Saturday Night Live / Tropes I to P

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I

• I Am Not Spock: invoked
  • Jim Parsons' monologue in season 39 is an impassioned musical number aptly titled "I'm Not That Guy", complete with the regulars acting as various other well-known examples like Urkel and Fonz.
  Jim: Her role on Murder, She Wrote was sweet old Jessica Fletcher; but Angela Lansbury she robbed 50 banks and nobody could catch her!
  Angela (Kate Mckinnon): (brandishing a pistol) Get down on the ground!
  • During John Krasinski's opening monologue for his Season 46 hosting gig, everybody in the audience keeps calling him "Jim" and bugging him to make The Office references or to invokedkiss Pam.
• I Am Very British: Cecily Strong often puts on a delightfully posh accent for her commercial narrations.
• I Approved This Message:
  • From the parody of Hillary Rodham Clinton's 3 a.m. ad: "I'm Hillary Clinton and I approve this unfair and deceptive message."
  • In the episode where John McCain, then the actual Republican Nominee for President and the election only a few days away, McCain appears in a sketch as himself where he is personally approving the radio ads his campaign is putting together, complete with a live recording of "I approve this message" rather than them sticking a prerecorded version on to the end.
  • In the Seth MacFarlane episode/Season 38 premiere, Barack Obama (now played by Jay Pharoah) prefaced his attack ad on Mitt Romney with, "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message. Uhhhh...but I'm not real proud of it."
  • Done repeatedly in "The Passion of the Dumpty" sketch when the program cut to commercial.
  • One Weekend Update in 2015 attempts a disclaimer of sorts with the Hillary approval edited:
    "I'm Hilary Clinton and I approve this (badly dubbed by what sounds like a black dude) Joke."
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: One recurring sketch set in a mountain lodge has visitors from the big city who came here to deliberately visit a place like this (apparently the lodge is within a stone's throw of a dozen of them), and Bill Hader is Roger, the sole witness cum victim who's always scoffed at. It turns out to be Real After All... behind their backs.
• Ignorant About Fire: One skit has a scene of cavemen hunting party gathered around a campfire. Guest Steve Martin plays The Smart Guy of the group, who develops the idea of encircling their prey to preclude escape. Bill Murray plays The Leader, who is also a Barbaric Bully, and so stupid that he steps into the campfire three times in total, yowling in pain each time.
• I Have Many Names: Nick the Lounge Singer's last name changes depending on what film's theme song he has added lyrics to.
• I Have This Friend:
  • In the Undercover Boss parody with Adam Driver appearing as Kylo Ren of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, who is disguised as "Matt," a radar technician, Matt tells a group of stormtroopers that he has a friend who saw Kylo Ren in the shower and that he had an 8-pack and was shredded.
  • Melania Trump (Cecily Strong) employs this trope to ask Michael Cohen (Ben Stiller) if a woman can testify against her husband:
    Melania: Hello, Michael, it’s Melania.
    Michael: Oh, hey, Melania. I was just talking to Donald about, uh –
    Melania: Oh, huh, yeah. Eh, listen, I have a completely hypothetical question for a friend of mine, okay? If her husband is accused of crime, would she have to testify against him?
    Michael: No.
    Melania: But could she? If she wanted?
    Michael: I guess she could.
    Melania: Oh, my friend will be so happy. Thank you, Michael!
• Imagine the Audience Naked: Subverted in Pamela Anderson's monologue. She was "nervous" because it was her first time hosting, but remembered advice that Tommy Lee gave her: Have the audience picture her naked. That didn't work — she actually had to be naked.
• The Immodest Orgasm: One sketch has Vanessa Bayer, Cecily Strong, Leslie Jones and Special Guest Miley Cyrus visiting the very diner where When Harry Met Sally... was filmed, where supposedly lots of diners have visited just to re-enact that scene.^note They even make sure to have a shot of the real place, Kat's Deli, of which a different shot is already in the OP during this period. Then Vanessa, Cecily and Miley have a go, and they all start goading Leslie into doing it. And then wish they hadn't.
