Funny / SCTV

The show has plenty of funny moments to choose from, so to name several:

• "SCTV is on the air!"
• The Great White North sketches in general.
• Anytime somebody blows up in Farm Film Report.
• "Liberace's Musical Tribute to the Holidays", featuring a burly gay man whipping Liberace (Dave Thomas) as he plays piano, a duet-turned-duel between Liberace and Elton John (Rick Moranis), and Orson Wells (John Candy) yelling at the crew for minor mistakes and taking the turkey (not the platter with the turkey on it; the actual turkey) with him as he walks off the set.
• Lewis Sings Dylan, a commercial for an album where Jerry Lewis covers Bob Dylan's songs.
• The Johnny LaRue movie Polynesiantown has Vic dying after getting hit by a rib truck, which is ironic since he poisoned the rib sauce in an attempt to steal Dr. John's gems. He literally keels over in an over-the-top fashion.
• The Dick Cavett Show with Dick Cavett. ^note Somehow, there's two Dick Cavetts!
• Every promo for Melvin and Howard (later named Melvin and Howards). The last of which has Curly Howard!
• The Man Who Would Be King Of The Popes.
• The Milk of Amnesia ad.
• This Tornado Warning.
• Gerry Todd under video attack!
• The Grapes of Mud. Someone got to stand just offscreen and hurl handfuls of mud at Joe Flaherty.
  • Dave Thomas playing the nutty old grandfather who wants an Oklahoma chicken-fried steak. When he dies partway through, his dying wish is to be chicken-fried.
    • A preacher (played by Eugene Levy) that "lost the calling" is picked up by the migrating family and proceeds to run off with their pregnant daughter. The mother's only comment is "I guess he found the calling."
• Mrs. Falbo's Tiny Town, especially when she accidentally catches the king and queen doing S&M on her telescope.
• The Fantasy Island parody, especially with John Candy as the little person Tattoo.
  • The ending, followed by the band playing "Disco Lucy" (unfortunately, the NBC version cuts that scene short).
• Benny Hill Street Blues. ^note It's exactly as it sounds for anyone familiar with The Benny Hill Show and comes complete with mashup of the Thames and MTM logo.
• What fits into Mother Russia?
• Tibor's Tractor, which has a talking tractor that used to be a man (specifically Nikita Khrushchev).
• The Zontar episode. It turns out that Bonar Bain (Conrad's brother), a new cast member, is working for Zontar, who seeks to abduct the staff at SCTV due to how funny they are because of his obsession with television, and he does this by sending cabbages to possess the staff. Thankfully, Gerry Todd is immune to this.
  • Larry Seigel has a hard time producing "Different Folks", which stars Bain.
  • The Overbooked Lawyer. The cherry on the sundae is where his pizza is delivered and he makes Kool-Aid.
  • DeForest Kelley plugs a movie called "The Julia Child Story", where he plays her husband.
• "Emergency Caterers".
  "The sardines were the last to go!"
• "Walter Cronkite's Brain". It starts out as a typical documentary, and it then it reaches Mind Screw levels.
• The Running Gag of Perini Scleroso in advertising.
• Monster Chiller Horror Theatre presents "Slinky... Toy From Hell".
• Rick Moranis' brutal parody of Merv Griffin, especially Griffin's laugh ("Boo-hoo-hoo-wah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!") and his tendency to say "ooooooo!" a lot. Then they take it up to eleven by placing Griffin in the most bizarre, unlikely situations: playing Andy Taylor, time traveling to The '60s to hang out with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and getting involved in a Close Encounters of the Third Kind / 2001: A Space Odyssey / Star Wars mashup.
• The skit for the "Steeplechase" game show.
• "Pepi Longsocks".
  • "Pepi Longsocks" gets even funnier when you know that the original audio track, muted to provide the very, very bad dubbing, was just the cast saying extremely rude and vulgar things to each other since they knew the audio was going to be removed anyway. Anyone who's good at lip reading, enjoy figuring out what the original dialogue was.
