Saturday Night Live / Tropes D to H

Main page | A to C | D to H | I to P | Q to Z

---

D

• Dark Lord on Life Support: Invoked with Adam Driver as malevolant oil baron Abraham H Parnassus, who claims he was born premature in a time period where medical technology simply couldn't deal with it, and his treatment involved putting him in a steel pot until he was old enough to crawl out, and despite living to a ripe old age, needs a cane. Worth noting is that Adam's best known role is a Sith Lord, and grandson of the Trope Codifier.
• Dark Parody:
  • In "You're a Champion, Charlie Brown", after Charlie Brown falls on his back as usual, he gets seriously injured on his head and dies. All Linus and Franklin can do is despair and yell at Lucy that it's her fault.
  • In "Clark Kent", Superman is so incompetent that everyone else in the Daily Planet is so sick of having him around that they convince him to (accidentally) kill someone by pretending the person was a super-villain so he'd go to jail and be out of the way.
  • From the tail end of 2020 comes "Stu", a parody of Stan that somehow manages to get even darker than the source material with a Cruel Twist Ending. The long-suffering wife played by Dido originally (and Kate McKinnon here) had managed to secure a PS5 well ahead of time as a surprise gift, but the rest of the video plays out just like the original, up to Stu driving in the rain (but on a fifth of eggnog instead of vodka).
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Parodied in "Grouch", a movie trailer for a Joker-style origin in which a well-meaning garbageman (David Harbour) is gradually driven by the depravities of Sesame Street to become Oscar the Grouch.
  • Invoked in "Mario Kart Trailer", where Nintendo decides to follow in the footsteps of The Last of Us (2023) for its adaptation of the decidedly unserious Mario Kart franchise and cast Pedro Pascal as Mario, a grizzled ex-kart driver tasked with driving Princess Peach through a post-apocalyptic Mushroom Kingdom.
• Deadline News: The "North Pole News Report" from the episode hosted by Eddie Murphy, which starts with a elf reporter (Mikey Day) on the scene at Santa's Workshop, trying to get to the cause of a sudden fire, with Eddie revealing that there were fatalities that weren't fire-related. It ends with Mikey being attacked by the real cause, a polar bear.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • In the first TV Funhouse "Anatominals" short, Lorne Michaels views the skit and is disgusted what the show has sunk to, and calls up Satan to get out of his contract of keeping the show running if he gets his soul. After getting a glimpse of what Lorne's life would be like without SNL (he provides foreign aid), he rescinds his offer and lets Satan keep his soul after all.
  • A People's Court parody had a hairdresser take the devil (Jon Lovitz) to court for violating their contract.
  • One sketch centers around a struggling musician (Garth Brooks) agreeing to sell his soul to the devil (Will Ferrell) in exchange for a hit song that will make him a star. However, it quickly turns out the devil has no musical talent whatsoever so the musician backs out of the deal.
  • When Jason Sudeikis hosted in Season 47, he reprised his Devil character on Weekend Update and revealed that Colin Jost made a deal with him to marry Scarlett Johansson.
• Deconstructive Parody:
  • Most of their TV show or movie parodies rip apart the logistics behind certain plotholes, tropes (as in "cliched plot devices," some of which can be found on this website), and character traits. Case in point: The Avengers sketch, with Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye. The parody centered on why an archer who doesn't have any superpowers would need to be in a superhero group (especially one that has a super soldier, a radioactive monster, and a Norse god) and what would happen if he ran out of ammo.
  • The recurring sketch "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood" was one for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" by taking the latter show's format and placing it in a crime ridden inner city neighborhood rather than small town suburbia.
  • The "You're A Champion, Charlie Brown" sketch from the Season 24 episode hosted by Brendan Fraser gives a realistic and depressing spin on the old "Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown" gag, in that Charlie Brown ends up with a severe head wound and the sketch ends with Lucy, Linus, and Franklin sobbing as Charlie Brown lays dying.
  • "Friendos" from season 43 deconstructs the Boastful Rap, with Kenan, Chris Redd and Special Guest Donald Glover as a send-up of Migos, who have been trying to out-pimp each other for so long that they have to attend group therapy.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Kate McKinnon as Debette Goldry, a now-geriatric screen diva from the 1940s, recounts her experiences in the era of filmmaking from before political correctness, which are much more jarring than she makes them sound. Basically it sounds like women on the set were little more than glamorised sex slaves, aand categorised under Inventory.
  • The Chadwick Boseman episode features him portraying King T'Challa competing on "Black Jeopardy" and highlighting the cultural and life differences between Wakandans and African-Americans.
    Darnell: You send your smart-ass child here ’cause she think she grown
    T'Challa: What is to one of our free universities where she can apply her intelligence, and perhaps one day become a great scientist.
    Darnell: Okay. Well, the answer we was looking for was “out my damn house.” But you know what, I’m going to give it to you, T’Challa. Y’all must have no mean streets in Wakanda.
  • Zigzagged in the Eddie Murphy episode, where Eddie resurrected a whole string of his past characters (over 30 years ago!), showing how they don't really line up with today's values anymore — until it's revealed that Mr Robinson's neighborhood has changed without him, and even Chivalrous Pervert Velvet Jones has taken a different approach to his usual self-help books for unabashed sluts (just updating the packaging really).
  • The Nickelodeon Show sketch features a few (fictional) episodes of You Can't Do That on Television where the kids make offensive comments, with Nick Cannon and Marc Summers (played by Chris Redd and Alex Moffat) reminding the audience that the episodes were made in the 80s.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • George Coe, who was in his mid-forties, was hired to be one of the original Not Ready For Primetime Players in 1975, and was billed along with the rest of them. The idea was for him to play the "older male" part in sketches, but that was deemed to be unnecessary and Coe was dropped from the regular cast after only three episodes. However, he continued to get occasional guest parts through 1976.