  "OOOHH THE CONDOM BROKE AGAIN MARCO!! YOUR JAGGED PECKER'S TOO SHARP!!!"
• Improv Comedy Is Inane:
  • One of the high school theater sketches incorporates some improv into the show, with the students asking for a suggestion from the audience. An audience member gives "basketball." The students then put on a clearly pre-rehearsed scene about a mother comforting her son after kids are homophobic to him in school, then announcing they're going to have basketball for dinner at the end.
  • One sketch parodies Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. with Chicago Improv, a gritty drama full of obscure references to the Chicago improv scene played as Serious Business. The reviews are very confused.
  "Too much improv," says Improv Magazine.
  • The sketch "Improv Show" from season 40 has an improv troupe named "Prince Charmin" who enter the scene doing corny dance moves and are overly expressive with every single sentence they say. When they interview audience member Robert Durst as a prompt for a scene, he says they have "too much energy" and once the team starts the scene, they end up laughing at all their own jokes.
• Inadvertent Entrance Cue: The third ex-porn star in the "We're not porn stars anymore" skits will walk in and ask "Did somebody say [pun relating to the item being sold]?" — only it's subverted because the cue is never said, and eventually the main girls just have the third one do their schtick regardless.
• Incredibly Long Note: The Arsenio Beckman sketch ends with Phil Hartman (as the announcer) saying, "Don't leave your seats, we'll be right back with more Arseniooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Beckman!"
  • The season 38 premiere has Seth MacFarlane singing a note close to the end of his monologue for 14 seconds.
• Insane Proprietor: 1977's skit "Crazy Ernie," who sells electronics valued at hundreds of dollars for as little as 52¢. He eventually admits he's actually Crazy Ernie's cousin, Crazy Frank, who's deliberately ruining Ernie's business because Ernie stole his girlfriend.
• In-Series Nickname: The much-loved SNL girl group, comprising regulars and the Special Guest if possible, started going with "Nasty Girls" at some point. Aidy Bryant in particular always goes by "Lil' Baby Aidy", which is made into a necklace she wears in "Back Home Baller".
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures:
  • Casting Bobby Moynihan as Kim Jong Un is a ballsy move on its own, but in this sketch the bits of Korean you can make out above the English translator's voice are actually Japanese.
  • Speaking of lil' Kim, the role would later go to Bowen Yang, who's actually Chinese and started out in a non-speaking take on the role (basically mumbling Korean-sounding gibberish while a translator provided the actual dialogue), before going with accented English that was really his Ken Jeong voice.
  • In the game show "Can I Play That?", Jackie correctly answers that a Japanese character can only be played by "anyone who's Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and maybe Pakistani".
    Host: Once you're generally Asian, that's as far as anybody looks into it.
• Intercourse with You: Parodied with the T.T. and Mario album. Most of the songs have the word 'booty' in the title.
• Interfaith Smoothie: The bewildering Church of Confusion sermonette, delivered by His Most Reverend Archbishop Maharishi O'Mulliganstein, D.D.S.
• Interspecies Romance: Aidy Bryant as Tinkerbell's half-sister Tonkerbell is actually a twofold deal — first she mentions that Tink's her half-sister, from their mother being with a housefly, then she reveals she's been dating a mouse.
  Peter Pan: If you say anymore I'll never have a happy thought again!
• It's a Wonderful Plot: Spoofed quite a few times during the show's run. Season 44 has "Ït's a Wonderful Trump", where Donald Trump gets to see what it would have been like if he was never elected President. Melania (Cecily Strong) talks without an accent since she's long left him for someone with better command of English; Kellyanne Conway (Kate McKinnon) looks younger as a result of breaking her Deal with the Devil; and Eric Trump (Alex Moffat) is now smart enough to solve a Rubik's cube. The twist: Robert Mueller (Robert De Niro) is the one guy cursed with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory.