• Bobby Bittman's little brother Skip guest starring on "The Sammy Maudlin Show".
  • The Yiddish argument the brothers Bittman have. The entire audience apparently understands Yiddish, because when Skip says something particularly rude, they all gasp in shock.
• The "Doorway To Hell" story with Wilcox and his dummy. Doubles as Nightmare Fuel for the first half.
• "Hollywood Squares: The Home Version".
• "The Nana Mouskouri Story".
• "Vikings And Beekeepers". Makes you wonder what was going through the cast's heads when they came up with this.
  • According to the booklet that came with the DVD set the sketch is on, lots of pain.
• Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes.
  "Would you like some more pancakes?"
  "Would you like some more syrup?"
• "The Lone Ranger Show".
• Angus Crock talking about lake monsters.
• Earl Camembert trying (and failing) to get a date.
• Fish Police ^note no, not that one.
• Logos Galore.
• Babe Ruth showing up in "Lust For Paint" during Toulouse's death, and beating him up after being mistaken for Baboon.
• "Murder Is Bad For Your Health", distributed by Alfred Hitchcock.
• All of the CBC shows, Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice in particular.
  • Gord announcing he got Alice pregnant, after disappearing with her into the kitchen for maybe twenty seconds.
  Garth and Gord: Yonge Street!!!
• ''Ben Hur'', all of it. Points go to John Candy as Curly Howard as Ben Hur.
  • Points also for Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas being a Roman centurion version of Abbott and Costello.
    • Harold Ramis (as Messala, the villain) informs Ben Hur of his mother and sister's fate with his dying breath. Everyone thinks he said they're lepers... but when Hur actually finds them, they're leopards. Related, Messala coming back to life just long enough after dying the first time to inform Ben Hur that he was just kidding when he told him his family was dead before the chariot race.
    • Jesus appearing as a bartender in houndstooth pants that gives out healing cocktails.
    • Moe Green praising Messala's death scene, claiming the acting is incredibly touching... so much so that it moves him to tears on-screen. Because Harold Ramis plays both Moe and Messala, this is essentially Ramis praising his own acting.
• Floyd the barber petitioning The Godfather to break Opie's legs is one of the greatest concepts in comedy history. Levy's impression of Floyd is frighteningly accurate.
  • There are lots of great bits in that episode: Jack Woltz...err...Leonard Bernstein and his Mister Ed obsession, Caballero getting shot hundreds of times and surviving mostly unscathed, the whole "network war" thing, and Ugazzo Home Vision is a very accurate portrayal of cable TV circa 1981.
• Do-It-Yourself Dentistry, starring Harold Ramis as Mort Finkel, who is here to tell you, dear viewer, how to fill in your own cavities using rum as a painkiller in lieu of novocaine. Extra funny because Ramis drinks actual rum, something he didn't know he was going to do until he actually drank it. He ended up actually drunk. One hopes that was the last sketch filmed that day, because otherwise the rest of the cast had to deal with a drunk Harold Ramis wandering around the studio.
• 5 Neat Guys Neatest Hits
  Who made the egg salad sandwiches?
  • Made funnier by the fact that, according to Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty's character in these sketches is actually drunk.
• Swishbuckler, starring Joe Flaherty as a Camp Gay pirate helping an even more flamboyant crew (Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis, and Dave Thomas) mutiny against their captain. It's Better Than It Sounds (not helped at all by the crew's tight, tight pants and tiny, ridiculous ponytails).
• SCTV Boogie, where Eugene Levy (as uncool, awkward Mel Slurrup) hosts a dance program ala Soul Train with a soundtrack consisting of snippets of the same disco song played over and over, talking to various high schoolers that all seem to go to one of two schools. Bonus points for Harold Ramis's amazingly bad dancing and Eugene Levy's shirt showing off a glorious Carpet of Virility. (The whole skit was a parody of an early Citytv program simply called Boogie.)
