio tries to get neighbor (host) to clear her walk
— Rita Delvecchio officially becomes a recurring character.
— At the very beginning of this sketch, are we supposed to see Christopher just stiffly standing awkwardly next to Rita Delvecchio’s house as the camera slowly zooms in on Rita?
— I always love Rita’s conversations with her off-camera friends.
— Christopher’s Italian wiseguy voice is freakin’ hilarious.
— I love Christopher’s odd threats to the snowball-throwing kids, especially “See how funny it is… when I bury your FACE… in the yellow SNOW.”
STARS: ***
THE CONTINENTAL
The Continental once again tries to charm a female visitor
— Of all the Continental sketches I haven’t reviewed yet, this is the only one I’m not all that familiar with, so I’m really looking forward to this one.
— A bit of a sad realization that this is the last time the trademark Continental stock voice-over intro from Phil Hartman will be used during Phil’s lifetime. All of the subsequent Continental sketches that use Phil’s voice-over are after his death.
— As always, it’s a riot whenever The Continental frantically jumps in front of the door when the woman tries to make a mad dash out of the apartment.
— Christopher’s “mmm mmm” sounds when enjoying the taste of caviar is a hilarious little Walken-esque touch.
— I love that The Continental is continuing to eat caviar while a piece of caviar is smooshed to his forehead.
— A huge laugh from The Continental saying “I have fallen for you and I can’t get up!” in a high-pitched voice when expressing how his heart feels.
— Hilarious reveal of The Continental having his head under the woman’s dress when we were led to believe he was tending to the fireplace.
— The visual of an unkempt-haired Christopher Walken with his head thrown back as the woman grabs him by the throat is the one part of this sketch that I’ve always remembered from past viewings. It’s a priceless visual (the last above screencap for this sketch).
STARS: ****½
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
musical guest performs “One Of Us”
WEEKEND UPDATE
JMB personifies relationship between the stomach & alcoholic beverages
Jesse Jackson (DAH) explains relationship between civil rights & laughter
— Yeesh, what happened to Norm’s voice? He sounds hoarse as hell. Flu from that week’s blizzard, I take it?
— Feels like the first big thing we’ve seen Jim Breuer do in quite a while. I thought the debut of the Joe Pesci Show sketch a few episodes ago would turn things around for him, but he’s STILL been struggling badly for airtime since then.
— Pretty fun bit with Jim doing various voices for the alcohol having a party in your stomach. I especially like the Scottish and Mexican voices Jim’s doing.
— Haha, some of Norm’s jokes are getting the audience really riled up.
— The debut of Darrell’s Jesse Jackson impression.
— So… yeah… blackface. But I can ignore that aspect of Darrell’s Jesse Jackson impression, as his impression is fantastic and he is killing with both me and the audience, especially when his speech randomly turns into a powerful sermon about The Flintstones.
— Between his Weekend Update commentaries as Phil Donahue, Bill Clinton, and Jesse Jackson, Darrell has been Update gold so far this season.
STARS: ****
CONNIE STINSON TALKS
Connie Stinson (host) puts words in guests’ mouths to provoke
— Christopher expressing his guests’ thoughts is hilarious. I also like the guests’ puzzled reactions to that.
— I love Christopher’s various statements using the insult “fat hog” towards the fat female guests.
— This is such a perfect sketch for Christopher. I can’t picture anybody else selling this material.
— This is such a dead-on parody of this type of trashy daytime talk show from this era.
— The cue cards make an accidental cameo in the background just now (screencap below).
— The “sit on my face” bit is hilarious.
STARS: ****
GUIDANCE COUNSELOR
Mary Katherine Gallagher dreams of dancing with guidance counselor (host)
— Was Christopher late arriving for this sketch? Not only does this sketch open with an abnormally long exterior shot of a school, but then when the camera does finally cut to Christopher, it looks like he’s still finishing putting on his outfit and is trying to get into character. It’s a pretty funny sight.
— A big unintentional laugh from Christopher opening the folder in his hand to make it look like he’s going through it, only to quickly put the folder aside when realizing there’s nothing in it. Haha, you can tell that wasn’t intentional. I guess this sketch was so ill-prepared, the prop people forgot to put paper in the folder.