  • Yvonne Hudson was the first black woman to be an SNL cast member, though she was credited as a featured player. (A black female repertory player wouldn't be seen until Danitra Vance was hired in 1985, and even still, it would be a while before SNL would have a black female cast member who lasted more than a season [Ellen Cleghorne] and who became popular outside of SNL [Maya Rudolph and, hopefully, Sasheer Zamata^note Leslie Jones was already an established stand-up comic before being hired as a writer and a cast member, but she has become more famous now than she did before she was hired thanks to her Weekend Update commentary].) Sadly, it was during the disastrous 1980-81 season. She was fired along with everyone in that cast except for Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy, but she continued to appear as an extra periodically through 1984 and has faded to obscurity. Not even hardcore SNL fans know what happened to her, except for the fact that she's still alive somewhere.
  • Happened to David Spade during Season 21. Lorne Michaels kept him on the show after firing most of the Season 20 cast and writers so there would be some consistency as the new cast members and writers settled in. However, Spade's screen time was drastically reduced and he made few appearances outside of his regular "Spade in America" segment. He would leave the show after the season once the new group became acclimated.
  • Michael Patrick O'Brien was a cast member during the 39th season (along with then-newcomers Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, Brooks Wheelan, John Milhiser, and Noel Wells, with Sasheer Zamata and Colin Jost added later). When Lorne Michaels made extensive changes to this overloaded cast, Milhiser, Wells, and Wheelan were fired, Bennett, Mooney, Zamata, and Jost were kept on as cast members, and Mike O'Brien (as he's credited) went back to work as a writer (with occasional appearances in his short films and in sketches that have large crowds and audiences).
• Depraved Kids' Show Host: Mr. Hands in the Mr. Bill Show. Also, everyone on "Happy Smile Patrol" and Mr. Robinson (Eddie Murphy) on "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood".
  • Inverted in the "Jingleheimer Junction" sketch, where "Junction Gang" kid Fred Friendship (Will Ferrell) keeps trying to spell a dirty word, while the host Jingleheimer Joe (Tim Meadows) is the Only Sane Man trying to stop him.
• Destination Defenestration: After smashing a chair on Chris Parnell's head 12 years ago, Natalie Portman returns to one-up it by flinging Beck Bennett through a window. At least it was on the ground floor. And that backdrop probably softened the impact a little.
• Didn't See That Coming: In one of the "High School Theatre" sketches, at one point one of the female students (played by Elizabeth Banks) demands that one of the parents in the audience guess what gender she is. The performers are clearly trying to make a point about transgenderism, fluidity and preconceived notions of gender — but the parent, having long ago clocked exactly what kind of show this is and having seen the intended point coming a mile off, calmly guesses that she's actually a boy. Having clearly not anticipated this response, the girl is forced to pathetically ask the parent to change his answer to "girl"; sure enough, upon his doing so, she smugly declares "Wrong! I'm a boy!"
• Disproportionate Retribution: The season 49 episode with host Ryan Gosling has a coutry music video about the typical Woman Scorned, except that while the first two girls (Ego Nwodim and Chloe Fineman) have fairly mundane ideas like keying his car, the third (Chloe Troast) has an entire Gaslighting ploy laid out for her guy (musical guest Chris Stapleton), from secretly swapping his shoes for bigger ones to spooking out his mother with a Scooby-Doo-style staged haunting. Ryan appears as the former CIA psy ops agent organising the whole thing. Even worse - it's all a misunderstanding.

  Ego: Not sure we're on the same page as each other
  Chloe F: The most I got was him getting beat up by my brother

• Dissimile: According to Anna Kendrick, "each dong is like a snowflake... except that it's a dong".
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Some of SNL's sketches play this for humor. The infamous "Schweddy Balls" sketch, the "Colonel Angus" and "Cork Soakers" sketches are some famous examples. The "Ambiguously Gay Duo" was basically this trope personified.
• Dogged Nice Guy: One recurring sketch is about aspiring online star Janelle (Sasheer Zamata) who ropes in her good friend Teddy (Kyle Mooney) when making her online dance tutorials. Teddy's clearly got the whole Rory thing going for him, content to just sit in the back and watch... and maybe borrow one of her pillows at certain times.
  Dad (Chris Rock): What have I told you about bringing boys into your room?!
  Janelle: He's not a boy, he's just Teddy!
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Ed Grimley would often say, "I'm as doomed as doomed can be."
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male:
  • The Tiger Woods press conference sketch on the episode hosted by Blake Lively (who played Tiger Woods' ex-wife Elin Nordegren). Coincidentally, the musical guest for that episode (Rihanna) is the same Rihanna who was beaten up by her now ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown (who would later be the musical guest for the season 36 episode hosted by Russell Brand.
  • The many sketches where Fred Armisen plays a character who ends up getting beaten by a woman (the Annuale commercial from season 33 had him getting kicked in the groin and punched in the face by Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig punched Fred during the mosh pit riot on the "Death Metal The Golden Girls Theme" SNL Digital Short, and the "Flags of the World" Digital Short had Nasim Pedrad hit Fred in the head with a "Girlfriend on the Rag Flag.")
  • In his one season on the show, Chris Elliott appeared in a sketch that was about a rape prevention class. Elliott's character is the "rapist" in the sketch, and the women students take turns kicking him in the nuts.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Played for laughs in the "Teacher Trial" sketches which involve a teacher (Cecily Strong) on trial for having a sexual relationship with her student (Pete Davidson), who clearly enjoyed the encounter. The boy's father, friends, classmates, and everyone at the trial, especially the judge, is impressed with the boy for pulling it off. The only one who's disgusted is his mother, who was the one who pressed charges in the first place.
• Drives Like Crazy: A rather notable example with Toonces, a cat who somehow is able to drive. It always ends with him and his passengers going off a cliff.
  • "Hitchhiker", an earlier segment from Season 8 features a young man getting picked up by a woman with a voracious sexual appetite all while she's driving. Predictibly, they also end up going over a cliff the moment she climaxes (the very same footage of the car going over the cliff would be recycled into the Toonces sketches).
• Driving Stick: A sketch from Season 47 parodied heist films with a scenario of a heist team boosting an expensive Lamborghini. The wheelman was stymied by the car's manual transmission.