  • Mel became a regular recurring character and SCTV Boogie underwent a number of name changes, until they settled for "Mel's Rock Pile." Mel reappeared in 2015 in an outro clip for Canada's other pride and joy, Rush, introducing them as a "little band" and saying "three guys does not a rock band make." Rush have had other SCTV characters introduce songs on their tours (Count Floyd in 1984 and Bob and Doug in 2007), but this one is arguably funnier when you think about the meta; Eugene Levy and Geddy Lee (Rush's lead singer/bassist/keyboardist) may or may not live in the same ritzy neighborhood in Toronto, depending on what source you're reading. Mel of all people should know about Rush's success, since "he" lives in the same neighborhood as the lead singer!
• Muley's Roundhouse, a Subverted Kids' Show with Harold Ramis playing a grouchy, sad old railroad switch operator who had dreams of being a military pilot, but was grounded for being "tetched." He also despises the Bolsheviks.
• Lust For Paint, (a mash-up of the Lautrec biopic Moulin Rouge and the DaVinci biopic Lust For Life) one of the last episodes to feature Moe Green , has, among other things, a character played by Ramis in the eponymous sketch appearing to the dying protagonist just to remind him that he (Ramis) has long legs, the extremely short protagonist and his equally small father both being played by a kneeling Joe Flaherty (the tallest member of the cast), and Monet and Degas being Camp Gay caricatures that constantly yell "YOO-HOO~!" at passing celebrities from their cafe table, all while Moe Green's career falls apart around him, culminating in Moe being fired (again) and even sticking his hand back in to wave his handkerchief at the viewers as a goodbye after he's left the set.
• Almost any SCTV News sketch. The very first one has Floyd reporting on multiple world-changing events while Earl gets mundane local news, culminating in an argument that ends when Earl loudly proclaims that Floyd is living with a woman he isn't married to. This is clearly meant to be scandalous- which it might have been in 1976 when it first aired, but 40 years later, it's arguably even funnier because that's not a big deal anymore.
  • The News sketch involving "the Mr. Earl doll," a clay likeness of Earl that Floyd plugs- and maims in multiple horrible ways, including beheading it- right before Earl was to do an editorial about friendship, as inspired by his relationship with Floyd. You can just see the horror and heartbreak in Earl's eyes after the commercial ends.
  • The time where Earl got high on pot and tried to anchor- utterly hilarious trainwreck.
• Bittman Does Dallas, in which Bobby Bittman goes country. Also features Bobby singing, which is surprisingly bad. Bobby's terrible singing is made even funnier by anyone who has seen A Mighty Wind and can attest to what a lovely voice Eugene Levy normally has.
• Bobby Bittman was given a 30-minute mockumentary on his life and career on Cinemax (long after SCTV ended) in 1988. It must be seen to be believed.
• Battle of the PBS Stars brilliantly skewered highbrow and lowbrow TV in a single shot, with the Mr. Rogers versus Julia Child boxing match being one of the great moments of the entire series.
• In 1982, SCTV won an Emmy for outstanding writing. The whole spectacle is hilarious in many, many meta senses.
  • The fact that SCTV had all but one of the nominations, each for a different episode.
  • When they inevitably win, the absolute crap ton of people that swarm the stage and the fact that it takes the announcers quite some time to list them all off and hand everyone their awards.
  • An evidently-bitter Milton Berle keeps interrupting Joe Flaherty's acceptance speech with sarcastic "oh, that's funny" and "we don't have all day" comments, to which Joe responds by saying "Go to sleep, Uncle Miltie," an amusing crack at Milton's Texaco Star Theater closing line ("Listen to your Uncle Miltie and go to bed").
  • The fact that in the next season, one sketch included Joe Flaherty out of character assaulting Milton Berle while yelling "You'll never ruin another acceptance speech, Uncle Miltie!"
  • Then they won again the next year, and presumably, that was infinitely less funny.
• "And Dave Thomas, as the Beaver."