• I Want Grandkids: Exaggerated for laughs in Season 47 Episode 9^*December 18, 2021. Paul Rudd's character is directing a commercial asking moms what they want (as in things that can be bought and sold). The moms keep finding ways to shoehorn grandchildren into what they say.

J-L

• Jerkass Has a Point: Dana and Niff (Cecily Strong and Bobby Moynihan) may be rude and loud especially when they think they're about to be fired, but they tend to be right about why half of their colleagues shouldn't be in customer service in any capacity. And at least one supervisor did mention that "the customers love you". Also their warnings about Andrew tend to be ignored, up until he chloroforms and drags off the supervisor at least once.
• Judgement of the Dead: This appears in a tribute to Rodney Dangerfield. In the sketch, St. Peter reads a list of questions to the late comedian who has arrived at the pearly gates, then simply says, "Okay, you can get in." RD is amazed at this, and St. Peter admits, "I just wanted to hear those jokes one last time." RD is nearly reduced to tears upon realizing that he has finally gotten some respect.
• Karmic Rape: At one point during his tenure as host of Weekend Update, Norm Macdonald joked that Prison Rape, being the worst part of the whole experience, should be formally portioned out during sentencing.
• Kick the Dog: The whole point of the "Super Showcase" sketch is showing the contestant (Vanessa Bayer) everything she didn't win due to one wrong answer.
• The Killjoy: Debbie Downer, played by Rachel Dratch, constantly ruined other people's fun by bringing up unpleasant facts. The character's name became a slang term for a depressing person, and has been added to several dictionaries.
• Kinky Role-Playing:
  • Parodied in a recurring sketch where a couple tries to spice up their sex life by talking dirty and role-playing. However, the girlfriend keeps taking the scenarios to weird places and turning off her boyfriend, such as by role-playing as a dirty third grader or pretending to be the Elephant Man.
    Boyfriend: I want you.
    Girlfriend: Yeah you do, you little bitch.
    Boyfriend: Ooh, you're so mean to me.
    Girlfriend: Because you're my little brother, bitch! Now scram!
    Boyfriend: What?
  • A parody of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" has Daddy watching Mommy and Santa Claus kiss as part of a cuckoldry fetish, and then when Santa tries to leave, Mommy and Daddy choke Santa out. Luckily, this is all part of an elaborate role-play they organized on Craigslist.
• Lady in Red: Kristen Wiig in the "Red Flag" commercial takes a... unique approach.
  Narrator: Red Flag. The only perfume that warns men...
  Kristen: I'm f*cking crazy!
• Lame Pun Reaction: In the March 4, 2017 Weekend Update, Jost's U2 pun makes much of the audience groan.
  Che: He insisted on telling that.
• Large Ham:
• Laughing at Your Own Jokes:
  • In "Weekend Update", Bill Hader as culture reporter Stefon often cracks up because the writer of the bit changes the cue cards at the last minute to stuff even more outrageous than planned.
  • In a Celebrity Jeopardy! skit, Sean Connery would nearly always crack up at his own obnoxious jokes while Alex Trebek would wear an annoyed deadpan expression.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the "Family Feud" sketch from the Sterling K. Brown episode in 2018, Jordan Peele (Chris Redd) tells Steve Harvey (Kenan Thompson) that at some point, you have to move on from sketch comedy. Thompson, who's been on the show for 15 seasons as well as All That for five seasons before joining SNL, begins to break character at that point.
• Least Rhymable Word: In The Religetables, during the Salem witch burning part:
  Broccoli and Yam: (singing) "God has a hitch / To right the witch / Without a hitch / We'll watch her twitch / And then we'll pitch / her in a ditch / And it's a cinch..!
  Broccoli: (talking) That doesn't rhyme.
  Yam: (talking) Whatever.
• Leaving Food for Santa: "The Night Hanukkah Harry Saved Christmas". Harry is Subbing for Santa and discovers some milk and cookies out.
  What's this? [sniffs milk] I'd better put this in the fridge before it turns.