• Drop the Cow: Zigzagged. Some seasons (and episodes within seasons) will have overly long sketches; others will have sketches that know when to stop (or come up too short).
• Dumb Blonde: All of the characters in "The Californians" (with the exception of the housekeeper and supposed Token Minority played by Vanessa Bayer) are mandatorily blonde (including the actual token minority played by Kenan Thompson). They also have the collective IQ of Bill Hader's toolbelt.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo: A handful of cast members appeared on the show before they became full-fledged cast members (featured and repertory). Among them:
  • Denny Dillon: Performed a stand-up routine on the Rob Reiner episode (season 1). Despite unsuccessfully auditioning for the show in 1975, Dillon was chosen for the 1980-81 cast.
  • Ann Risley: Had a small speaking role in a pre-taped sketch called "Mobile Shrink" during season 2's Dick Cavett episode. Like Denny Dillon, Ann would be chosen for the 1980-81 cast.
  • Yvonne Hudson: Before she became a credited featured player during the 1980-81 season, Yvonne often appeared in season 4 and 5 sketches that needed a black actress ^note Lorne Michaels didn't have a black female cast member in his cast until 1985, when he hired Danitra Vance. Her most prominent role was during season 5, as a co-host (with Garrett Morris) of the talk show "Bad Clams," where a pair of black talk show hosts feed Lucille Ball (Gilda Radner) bad clams until she gets sick.
  • Terry Sweeney: Originally hired as a writer for the 1980-81 season, five years before he was hired as a castmember by Lorne Michaels. He makes one on-screen appearance that season, in the cold opening of the Sally Kellerman/Jimmy Cliff episode where Ronald Reagan (played by Charles Rocket) celebrates his 70th birthday.
  • Rob Riggle: Appeared on the Donald Trump/Toots and the Maytals episode (from season 29) in a pretaped commercial parody called Fear Factor Junior. Riggle played the father of a child who had to eat the maggots off a plate of eggs Benedict or risk watching his parents divorce.
  • Tina Fey: Back when she was the first female head writer of SNL ^note (which, back then, was considered groundbreaking as SNL has always had men as head writers; there were women writers — including Jean Doumanian during her disastrous tenure as executive producer, but no woman before Tina Fey was a head writer), Fey appeared in some sketches as an uncredited extra and even had a celebrity impersonation (Kathleen Willey) before she became a cast member/Weekend Update anchor in Season 26.
  • Jason Sudeikis: Had a lot of bit roles in seasons 29 and 30 (the years when he was a writer) until he was hired as a cast member near the end of Season 30.
  • Billy Crystal: As mentioned in the intro, Billy Crystal is one of two cast members who hosted the show before being hired (the other being Michael McKean). Crystal was originally supposed to be a guest performer on the 1975 premiere, but was passed up in favor of Andy Kaufman.
  • Phil Hartman: On the Season 11 episode hosted by Pee-Wee Herman, Hartman made an uncredited appearance as a Pilgrim in the "Pee-Wee Herman Thanksgiving Special" sketch (which he also wrote). A year later, Hartman would be part of the cast that would make SNL fans forget about Season 11's informed lousiness and launch a second golden age for the show.
  • Leslie Jones: Before becoming a cast member in Season 40, Jones was a writer who made a controversial appearance on "Weekend Update" the previous season.
  • Bowen Yang: another writer who got a cameo as Kim Jong Un in season 44 before getting added to the lineup one year later.
  • Similarly, Andrew Dismukes, who joins the featured cast in season 46, appeared in season 45 as a photo of the e-sports commentator who was replaced at the last minute by Lazlo Holmes (host Chance the Rapper).
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • When Saturday Night Live premiered (as NBC's Saturday Night), it was much more of a Variety Show, despite Lorne Michaels wanting the show to be a subverted version of the kind of variety shows they had back in the late 1960s into the 1970s. The first few episodes had multiple musical guests and other performers (Andy Kaufman the most notable of these), with the Not Ready For Prime Time Players only one part of the larger whole. The second episode (October 18, 1975) had no sketch comedy at all other than Weekend Update; the whole rest of the show was given to host/musical guest Paul Simon and other musical acts. Before the first season was finished, the sketch comedy part of the show came to dominate — thanks, in no small part, to the episode hosted by Richard Pryor, which also established SNL as the comedy that wasn't afraid of tackling edgy issues with humor.
  • With few exceptions, Chevy Chase opened each episode with his signature pratfall and then announced the show. The only exceptions were the first episode, in which he didn't fall, the Richard Pryor episode, in which Garrett Morris imitated Chase's fall and opening, and the Ron Nessen episode, in which President Ford himself (on tape) delivered the opening after Chase's fall. After Chase left the show, the fall left with him and now anyone could announce the show.
  • The infamous sixth season (1980-81) included a specific case of Real Life Early Installment Weirdness in the form of cast member Gilbert Gottfried. Watch clips of Gottfried from that season and you will see that he doesn't squint, has a full head of black hair, and (most jarring of all) didn't have his trademark loud, obnoxious voice (it does crop up sometimes, but mostly Gottfried was soft-spoken).
  • When The Blues Brothers made their debut on January 17, 1976, they were dressed as bees (the "Killer Bees" were a recurring first season sketch).
  • During the first few years, it wasn't uncommon for the same person to host more than one episode a season. It still happened occasionally during the Dick Ebersol era, but stopped after Lorne Michaels returned to the show in 1985.
  • In the first "Celebrity Jeopardy" skit, Sean Connery doesn't insult Alex Trebek like he does in future skits; he doesn't even use a single Double Entendre or Your Mom insult. The closest he comes to his future characterization is mistaking the category "S words" for swords. He also didn't appear in the following two skits, only becoming a regular character in the fourth one. The first sketch also featured categories and questions that would actually be plausible for a real game of Jeopardy!. In later sketches, it's a joke that the game has been dumbed down to the point of absurdity, and the celebrities still can't handle it.