— Very interesting turn with a black-and-white musical fantasy involving Mary Katherine Gallagher and Christopher dancing around the SNL studio. This is fun, and I especially love when they go to SNL’s home base stage.
— It feels weird hearing the audience still have a fairly muted reaction towards Mary Katherine Gallagher. This is her third appearance, yet the audience STILL doesn’t seem to be 100% on her side yet. By contrast, The Cheerleaders have only appeared twice by this point, and the audience already seems to absolutely love them. I wonder which installment it is where Mary Katherine Gallagher starts becoming a popular crowd-pleaser.
STARS: ***½
SPADE IN AMERICA
without realizing he’s on-air, DAS reports from outside
— A big change of pace, with Christopher sitting in for Spade while Spade does a live remote from outside.
— I like how when the camera first cuts to Spade, he’s quietly singing the same One Of Us song that we just heard being performed earlier tonight by Joan Osborne.
— Spade, regarding having to stand out there in the cold: “Can’t one of the new guys do this? Get that guy that does the cheerleader.”
— I like Spade telling a passerby that Christopher Walken is even weirder in real life than he is in movies.
— Now Spade is quietly singing another popular song from this time period: Big Poppa. It’s particularly funny hearing him sing this.
— Spade: “Are they still on Update? Good god, it’s 12:40! How many anal rape jokes can Norm do this week?”
— Yet another funny line from Spade, where he says Christopher is probably in his dressing room “going over his lines” (*mimes drinking*).
STARS: ****
EXECUTION
executioner Gerald Tibbins (DAK) jokes around with condemned man (host)
— Yes! We get the debut of Koechner’s T-Bones character, which has always been one of my (many) favorite things Koechner did on SNL during his short-lived tenure.
— I’m glad to see that Koechner is just as hilarious as this character as I remembered. So many funny goofy bits from T-Bones throughout this sketch.
— I like Christopher’s “Could… could you not speak to me?” response to T-Bones.
— Very funny prank with T-Bones faking a call as a governor giving Christopher a reprieve.
STARS: ****½
BAND SHOT
— We return from commercial just to get a shot of the SNL Band immediately playing the show back to commercial. Whenever that happens at the end of an SNL episode, it’s obvious that the show has run long and had to cut some scheduled segments at the last minute. One of the scheduled segments cut at the last minute tonight was Joan Osborne’s second musical performance (of which the dress rehearsal version would be aired a few weeks later in a “Best of the New Season” compilation special). I also wonder if tonight’s show running long and having to cut some scheduled segments accounts for why we don’t see Mark McKinney AT ALL tonight.
GOODNIGHTS
(Not included in the copy I’m reviewing of the live broadcast of this episode. My copy just abruptly ends with an abnormally long shot of a Christopher Walken SNL bumper picture that followed the preceding SNL Band shot. I guess tonight’s episode ran so long that some NBC affiliates didn’t have time to air the goodnights.)
IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS
— A solid episode, as Christopher Walken-hosted episodes usually are, even if this one isn’t among my favorites that he’s hosted. However, something strangely felt a little empty about this episode, maybe due to both the lack of goodnights in my copy and the scarce number of appearances from most of the cast throughout the show (even the usually-prolific Will Ferrell only made one appearance, and as mentioned earlier, Mark McKinney was completely absent). The scarce number of cast appearances is presumably due to the fact that 1) some of the sketches were very long, especially The Continental (as always) and Connie Stinson Talks, and 2) most sketches involved little-to-no cast members. In fact, believe it or not, Connie Stinson Talks was the ONLY sketch all night that involved more than two cast members (not counting the monologue or Weekend Update, as they’re technically not sketches). This is all a minor quibble, though, because I still enjoyed the entire show. Every single segment worked for me, a few of which were particularly strong.
MY PERSONAL CHOICE OF “BEST OF” MOMENTS FOR THIS EPISODE, REPRESENTED WITH SCREENCAPS
HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (Madeline Kahn)
a step up
My full set of screencaps for this episode is here
TOMORROW
Alec Baldwin
It’s probably the worst Walken episode, but even then it’s still pretty good. God, I love the T-Bone character.