• Leno Device: In "Divertor", Leno is shown making jokes on the various scandals that erupt.
• Likes Older Men: Aidy Bryant as Melanie, a middle school girl who goes to a slumber party and falls for her friend's father each time. It's actually explained all of one time when the father is played by Drake:
  Melanie's Mom (Vanessa Bayer): She's not 12, she's 25. We lied to her about how long she was in that Vicodin coma, so she's all horned up and she doesn't know why.
• Literal-Minded: A lovely example when John Mulaney returns for the second time in 2019, pointing out that his first hosting gig was in April 2018, and adding that they have a photo. They show a photo of the calendar page for April 2018.
• Live but Delayed: SNL had three episodes were put on seven-second delay, all of which were hosted by controversial comedians — Richard Pryor (Season 1), Sam Kinison (Season 12), and Andrew "Dice" Clay (Season 15). Outside of that, SNL is only live on the East and Central Time Zones and tape delayed on the Mountain and West—that is, until April-May of 2017, when, for the first time, the show aired live all across the country.
• Long Bus Trip: After beginning the "Coffee Talk" segment as Paul Baldwin, Mike Myers found it was funnier hosting it as Linda Richman. Officially, though, Linda's appearances are just her filling in for her friend Paul while he recovers from "shpilkes in his genecktageesoink."
• Long List:
  • When Dana Carvey impersonated George Michael, complaining about how the editor of his music video didn't follow his instructions:
    Carvey: It went: Shot of boot, beard shot, belt, bullfighter, hair, crowd, face, hand, bull, boot, hair. And I told them specifically it was supposed to be: Butt shot, shot of the hand, back to the butt, hand, butt, hand, butt, hand, butt, belt, butt, beard, butt, butt, earring, face, butt, earring, tight, hold on the butt, hold on the butt; it's a formula, but it bloody works!
  • The sketch digging about a teacher being sued for sex with a student unknowingly veers into one of these.
    Prosecutor (Taraji P. Henson): Did the kids call you names?
    Student (Pete Davison): Um, yes ma'am; The Man, Luckiest Guy Ever, My Hero, Baller, Lil' Pimp, Lil' Baller, The One, Goodyear Pimp, Fred Pimpstone, Ren and Pimpy, King of the Teachers, After-School Special, Teacher's Petter, The Boy who Lived, Gavin the Great, Magic the Gavin-ing, Legend, Supercalifragilisticexpi-such-a-dope-kid, and He who has Sex with Teachers — I'm sorry, that's all I can remember, those were the main ones.
  • Kenan as Dominican baseballer David "Big Papi" Ortiz, spokesman for Conspicuous Consumption and countless endorsements, who's always going into one long list after another. Made even more ridiculous by doing it in presumably his mother tongue.
  • Also from Weekend Update:
    Michael: This week Sony Pictures announced it would not release the movie The Interview, drawing criticism for giving in to terrorist threat. Because studios are only supposed to give in to the threats of actors. And directors, and producers. And agents, and focus groups, and bloggers, theater chains, conservative groups, liberal groups and anyone with a damn Twitter account.
  • A lesser-seen Running Gag in Weekend Update involves deliberately subverting this with a scroll that's deliberately done a little too fast just to show how short the list really is. For example, episode 2 of the 2017 Summer Edition lists everything the Economic Advisory Council accomplished before it collapsed: Had One Meeting, Got the Wifi Password, Ordered Thai food, Everyone Quit.
  • One season 43 episode has Bill Hader going into a list of inbreeding-related conditions after it's revealed that incest is supposedly commonplace in Ireland.
  • Pete Davidson again in season 44, regarding his new relationship with Kate Beckinsale, starts going into a list of every Hollywood relationship where the guy was the significantly older one. It's ridiculous, even if you ignore how Larry King pops up three times.