  • The first "Bill Swerski's Superfans" skit actually had Bill Swerski (Joe Mantegna) appear as the host, none of the characters suffered from their later trademark heart attacks, and the absurdity of the group's predictions was lampshaded when an oddsmaker (Kevin Nealon) tells them that a game between Mike Ditka by himself and the New York Giants would be a blowout in favor of the Giants.
  • The titular couple in "The Couple That Should Be Divorced" were originally identified as "Sally and Dan Harrison" before their names were changed to "The Needlers". Interestingly, the skits as the Needlers indicate that their first names are still Sally and Dan.
  • For a couple months, the show portrayed Kellyanne Conway as a guilt-ridden broken shell over her role in Donald Trump becoming president. After it became clear that she wasn't going away any time soon, was still an avid Trump supporter, and was going to have a role in the then-upcoming Trump administratin, they switched gears as announced with a spoof of "Roxie" from Chicago the day after the inauguration.
  • The show changed its portrayal of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump drastically over the course of the campaign. In early skits Trump, while still portrayed as a bully, was established as fairly intelligent and a Deadpan Snarker, before evolving into Stupid Evil. Clinton, on the other hand, started out as power hungry with No Social Skills, before becoming the Only Sane Man in the face of Trump's lunacy.
• Ear Worm: "Party at My Parents' House". One of the Union soldiers (Jimmy Fallon) feels the traditional tune they're singing isn't interesting enough and interrupts with lyrics about a teen party. Soon, everyone's singing it.
  Fallon: Sorry, I added it. I felt like it needed a fat, catchy hook that people can sing along with. It's good, right?
  Mikey Day: Yeah, I mean it's already stuck in my head!
  Alex Moffat: [nods enthusiastically]
• Easter Episode: In one sketch, Hanukkah Harry and the Prophet Elijah end up saving Easter when the Easter Bunny gets sick, much like Harry did in "The Night Hanukkah Harry Saved Christmas."
• Electrified Bathtub: In the Season 46 Maya Rudolph episode, Maya struggles to remember her time on SNL due to all the times she's dropped her toaster into the bath. "What can I say? I like hot baths and I like hot toast."
• Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: Gilda Radner plays this up with Baba Wawa, her parody of Boston-bred newswoman Barbara Walters.
• Emasculated Cuckold: Parodied in a pre-taped sketch starring Michael B. Jordan as insurance mascot Jake from State Farm, whose policies are so satisfying that he's become an interloper in a suburban couple's marriage. He's always around, acts as a father figure to the kids, and even sleeps in the same bedroom as the wife. The husband is reduced to a paranoid, drunken wreck sobbing about the state of his marriage... until rival insurance mascots Doug and LiMu Emu from Liberty Mutual show up to help him.
• Endangered Pest: A friendly outdoor barbecue is interrupted by an ugly giant bird landing in the middle of the table. The men try to shoo it away, and eventually (since it won't leave) they beat it to death. At the end of the sketch the camera zooms in on a newspaper in the background with the headline "Rare California Condor released back into the wild" with a photo which looks exactly like the bird they just got done killing.
• Ending Theme: "Waltz in A" by saxophonist/band leader Lenny Pickett, first as a piano riff out of commercial (with audience clapping in time) and over the host's parting words. The rest of the band joins as the credits roll. The amount of the the tune (and credits) heard varies based on each live episode's timing from mere seconds after the parting words to up to a potential six minutes. The longest amount is usually during the occasional Christmas episode finale from the Rockefeller Plaza ice rink.
• Erotic Asphyxiation: Concerning the death of Jeffrey Epstein in prison, "everyone"'s conspiracy theories about various parties who must've been behind it are said to be put forward as "anything but" what Michael Che considers the "obvious" answer of... breaking his own neck while trying to get off on choking himself.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: One of the Bill Brasky sketches has a barfly state that "The character of Johnny Appleseed was based on Brasky." This may not be intentional, since Johnny Appleseed is so mythologized that it'd be easy even in real life to assume he's just a fictional folk hero.
• Establishing Character Moment: Pete Davidson had this with his very first appearance on Weekend Update in 2014, in which he established his casual, tolerant, millennial persona by cheerfully admitting that he would go down on a guy for a million dollars, and justified this (as a straight man) in terms of simple economics:
  Michael Che: So you're saying you would go down on a guy for a million dollars?
  Pete Davidson: Of course I would! A million dollars is a steal! I hope he starts at a million. I would do for, like, three thousand, if I had to be honest with myself. [...] People would be like "Pete! You must be gay!" And I'm like, "No, I'm a businessman, okay?" Look, if you're gay it's fine. Me and my friends are just trying to make money. If you won't go down on a guy for a million dollars, you obviously don't care about your family. When I was in high school three years ago, my opinion was different. Whenever I played that game, and my friends asked me if I'd go down on a guy for a million dollars, I'd be like "No. Gross." And I meant that, because times were different. I lived with my mom, at the time, you know? I had food, clothes, I had a TV in my room, I didn't need to go down on a guy. My mom was already doing that. But now I live on my own, you know, so I think two times a year is an acceptable amount of times to go down on a guy. It makes complete sense. Once in the summer, so you have a great summer, you go to Six Flags and bring your entire family, get the flash pass, and once right before Christmas so the whole family eats. I actually think that's quite noble. Just think of how proud you'll be at Thanksgiving dinner when your grandpa's saying grace, and he's like "We'd like to thank Pete's mouth for this wonderful feast." Some people would be like "Hey Pete, won't you have to go to therapy?" And I'm like "Yeah! But guess who can afford therapy now." [smirks]
• Establishing Shot: Most sketches that don't have a theme song use one (and sometimes show the same establishing shot at the end of sketch as well).
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Season 42's finale has a mad scientist competition competing for most evil invention in the world. Host Dwayne Johnson's character, Roy, enters the contest with a child-molesting robot, which disgusts everyone else there.
    Baroness Antarctica: (outraged) Oh, my god!
    Roy: What's wrong?
    Baroness Antarctica: "What's wrong"?! My most evil idea was a blizzard in July!
    Roy: Right. Well, I went in a slightly different direction with the assignment.
