This Season 51 ‘SNL’ Sketch Might Be Worst of All Time, According to Reddit
Saturday Night Live’s Season 51 premiere had some notable high points: Bad Bunny’s monologue, Kam Patterson and Bowen Yang’s spots on Weekend Update and Colin Jost playing Pete Hegseth in the cold open. But outside of those high points, there were a significant number of low points.
The bulk of the show seemed to rely on “tried-and-true” sketch constructions: two back-to-back dinner table conversations, a classroom/school meeting and the classic “Jeopardy” set-up. Lorne Michaels clearly has a few established settings for comedy to occur in. But it was the Jeopardy sketch that earned the most ire — even Kenan Thompson’s character “Luckass” couldn’t save the sketch from pretty harsh criticism.
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One Redditor in particular was outraged about it. “The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the Jeopardy sketch was a legit all-time bottom-10 stinker,” they wrote on the R/LiveFromNewYork subreddit.
They went on to elaborate, at length, about the history of Jeopardy on SNL. (The game show has been a premise for SNL for decades.) After that, they tore into the substance of the show itself: “Then you had this where the whole premise was ‘guy doesn’t know how the most famous game show ever works.’ And then the punchline is fucking Who's On First,” the Redditor argued. “And that’s it. It’s something a child would write for a talent show. I seriously can’t believe it ran at all, let alone right after the monologue.”
Plenty of people in the thread agreed.
“Most of it was with the writing,” another person added. “The entire sketch hinged on the concept that a contestant didn’t know to put the answer in the form of a question, which is lazy and uninspired. It put Bad Bunny in the difficult situation of saving a poor concept, which only comedy pros might be able to achieve.”
A third Redditor added: “It felt like the humor of a sketch in 1998. I was like wait, that’s the whole joke? That he can’t answer with a question because he’s dumb? I’m just shocked that went on first.”
I personally didn’t laugh after the first time I heard “Luckass.” Top 10 all-time stinker, though? There are a LOT of bad dinner-table sketches, and this one at least featured Bad Bunny’s jawline.