• Long-Runner Cast Turnover: The show's cast and crew turnover is as legendary as its peak-and-valley quality, and the reason why it has such a love/hate relationship with viewers. According to show creator Lorne Michaels on an E!-channel special about the history of the show (from Season 1 to 28), this is the secret to the show's longevity. Seasons 6 and 11 have been the only seasons where the entire cast turned over at once. The fact that both seasons were poorly received and put the show's future in doubt explains why Michaels has since made sure to keep at least a core of the previous year's cast even in drastic overhauls.
• Long-Runners:
  • SNL has hit 47 seasons and shows no signs of ending its run anytime soon (with Lorne himself stating that the only way the show is going to end is if he dies or decides to retire, as he really doesn't want SNL to fall into another showrunner's hands like what happened between 1980 and 1985). It has survived cast and crew changes, eight U.S. Presidents (starting with Gerald Ford), harsh critics, low ratings, threats of cancellation, fickle fans, radical (and not-so-radical) social and cultural shifts, world and domestic events that often make it hard to laugh at the news (particularly the September 11th attacks, as it happened in the city where the show is broadcast), and all of the Dueling Shows that have aired as alternatives (taking out Fridays and MADtv, which were specifically made to get disillusioned fans of SNL to watch their shows and see them as better). Its presidential election spoofs are now so traditional, they're a de facto part of the American Political System. The show has run for so long that all of its current cast members are younger than the show itself.^note Leslie Jones was the most recent cast member to be born prior to SNL's debut. She left the show in 2019. Darrell Hammond is still technically part of the show but as the announcer, rather than a cast member.
  • A lot of cast members have been on for more than seven years like Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Nealon, Tim Meadows, Al Franken, Fred Armisen, Kenan Thompson, Seth Meyers, and Darrell Hammond. Kenan currently holds the longest tenure out of any cast member in the show's history, currently in his 19th season.
• Loony Fan:
  • The current page quote comes from a sketch about a support group for obsessive fans of Mr. Belvedere. They play a game called "Should and Shouldn't" which "helps keep the line between fantasy and reality a little less blurry":
    Chris Farley: I should want to say "Hi!" to Mr. Belvedere. I shouldn't want to kidnap him and keep him in a big glass jar in my basement.
    Tom Hanks: Okay, okay. That's good, we get that. But why? Why shouldn't you do that?
    Chris Farley: [beat] Uh, because his breath would fog up the glass and I couldn't see him then?
  • They once did a direct parody of Misery featuring Roseanne Barr as Dana Carvey's biggest fan. After Carvey announces he's retiring the Church Lady character, then gets into a car accident with John Lovitz, Barr rescues him (but apparently left Lovitz to die). When she finds out he's killed off the Church Lady, she starts trying to dress him up as her, to the point of painfully shoving orthopedic shoes on his mangled legs. They get in a fight until Lovitz shows up completely unharmed, kills Barr, and kills Carvey so he can steal the Church Lady character.
  • A Season 46 sketch parodies the music video for Eminem's "Stan," except it focuses on a deranged fan of Santa Claus named Stu writing a letter asking for a PS5 before presumably killing himself when Santa doesn't get back to him.
• Loony Librarian: Exaggerated in a sketch with Margot Robbie as a Hot Librarian who turns out to be a creepy, murderous, acid-spewing alien.
• Loophole Abuse: "Celebrity Family Feud" with Jimmy Fallon as Jim Parsons. Jim manages to nail an overly obscure answer on the board, before revealing that he was able to get it up there just by being one of the 100 people surveyed.
• Lounge Lizard: Bill Murray's Nick the Lounge Singer is the Trope Codifier for the stereotypical lounge singer.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: The gimmick of the character "Guy Who Just Bought a Boat" is that he's a man who's so terrible at sex that he bought a boat in order to compensate.

M

• Machine Monotone: Utilized in the "Robot Repair" sketch.
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: A lot of people who recap episodes like Rich Tackenburg and Rob Cesternino say that a lot of current characters do this. Such as Drunk Uncle, The Porn Stars, or Riblit.