  • The Celebrity Jeopardy! 40th Anniversary special has a Video Daily Double about Bill Cosby making a mixed drink. Sean Connery, who terrorizes Trebek with one-liners about his sexuality and Your Mom jokes, is disgusted by it.
    Sean Connery: That was BAD, Trebek!
  • Whenever Jason Sudeikis's Devil shows up on Weekend Update, there is at least one thing that disgusts him, such as the Penn State child sex abuse scandal.
• Even the Girls Want Her:
  • The Cameron Diaz opening monologue has several SNL actors of both genders as obvious plants in the audience just to gush over her. Special mention must be made of Beck Bennet and Aidy Bryant as a man who's already gotten his wife's approval to hit on Cameron -- and not necessarily for a threesome.
  • The Ariana Grande episode of 2016 starts out with Cecily unwittingly revealing that she snuck into Ariana's dressing room to sniff all her clothes.
  • The alien abduction sketches usually lead to Lipstick Lesbian Kate Mckinnon finding some excuse to get really, really close to Ryan Gosling.
  • In a similar vein, the season 48 episode with Michael B. Jordan leads up to Butch Lesbian Punkie Johnson pawing him on at least 2 occasions.
• Everyone Has Standards: During the "Best Buy Firing" sketch, Beth is called a flaming trash-pile by Dana and Niff, but she thanks them for not making fun of her adult braces.
  Niff: C'mon Beth, I mean, we're not monsters.
• Exotic Equipment:
  • Season 43. Natalie Portman reveals that Jar Jar Binks has 17 dicks.
  • All but stated by name in a sketch with Donald Glover as young Lando Calrissian.
    I love the surprise when the clothes come off, and I'm like "oh, that's your that?"
• Extra Digits: A parody commercial advertising a finger removal cream for people with extra fingers.
• Extremely Easy Exam: Played for laughs in the "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketches, where any question the celebrities actually try to answer will inevitably be unbelievably simple, yet the celebrities will fail to answer it. "Final Jeopardy!" always consists of Alex Trebek (Will Ferrell), sick of the celebrities, telling them to write down something simple, only to see them bungle that, too.
  Trebek: Okay, let's just move on to "Final Jeopardy!". And the category is... You know what? I tell you what, just write a number. Any number, any number and you win.
• Eye Scream: Weekend Update Summer Edition brings back Cecily as Carol Anne, who claims that staring into the eclipse of 2017 the week before left her right eye blind. The other one's okay because "it's glass."
• Eyelash Fluttering: The skit "The Lawyer" from season 42 stars host Louis C.K. as a lawyer with surprisingly big eyelashes who uses his unlikely attribute to charm his way out of a case by fluttering his lashes at everyone he talks to.

F

• Fake Guest Star: Beginning in Season 42, Alec Baldwin has being impersonating Donald Trump in nearly every episode despite not being an official cast member.
• Fake-Hair Drama: A parody commercial was about avoiding this trope by using a pubic hair transplant instead.
• Fake Orgasm: The sketch "Katz's Deli" is set in the location where the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally... was filmed. Four women are sitting at the same table from the movie, and they start to take turns "playing the Meg Ryan part." When it comes time for "Rhonda's" (played by Leslie Jones) turn, her fake orgasm consists of monologuing an entire oddly specific sexual encounter involving her "brother's husband" in a public bathroom, among a few bizarre details, which puzzles her friends.
• Fan Disservice:
  • The Love-ahs, a middle-aged couple played by Rachel Dratch and Will Ferrell, regularly disturb other characters and the viewer with public displays of affection, which may include plates of spiced meat, and explicit purple-prose-laden details about their...lovemaking.
  • Kristen Wiig's character Shana was a buxom, breathy-voiced Expy of Marilyn Monroe, whose appearance at a party would be hotly anticipated by all the male characters, who would ignore the only other female character. When Shana showed up, she would behave like a stereotypical Brainless Beauty, except that she would invariably start to behave in shatteringly unsexy ways (delivering an incredibly long belch or fart, accidentally defecating, telling a story about how she went ducking for apples but mistakenly ate cow manure instead). All of the men except one would be completely turned off.
  • During Season 42, Margot Robbie plays a hot librarian that students are lusting after... until she starts doing horrific things like letting her hair fall out, taking out her teeth, showing embarrassing tattoos, and murdering a woman.
  • Resident hottie Cecily Strong gets to dress up as Princess Jasmine in "recreation" of the iconic magic carpet flight... and then she starts getting hit by stuff.
    "I think that airplane just emptied its toilet on us!"
  • Cecily parodies the online appearance of judge Jeannine Pirro, which went memetic because she was clearly drunk at the time, but goes a few steps further with the Zoom signal getting messed up and Cecily going through unannounced costume changes, looking increasingly skimpy as well — except it's still Jeannine Pirro going further Off the Rails.
  • A post-9/11 sketch had Will Ferrell going into a business meeting wearing a red-white-and-blue thong.
• Fanservice:
  • The Kellyanne Conway musical number parodying "Roxie" from Chicago has Kate McKinnon singing in a short flapper dress and playing up the Blonde Republican Sex Kitten act.
  • Cecily Strong as tech savvy shopper Jill Davenport appears on Weekend Update, then skips clear over that subject by flirting with Colin Jost, taking off her jacket and everything.
    "Oh my god you can totally see down my shirt and everything..."
  • One sketch from the John Cena episode is about Aidy Bryant as a bookstore employee who briefly shows her bra. Then again, she's with John Cena.
  • One episode hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had them showing their "Dope Squad" (in a parody of the music video of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood"), and much like the music video, the sketch featured them in a lot of Costume Porn. One such outfit was what could be best described as a mink coat that flashed their fishnet-covered legs. Tina also gets to pose with a long gun, while also showcasing her legs.
  • Nasim Pedrad as Kim Kardashian had the frame-fitting fashion and The Tease attitude of the original down to a T. Pretty much every sketch involving Pedrad's Kardashian uploaded on YouTube will have a comment saying something to the tune that she looks just as sexy as the original, if not more.
