Trump’s Worst ‘SNL’ Sketch Was Then-Senator Al Franken's Idea

The 2015 Donald Trump-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live was arguably the lowest point in the show’s history. And considering that the same program once gave us Elon Musk as Wario and 90 minutes of Steven Seagal attempting to perform comedy, that sure is saying something.

The aspiring authoritarian ruler’s late night campaign stop included an assortment of terrible sketches featuring lame jokes about Twitter, an Ivanka cameo and a filmed segment that found him joining Martin Short’s Ed Grimley to awkwardly gyrate to “Hotline Bling.”  

But if you thought that the material that actually aired was bad, wait until you see one of the sketches that didn’t make the cut.

“Donald Trump’s Hair” was a Fantastic Voyage parody set in the future year of 2017, in which “an elite team of supersoldiers” get zapped by a shrinking ray and tasked with piloting a ship onto Trump’s head. Why? In order to save the president’s embarrassing haircut from a slight breeze by detonating a hair gel bomb before Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin.

The sketch actually made it to the show’s dress rehearsal, but it was ultimately scrapped before the live episode was broadcast. Officially, “Donald Trump’s Hair” was “Cut For Time," presumably because SNL never puts “Cut For Being An Unfunny Mess” on their YouTube video titles.

Who came up with this godawful sketch? Apparently it was a sitting U.S. Senator. 

As reported by LateNighter, the germ of the idea came from then-Minnesota Senator and SNL alumnus Al Franken. It seems that Franken reached out to Lorne Michaels directly and pitched him a sketch poking fun at Trump’s famously bizarre follicles.

“As I recall, I just gave Lorne the premise for a sketch in which Trump’s hair is depicted as a construction site,” Franken recalled. “So I had no part in writing this sketch and never saw it until now. I understand why it was cut, although Trump’s performance in it, as you can tell, is brilliant.”

So the SNL writers seemingly took Franken’s idea about populating Trump’s hair with tiny people and ran with it, turning it into a sci-fi riff (complete with bloody deaths and a yeti sighting) rather than a straightforward skit about construction workers. 

At least we can be fairly sure that this is one Al Franken idea that wasn’t stolen from Garrett Morris.