  • Reese De'What will often open Cinema Classics by remarking upon a time when his wife asked him a question and he gave her a snarky, insulting answer, then he says to the camera, "Worst. [insert event]. Ever."
• Magical Negro: Invoked with Kenan as a racelifted take on the angel from It's a Wonderful Life.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places:
  • "Teachers Snow Day" leads to two teachers "having Fifty Shades sex" somewhere in the school.
  • The first part of the Leslie & Kyle arc ends with them doing it in the guest host's dressing room.
• Malaproper:
  • Two recurring Vanessa Bayer and Cecily Strong characters are a duo of porn actresses-turned-advert stars with barely functioning brains. Naturally, they have difficulty with some of the words they have to say in their commercials.
  Cecily's character: All the grits and grammar of a high-class shoe.
  Vanessa's character: Good ribbons.
  • Bobby Moynihan does this a lot, most famously as Drunk Uncle, but also as Anthony Crispino, a "second-hand news correspondent" who has a habit of mangling words when retelling the gossip he's overheard.
• Man of a Thousand Voices:
  • Bruno Mars is revealed to be this in the Pandora Power Outage sketch. Ariana Grande repeated the achievement.
  • Kenan Thompson has done the most impressions on the show. However, people who do podcasts like Rich Tackenburg and Rob Cesternino say he's terrible at impressions.
  • Jay Pharaoh has a recurring "Secret X Meeting" bit in Weekend Update — in season 41 he goes into a string of impressions to illustrate a secret meeting of black comedians (including SNL alumni Tracy Morgan and Chris Rock among others), and in another one it's a string of rappers.
• Manchild: A sketch in the Selena Gomez episode parodies Old Enough with Old Enough: Longterm Boyfriends. Instead of a 4-year-old going on errands, it's a 34-year-old who spends so much time playing video games and LEGOs that he's totally lost when his girlfriend asks him to run an errand for her. He breaks down crying when he can't find the makeup she wants at Sephora.
• Marijuana Is LSD: In one sketch from the Regina King / Nathaniel Rateliff episode, Regina's cop character unknowingly eats a bunch of weed gummies from a stash of evidence in the cop car, leading to a musical acid trip featuring singing gummy bears, a demonic Marge Simpson, and an adult version of the sun from Teletubbies.
• Martial Arts for Mundane Purposes: In the early years of the show, one of John Belushi's standard sketches involved a samurai warrior using his sword skills. One specific sketch was "Samurai Delicatessen", where he used his katana to cut up food items such as meats.
• May–December Romance:
  • A Season 41 episode had Tina Fey and Amy Poehler host Meet Your Second Wife!, where three unsuspecting, happily-married men (and their wives in the audience) get to meet their future partners as they are that moment. The first one is an eighth-grader, and the second one is 5 (and will meet her husband for real when her college roommate tells her about the internship program her dad's company runs). The third one is a college sophomore, which doesn't seem so bad...until it's revealed she's three months pregnant with the actual bride-to-be.
  • Season 43 has Bill Hader as a wheelchair-bound geriatric who's married to Cecily acting her actual age... and they're trying for a baby.
  • A Season 46 episode has Mikey Day and Heidi Gardner as a 26-year-old man and his 106-year-old wife, with the man debunking concerns that he only married the clueless elderly woman for her money.
• Mistaken for Destitute: Parodied in a high school theater sketch, in which the Soapbox Sadie teenage actors put on a scene to demonstrate why not to judge a book by its cover. They ask someone hunched over and warming up his hands if he's homeless, to which he replies, "No, I'm just cold. I'm actually very rich." Then they ask someone standing up proudly if she's rich, and she replies, "No, I just have good posture. I'm homeless."
• Mistaken for Pedophile: In a rare onscreen appearance, then-writer Adam McKay is a Weekend Update correspondent polling kids on their reactions to the 2000 Presidential election. Unwisely, he asks them to step into the back of a windowless van in order to respond.