  • The Ronda Rousey episode has a spoof of those "Bachelor" shows, with Ronda and all the SNL ladies in dresses showing at least some cleavage. Even musical guest Selena Gomez joins in with a Cleavage Window dress!
  • Lindsay Lohan's first episode hosting features a Harry Potter sketch in which all the male Hogwarts students are stunned at how hot Hermione got during the summer. Lohan wears a low-cut sweater and at one point uses a giant magnifying glass positioned just right for the cameras.
  • Sarah Michelle Gellar's second episode hosting features a pre-recorded commercial parody sketch for Holding Your Own Boobs Magazine. Gellar is shown topless, using only her hands to cover her breasts, as she does an infomercial-style pitch for the magazine. She also recreates Christina Aguilera's raunchy routine from her "Dirty" video wearing the same skimpy outfit.
  • Britney Spears plays an 18th century milkmaid re-enactor in a very revealing top with a lace up front who churns her butter in an extremely suggestive manner.
  • Katy Perry makes fun of her appearance on Sesame Street being banned due to her revealing costume with the character of Maureen, a teenage librarian who has "developed over the summa" and whose cleavage is now exploding out of her Elmo t-shirt.
  • Season 49 has a sketch with Heidi Gardner as a Consummate Professional secretary who has an accident when she sits on her desk and it collapses — and somehow causes her top to come off, leaving her in her bra.
  • A later episode adds context for a change, with an AA meeting of women who are all immediately smitten with host Jacob Elordi as an unwitting new member. They all start vying for his attention, and Punkie Johnson deliberately undoes her top to show her bra, though the effect is more hilarious than fanservicey when the mass corpsing starts.
• Feedback Rule: Will Ferrell & Ana Gasteyer's recurring sketch about middle school music teachers Marty Culp & Bobbie Moyhan-Culp, who are there to do a gig by playing popular music in a classical style, always begins with mic feedback. "Ooh, we got a real hot mic here."
• Finger-Snapping Street Gang: Parodied in the sketch "Cobras & Panthers" where Norm Macdonald plays the Straight Man leader of a gang called "The Cobras" who has to deal with the other gang members breaking out into spontaneous song and dance, complete with them all snapping their fingers, before they are confronted by a rival gang.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Season 44. Host John Mulaney plays the one white guy at a predominantly African-American wedding reception that gets dragged into a complex dance routine, and for some reason when the DJ calls out for everyone to take out their church fans, John somehow has one already. Turns out he already knows some of the folks here, including one from church.
• Formerly Fat: All the testimonials of the "Ride the Snake" weight loss method, but Jimmy Tango (presently with the build of Jim Carrey) more than anyone, whose hysterical paeans to his own radical weight-loss method seem to stem from days when people would "stuff a letter into my mouth" if he wore a blue suit and yawned.
• Frazetta Man: The "Bioflex" commercial introduces a home workout system, consisting of a vicious genetically-engineered apeman that the hapless customer is forced to fight (read: get beaten senseless by).
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Season 49. The "I'm Just Pete" song has Pete Davidson bring up "a guy whose name I can't say legally", before they flash a single frame with Kanye West.
• From Bad to Worse: The Chucky Lee Bird 'Greatest Hits' album infomercial where the singer seems to be doing innocuous '50s-style rock and roll love songs but then each subsequent song played reduces the age of the various females that Chucky is singing about from 17 through 12. Then the summary of tracks listed mix in sexual predator behavior (with the song titles implying that the singer openly knows his pedophilia behavior is illegal and wrong) along with a love song that describes love for an 11 year old. Then it gets bad for the male host where not only he admits that the singer is the host's grandfather (and tries to use that as an excuse to keep the infomercial going), but also revealing that Chucky Lee Bird actually made these pedophila songs in the 1980s (possibly implying he's still alive and getting residuals for his pedophilia songs, and is not in prison) when the behavior should have been noticed and reported.
• From the Mouths of Babes:
  • Weekend Update guest and child actor Lauren Parsons will talk about the news she's been hearing from grown-ups... who probably should have watched what they said around minors, even if they look as old as Vanessa Bayer.
    Michael Che: "Do you even know what 'sexual harassment' means?"
    Lauren: "Oh yes. [...] (Donald Trump) told the stewardess she looked nice... And then put both hands up her skirt!"
  • One season 43 Cold Open pulls this off with actual kids, all of whom have been educated by their parents on current events a little too thoroughly.
    (slight stutter) "I want an NBC... an embassy that's still in Tel Aviv!"
• Fun-Hating Confiscating Adult: Cheri Oteri's recurring character Rita DelVecchio, who would tell kids "I keep it now! It's mine now!" when their football/novelty flying disc/etc. would land on her lawn or porch.
• Funeral Cut: In a season 45 episode, A wife makes a disgusting "salad" overnight, which her husband and kids predictably hate. After they leave her, she attempts to eat the entire salad by herself, resulting in the scene cutting to her grave.
• Funny Background Event: "Basketball Scene" has two supporting actors trying to play basketball and ruining takes in the background while the stars talk in the foreground.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • Al Sharpton (played by Kenan) is under the impression that Japan has a KKK — Karate, Karaoke and Kaiju. Then again this is a guy who keeps pronouncing MSNBC "Ms. NBC — NBC for women, I guess."
  • There's a parody commercial about a cheaper alternative to Angie's List (kind of an online Yellow Pages where you find handymen) called Aron's List... then it's revealed that it stands for American Registry Of Non-violent Sex-Offendors.
    Vanessa: What about janitors?
    Bobby: (creepy smile) There are literally thousands of us!
    Vanessa: Even dog walkers?
    Jay: (Kubrick Stare on) I'll do it.
  • The Charles Barkley episode from Season 43 has him selling a product called Ned's Roach Away, which exterminates bad roaches by using good roaches carrying tiny AR-15s.

G

• Gag Dub: One Cold Open has Jay-Z (Jay Pharoah) and Solange Knowles (Sasheer Zamata) explaining what the CCTV footage of them getting into a fight was really about, by layering the "actual audio" over it.
  Solange: Oh my god there's a spider on you!