Damn what a great character. I’m glad he found other places to use it since then, he basically did that character (they changed the name but it was basically Gerald) in the Mr. Show movie Run Ronnie Run and he ended up being one of the highlights of it. The Comedy Central Show with Dave Gruber Allen was underrated too. I always heard stories about Norm being a huge fan of the character and he would always make Dave do Gerald for him backstage at SNL.
Oh, I was going to add, that the one thing this era (95-97) does that really annoys me is take all-time great hosts (Walken, Baldwin – though I’m thinking specifically of his 97 episode) and give them cookie-cutter roles in recurring character sketches. Like, we really do not need these aces playing straight man to the Cheerleaders or MKG. What a waste.
I pretty much just skip these appearances for the sake of my good will. I sat through this stuff at the time as I was watching live – once was more than enough. I’ll be doing the same when we get to the Jimmy Fallon and Chris Kattan recurring characters.
Actually, nowhere is this tendency to misuse great hosts worse than with the Roxbury Guys. Yes, they nailed it with Carrey, but they burned through editions with Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin and Martin Short, wasting great hosts to no great benefit.
Gerald/T-Bones rendition of TLC’s Waterfalls remains of the my earliest memories of laughing my ass off at an SNL sketch (this was the first season I started watching regularly) and something I’d go on to quote constantly for years as a kid.
Ends up being somewhat funnier in hindsight, when Ferrell’s movie “The Other Guys” had a boss who directly quoted the song in complete seriousness, completely unaware he was doing so.
I think Dave was on a podcast talking about how the T-Bone sketch is what bumped Joan Osborne’s second song. She supposedly stared him down during the goodnights.
Speaking of Joan, isn’t this is the first instance in a long time…maybe since Jerry Lewis/Loverboy that there was only one song?
Is the little boy in the Rita Delvecchio sketch the same boy who was in the Halloween sketch? Christopher Marquette. He sounds the same and kind of looks the same.
Your mention of the lack of cast in this episode reminds me of how odd it is that we see Colin Quinn or Fred Wolf more than at least two of the actual credited cast members (Mark and Jim). On paper, this season had a more streamlined cast than 94-95, but onscreen the spread is more than a little confusing.
Other than the cold open (I see the rah-rah Rudy era of the show has begun – I’ll be doing a whole lot of skipping over that) and MKG, I did watch and enjoy the whole episode. Not as strong as several other Walken episodes, and also the point where his eccentricities are overtaking his overall performance skills (the musical number here is much sloppier than his ’92 musical monologue), but still good.
The sketch is grimy as all get out, but the talk show piece is probably the standout moment of the episode for me. This is one of the few talk show sketches that actually feels like a real talk show, between the cuts to backstage, the ridiculousness of Tim and Cheri trading off “talk to the hand” gestures, and the hollowed out host trying his best to whip up a frenzy with the guests and the audience. It’s also the best use of Walken’s unique talents – who else could make repeated uses of “fat hog” so funny?
I didn’t realize just how many times Spade’s pieces this season go outside the usual sneering Hollywood Minute box. This is another one that added a different flavor to the show, and Spade gets in some very pointed (and frankly, necessary) digs, like Norm’s many rape jokes.
T-Bones is a very good sketch, sold easily by David Koechner’s charisma. He’s such an effortless and intelligent performer. I just…will never get his firing.
The Rita sketch is once again a great deal of fun, with a a pretty solid story threaded throughout the catchphrases. I liked the end, where she tricks him into leaving his snowblower behind so she can do her “it’s mine I keep it.” Her long climb off the porch, underwear on display, was good physical comedy.
My face is leaving town in 10 minutes.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Be on it!
FWIW, the copy of this episode available on Peacock includes a proper goodnights/credits sequence, which I assume was sourced from the dress rehearsal.
On Spade’s best-of DVD, they made some slight edits to this episode’s Spade in America segment. The part where he sings “Big Poppa” was cut (or muted? You can still see him dancing to it) as well as his comments on Update running long. Was that the version shown during 60-minute reruns?
The version available on YouTube is uncut.