• The Mockbuster: One sketch is about the voice acting work behind the new movie Zoo-opolis, which even has the voice actors mimicking well-known celebrities (similar to the Pandora Power Outage sketch) in lieu of being able to afford real ones.
  Kenan: Alright, as you know we just completed the initial story board for TV movie Zoo-Opolis. It’s an animated film about a city that’s full of animals.
  Octavia: Is that like, Zootopia?
  Kenan: "Is that like, Zootopia?" Who are you? My lawyer?
• Monochrome Casting: The show has received some criticism in The New '10s for not having a diverse cast. The majority of its cast members have been white and the show has rarely had more than one non-white cast member at a time (and has never had any fully Asian cast members). The show has especially come under fire for not having any black female cast members since Maya Rudolph's departure in 2007(and for having had only 4 black female cast members in its 38 year history), a fact that was highlighted when Kerry Washington guest starred (the Cold Open featured her having to play Michelle Obama, Oprah and Beyonce in the same sketch because of the lack of black women, also mocking the show's tendency to use black male actors in drag). SNL attempted to remedy this by holding a casting call in December 2013 specifically for black women, and in January 2014 hired black woman Sasheer Zamata. In season 40, SNL hired (or rather, rehired) Michael Che (a former short-lived SNL writer who quit to do The Daily Show, but was called back to SNL when Cecily Strong decided that Weekend Update wasn't for her) and Leslie Jones as cast members. Because of this (and the fact that Kenan Thompson, Jay Pharoah, and Sasheer Zamata haven't been fired or quit), SNL's 40th season is the first time that the show has had more than three black cast members and the first time they've have two who were black women.
• Mistaken for Cheating: In a sketch built around wartime letters, a homefront wife becomes paranoid about her husband having spoken with a French woman, and even tries to claim a Double Standard at work when he asks horrified questions about how she managed to produce footage of herself palling around with the Nazi high command.
• Mood Whiplash: In-universe, the couple on the "100 Floors of Frights" Halloween ride are enjoyably freaked out by everything they see until David S. Pumpkins — who is basically just a smarmy guy in a suit covered with pumpkins accompanied by two guys in skeleton costumes doing a dance — shows up out of nowhere. At which point they are so bewildered by how weirdly out of place he is and the fact that he keeps showing up that they spend the entire rest of the ride trying to figure out what his deal is.
  David S. Pumpkins: Any questions?
  Man: YES! SEVERAL! I mean, what, he has the middle initial now? I am so in the weeds with David Pumpkins!
  • The Happy Smile Patrol Sketch lives on this trope, rapidly cutting between a saccharine kids show and a news report detailing that the entertainers the audience just saw are drug smugglers, murderers and violent militia members.
• Most Writers Are Male:
  • The recurring "ESPN Classic" sketches are about women-only sports with Jason Sudeikis and Will Forte as commentators, and being sponsored primarily by feminine products leads to some of the most awkward Product Placement in history.
  • Due to the Day Without Women protest, all of the writers were male for one infamous sketch.
• Mouthing the Profanity: The show once featured a sketch with Joe Pesci playing his Goodfellas character buying a pinkie ring. He goes to the mirror to try it on and begins miming a conversation which ends as an angry argument full of F words. Today, censors would pixelate his mouth and no one would get the joke.
• Mr. Fanservice:
  • A large number of Taran Killam's otherwise unrelated roles have him go sleeveless. Or shirtless. Or less.
  • After Taran's departure, Beck Bennet has inherited that role; his shorter frame makes his dad bod even more pronounced, and his best known role is the perpetually shirtless Vladimir Putin. The Christmas episode of season 44 even has him in a tight tee in the Cold Open.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • The SNL Digital Short "Lazy Sunday", in which Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap with hugely inappropriate levels of aggression about their Sunday afternoon of waking up late, getting cupcakes together and going to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
  • "So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long lives this and gives life to me... SECTIONAL COUCHES!"
  • The 2017 sketch "Papyrus" featured Ryan Gosling reacting to the fact that whoever did the poster for Avatar used the Papyrus font, as if it were a horrific murder that the killer got away with. What makes it especially surreal is that the poster designer behaves exactly the same way.