• Gay Best Friend: Parodied and inverted. A gay man laments that his female friends are draining, so he does his own unwinding with a Straight Male Friend, a heterosexual gamer jock who has no expectations about emotional effort, attachment or spending money.
• Gallows Humor: Immortalized in the first episode following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York. Mayor Rudolph Guiliani said in a press conference that one of the first orders of business was to get Saturday Night Live back on the air, he appeared in person along with actual members of the relief team clearing away debris and rescuing stranded individuals, explaining how the show was a New York institution and continuing business as usual is the best way to keep the terrorists from winning. Lorne Michaels queried, "But can we be funny?" and his reply was "Why start now?"
• Game Show Goofballs: Game shows featuring less-than-brilliant contestants have often been a source of comedy during SNL's long run.
  • The best-known example is the recurring "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketch where an exasperated Alex Trebek (Will Ferrell) has to regularly contend with celebrity contestants who are either blissfully ignorant, self-absorbed, or — in the case of Sean Connery (Darrell Hammond) — belligerent and antagonistic. The categories start off normal, but quickly turn into childish and blatantly easy stuff like "Colors That End In 'Urple'" and "Drummers Named 'Ringo'", and categories with no clues whatsoever like "Automatic Points" and "I Have a Chardonnay" (the latter additionally allowing Trebek to have a glass of wine).
  • In "Should You Chime In On This?", the contestants are uninformed loudmouths who are asked to refrain from adding their opinions on a given topic. Despite the promise of prize money, they prove themselves incapable of keeping their thoughts to themselves.
    Host: We bring out three idiots and give them hot button-issues, and ask them, "should you chime in on this?" The answer should always be "no".
  • "Where'd Your Money Go?" is a game show where professional athletes, "the world's most ignorant millionaires", are asked if they should pursue a series of ludicrous financial ventures. Once again, the host spells out that the answer should always be "no" — and once again he is completely ignored by the contestants.
  • The recurring sketch "What's Wrong With This Picture?" brings some very strange, sometimes perverse contestants on to find a logical problem with a cartoon image. The puzzles are easy enough for a child to solve, but the contestants completely misunderstand the exercise. (The first sketch justifies the poor choice of contestants by noting they were the only ones available "at 2 P.M. on a weekday.") For example, an image depicts a woman looking in a mirror, with the obvious mistake being that she wears a belt and her reflection does not. The contestants' guesses for what's wrong with the picture include "She's 4 years old and the boobies grew too fast," "Her twin's in that fish tank and she can't get out," and "She just did blackface and got away with it."
• Gasshole:
  • One sketch has Alec Baldwin as a high school coach pushing Mikey Day to break the class sit-up record... which inadvertently leads to toots and parps with every rep, ending with a long drawn-out peep.
  • One sketch set in the golden age of Hollywood has Vanessa Bayer as a screen diva struggling to do one scene despite her own uncontrollable tooting and parping (there's even a squelch). The scene ends with Special Guest Dwayne Johnson holding her in a tight embrace (heavily implied to be squeezing out the last of it!)
  • In the 2009 January Jones episode, Grace Kelly (Jones) can't stop farting while shooting Rear Window.
  • In the 1993 Kevin Kline episode, Kline plays an Italian actor who repeatedly farts while wooing an American tourist.
• Generic Cop Badges: In "The Shooting", the two police officers who show up near the end have the same generic "POLICE DEPT." patches on their arms as well as what can be assumed to be nondescript badges.
• Genius Bruiser: Dwayne Johnson's recurring character Koko Watchout, a wrestler who may have missed the point of wrestling — instead of trashing his longtime opponent Trashyard Mutt (Bobby Moynihan) in the ring, he opts for overly elaborate plots and schemes to destroy Mutt's personal life at a level approaching Gaslighting.
• Germanic Depressives: When Angela Merkel comes on Weekend Update, her dialogue is heavy on this.
  Angela Merkel: (regarding getting TIME Magazine's 2015 Person of the Year and making a lot of goofy faces) I am trying to celebrate, but my body is rejecting it.
• Gift Shake: In a December 2022 Sketch titled "Jennifer Coolidge is Impressed by Christmas Stuff", Chloe Fineman as Coolidge is impressed with holiday staples like lights and carols. At one point she shakes a gift, guessing from the sound that it contains an antique doll with one eye. She is correct.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: "Loco", a music video headlined by Ego Nwodim, has her on the clubbing scene and looking to hook up with a guy (host Regé-Jean Page)... except the song is really about Covid-era quarantine, she's hallucinating returning to the club, and the guy isn't even real. Also not real, musical guest Bad Bunny as the potted plant she thinks is talking back to her.
• Gorn: "The Duel", from the episode with Sandra Oh, is about two 19th century gentlemen about to duel with pistols for the favor of Sandra — until the guns keep misfiring, going wide, ricocheting and tearing through Sandra, who maintains a calm front even as the pellets blast her fingers off and rip through her shinbones!
• Got Me Doing It: On the first Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch, this happens to Alex Trebek after getting so exasperated with Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds referring to the "'S' Words" category as "Swords".
  Alex: We're not doing "Swords"!
• Gourmet Pet Food: Subverted. In one sketch, the elegant packaging illustrations and elaborate descriptions are intercut with actual cat food cans opened onto plates complete with glopping sounds as the meatwad comes out of the can.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: Done in a sketch where the Wishmakers Foundation grants a child's desire to be a sports commentator at a professional game (football the first game, basketball the 2nd). The only football term he knows is "That'll move the chains!" and basketball, "Nothing but the bottom of the net!" This eventually gets taken to a hilarious extreme when the other commentators lets him take over to make up for complaining about the supposed disease (the kid said he had O.C.D. when asked, but this really stood for "Overwhelming Corpse Disease") and eventually begins shouting various sports terms and maneuvers all in the same sentence ending with "NOTHING BUT THE BOTTOM OF THE NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!" and then dies onscreen.
• Groin Attack: "By the Balls", a sketch where Katie Holmes repeatedly grabs Will Ferrell's crotch to interrogate him.