Darrell previously did the Flintstones bit as Jesse Jackson for this stand up routine:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rX4Y25rwqZA
One of the few episodes that ever went outside during winter and acknowledged the white holocaust that is New York City. Oh, and first appearance of Giuliani on SNL! Neato. They have no idea how much they’re gonna love this man in 6 years.
The girls look cute in their little fake parkas. I recently moved to West Virginia and the number of people who’ve never even heard of parkas is astonishing. This is a pretty elaborate monologue after they claimed they had little time to prepare.
Ahh, the angry bitch is back! I love her. I dunno if Christopher Walken snowblowing is a classic bit or not, but I’ve seen it many times and its classic to me. Was that underwear shot deliberate or accidental?
Oh damn, the Continental, Americas only funny rapist. I think the audience was a little too loopy. They’re laughing like maniacs before he even does anything. We really need 2 of the 3 women to make up a Hillary Clinton and Barbara Walters impression. Cheri was great as Ross Perot. I don’t know how you could work that in but a smart writer could make it happen. Jim Breuer looks like the kind of guy who knows about hangovers. Sorry, its true. Norm is at that point where he loves the booing, cuz he knows he’s ruffling feathers. I had forgotten James Earl Ray was still alive at this point. Really? You only have one black man in the cast and he’s not Jesse Jackson tonight? Wait? Is Tim gone? Did he get snowed in somewhere?
Nope. There’s Tim. And there’s fat Nancy, which is kinda funny. And now fat Cheri, which is good too. OK now I’m wondering if David Koechner is unavailable, or they just don’t like him. Why is a writer performing a character? And of course we have fat Molly. I am liking Walken as a sleazy talk show host. Oh there’s David. OK. They found a role for every actor. Good use of their cast.
Mary Katherine is not yet getting applause or cheers, so she isn’t a big success yet.
Walkens Irish accent is terrible. He should have done his normal Italian. Is this an actual live remote? Or was it recorded and expertly timed? Its not as funny as the writers think it is. But it killed several minutes of air time. They might have had to scramble what with the bad weather and limited rehearsal time.
Finally Koechner gets something really funny. Only took 10 episodes. And an EXTRA long musical interlude with the hosts photo and then dead air. Yeah, they definitely had troubles this week. At least they were honest about it in the cold open. My version of the video doesn’t even have the good nights. But even with all the issues, it was funny and I enjoyed it. Walken never disappoints even in a blizzard.
I grew up in Minnesota and for us 1996 was a normal year. But checking the news, NYC really got hit much harder than normal. Some county in West Virginia had 4 whole feet of snow that year.
It’s insane that the “fat hog” sketch is nearly 10 minutes long!
Koechner said the Gerald sketch running longer than expected bumped Joan’s second performance and claims she can be seen in the goodnights giving him the evil eye!
latenighter.com/podcasts/inside-late-night-with-mark-malkoff-ep-15-david-koechner/
“And I remember also, during air, I had to cut pieces to get it shorter. So, during air, Lorne is doing this on the floor. So, I’m cutting, uh, dialogue to the punchline. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I was like, “Wow, I can’t, okay. Because I’m like, it’s the last sketch of the night, and I can’t get this thing cut, right?” Or they can’t just go out before we get to the end. I remember poor Joan Osborne was on the show. She glared at me for the closing night thing, you know, up on the stage.”
Theres some interesting tidbits about season 21 in that linked interview. Apparently there was a Bill Brasky done in dress rehearsal for the Tom Arnold episode (I can kinda picture Tom being a good Bill Brasky guy, despite how awful he seemed to be in everything when he hosted this time) as well as Jimmy Tango’s Fat Busters (Tom Arnold as the Jim Carrey character however, I can’t picture at all) also Colin Quinn wrote Gangsta Bitch Barbie?!? Neat, never knew that!
Also the Jim Carrey season finale where Koechner was mostly shut out of, his big sketch that week would’ve been a Gerald sketch cut after the dress show, involving T-Bone at a Trading Post general store and Jim Carrey playing some kind of Indian chief, hearing about all this stuff always makes me wish “Cut for Time” stuff put on YouTube was a thing back then, or that they’d start doing some retro Cut for Times. Still wish I could find that Chris Farley Bill Brasky sketch that used to be online in full like a decade ago but it now impossible to find.