• Group Costume Fail: One Goth Talk sketch features Azrael's brother Glen and a friend (host Chris Farley) crashing the show's Halloween special dressed as the Budweiser Frogs. However, a third friend who was supposed to complete the trio got sick, so the two of them force Azrael to help them complete the "Bud", "Weis", "Er" croaking.
• Gunman with Three Names:
  • From season 39, the (fictional) documentary Killer Files features Serial Killer Mark Allen Henry (Special Guest Jim Parsons).
  • The Boxer from Every Boxing Movie (played by Matt Damon) is named Tommy Ray Donovan, likely for the intimidation factor.

H

• Hair-Trigger Temper:
  • How Barry Gibb (played by Jimmy Fallon) is portrayed in "The Barry Gibb Talk Show". One such example:
    Cruz Bustamante: I'm a real big fan! When I was growing up, I thought you guys were the greatest band around!
    Barry Gibb: Oh yeah, huh? You thought we, you thought we were the greatest? You hear that, Robin? We were! WERE!! Huh? Don't you EVER talk to me like that AGAIN!! I'M BARRY GIBB!!
  • Joe Pesci (Jim Breuer) in "The Joe Pesci Show" sketches, where he'd usually fly off the handle over some little thing a la GoodFellas.
  • One-shot character Johnny Canal (John Malkovich) responds to any questions he can't answer (which is all of them) by just flinging himself at the questioner, Bowie knife in hand.
• Halloween Songs:
  • In "Spooky Song", a pair of teenagers try to hook up in a graveyard during Halloween Night, only for four ghosts to appear and sing about how they each died. One of the ghosts insists on night sharing his story (played by Chance the Rapper), only for the others to make him divulge in order to return to their graves. He reveals that he electrocuted himself to death with a lightning rod up his ass because batteries no longer did it for him.
  • In the sketch "Graveyard Songs", a pair of visitors (Sasheer Zamata and Pete Davidson) wander into a graveyard at night on Halloween, only for the grim reaper statue, a tree and two headbust gravestones to come alive and start singing a jolly halloween tune (the titular Graveyard Song). Unfortunately for them, a pair of ghosts named Paul and Phil (played by (Jim Carrey and Taran Killam) try singing along, but their lyrics derail the song's intent and they spoil the riddle the singers had for the couple.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: Host Sarah Michelle Gellar did a pre-taped commercial parody for "Holding Your Own Boobs Magazine" spoofing handbra-style topless poses in magazines. In the spirit of the magazine, Gellar herself was actually topless for the duration of the sketch, using only her hands to cover her breasts
• Happily Married: Stefon and Seth Meyers get married in Stefon's last appearance after years of buildup.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": A Running Gag in the Chad sketches is that someone will confide something very serious in Chad, only for him to snicker because they said something that could sound vaguely dirty.
  Jennifer Lopez: I'm in love with Alex...Rodriguez. A-Rod.
  Chad: Heh heh. Rod.
  Jennifer Lopez: What more could a girl want? He was a Yankee!
  Chad: He heh. Yank.
• Heroes Love Dogs: Cecily Strong can be seen cuddling her dog, Lucy, in the opening credits. One sketch has her as a bipolar European diva with a Precious Puppy, which she sends running off and then running back to her hands on cue.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Shanice Goodwin: Ninja, as played by Leslie Jones, may have the proper black suit, but ends up stumbling around and creating a much bigger din than Special Guest Scarlett Johansson, the much smaller-sized ninja in white.
• Hippie Teacher:
  • Vanessa Bayer as Miss Meadows during the Miley Cyrus episode in season 39, throwing in several Verbal Tics like it's a field test for Dawn Lazarus.
  • Charlize Theron in season 39 plays a modernized take on this trope — by modernized we mean out of the 80s for a change, a Hell-Bent for Leather biker chick with an e-cig instead of weed.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Weekend Update in season 49 has been taking a particularly bloodthirsty direction, eventually leading to this:

  Colin: In a video on Truth Social, Donald Trump falsely said that Democrats support "abortion up to the 9th month and beyond", saying the baby is "executed after birth"; but he only believes that because when Trump was a baby, a bunch of time travellers showed up trying to kill him.

• Honest John's Dealership: Ned and Fed Jones, a pair of drugged-out street hustlers (played by 1985-86 cast members Damon Wayans and Anthony Michael Hall) who sold everything stolen, including pocketbooks (with ID), bikes, 1980s-style home computers, radios, and 1980s-style cable TV hook-ups.
• Hulking Out:
  • One of Dwayne Johnson's contributions — when Barack Obama (Jay Pharoah)'s patience is tested by negotiations with the Republicans for the last time, his temper breaks and causes him to transform into The Rock Obama!
  • The Idris Elba episode parodies this with "The Impossible Hulk." Rather than turn into a terrifying beast when he gets stressed out, Idris turns into an entitled middle-aged white woman who won't leave until she gets her way.
• Hulk Speak: The team-ups of Tarzan (Kevin Nealon), Tonto (Jon Lovitz), and Frankenstein's monster (Phil Hartman)! One sketch revealed the monster had a completely articulate Evil Twin played by Mel Gibson.
• Humanoid Abomination: Kate Mckinnon's take on Kellyanne Conway. One famous sketch has her surviving a fall out the window that breaks all her limbs just by fixing them back. A followup sketch implies that Deadlights are involved.
• Hypocrite: In one of the "Woodbridge High School Experimental Theatre" sketches, one of the scenes the students perform involves a girl delivering a eulogy to her dead mother, delivering a message about how you should cherish your parents before its too late. This is not appreciated by her actual mother, very much alive and in the audience, who disgruntledly points out that despite the pious and self-righteous tone of the eulogy her daughter is actually a "total bitch" to her on a daily basis.
• Hypothetical Fight Debate: In the recurring sketch "Bill Swerski's Superfans", the Chicago natives sit around discussing who would win things, with the answer always being "Da Bears!" (Or if it's basketball, "Da Bulls!") Or complete non-sequiturs like Mike Ditka vs. a hurricane.