    Ryan Gosling: I know what you did! I KNOW WHAT YOU DIIIID!
• Muppet Cameo: Back in the late '90s, Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, Tracy Morgan, and Chris Kattan used to do an annual Christmas song. When Fallon, Morgan, and Kattan left, The Muppets came in to cheer up Horatio!
• Mushroom Samba: Episode 12 of Season 46 has a sketch titled "The Negotiator." In it, host Regina King plays a police officer who is called in to handle a hostage situation, but before arriving she admits that she ate en entire bag of gummy bears in a bag labeled EVIDENCE. What ensues is her hallucinations of giant weed gummies, lava men, the devil as Marge Simpson, and the Baby Sun from Teletubbies all grown up.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: One sketch in the Ryan Gosling episode is for a dating app named Settl. They guarantee a date by taking out the swipe left function. The tagline? "Tick tock".

N

• N-Word Privileges:
  • One of the most famous sketches in the history of the show was the first-season "Word Association" sketch in which Chevy Chase's character gives Richard Pryor's character a series of increasingly nasty racial slurs during the word association test. It ends with a terrified Chase giving an enraged Pryor the job.
  • The 70s Buddy Cop Show parody "Dyke & Fats" about a pair of Chicago policewomen: "Les Dykawitz"(Kate McKinnon), who's gay and "Chubbina Fatzarelli" (Aidy Bryant), who's large. After they solve a case they congratulate each other, calling each other by their nicknames but when the Da Chief (host Louis C.K.) says "Good going Dyke and Fats!" they get angry and yell "You don't get to call us that! Only we get to say it! Those are our words! We love each other, we're friends!" and then the end credit reads: "Created by Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant".
  • Dave Chappelle dropped the N-word in his opening monologue in Season 42.
  • A joke by Michael Che during Weekend Update on the 42nd Season about why one of the former cast members of The Cosby Show didn't denounce Bill Cosby once he got accused of sexual assault was because, according to her, "That nigga made me rich."
  • Also in Weekend Update, Leslie Jones hitting on Colin by calling him "you vanilla milkshake" or something similar, but whenever Colin tries to respond with anything including the word "black" she immediately goes "no, you can't say that".
  • Subverted in season 44, when Michael Che claims that the terms of his contract only allow him to say it up to 4 times for the entire season. Then he uses up one. Seth Meyers jokingly complained that he was here for 12 years and Lorne never gave him one. "Probably for the best..."
  • In one filmed bit where he's undercover as a liberal white woman, Che says "Your masculinity is getting mad toxic, my nigga!" to (white) Alex Moffat.
  • One Season 6 sketch has Charles Rocket (as Uncle Lester) drop it completely uncensored when talking about hunting communists as game, comparing the odds of shooting of one to that of shooting "a jew or a nigger" as one and the same. One can consider his eventual firing over his similarly uncensored "fuck" in the finale as a bit of delayed Laser-Guided Karma over this.
  • One sketch in Season 48 has Mikey Day forced to sub in for host Dave Chappelle in a sketch about Black Heaven. As Mikey reads the cue cards, he realizes the next line has the N-word in it and flat out refuses to finish the line. Kenan Thompson and Ego Nwodim admit that it's a good call.
• Naked People Are Funny:
  • While not nearly naked, the sketch with Beck Bennet and Kyle Mooney as two out-of-control kids has them in tshirts and tightey-whiteys getting into repeated scuffles, defused by their father turning a hose on them until they're soaked to the skin.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: An in-universe example for a sketch from the Jonah Hill episode. In a send-up of Cluedo, six murder suspects, half male half female, are all in different colors but deliberately jumbled up. Turns out the culprit is the only one whose color and gender match a canon character — Kate Mckinnon as "Mrs White".
• Nested Story Reveal: In the "Totinos" sketch, what starts out seeming like an ad for a microwavable snack ends up being a promo for The X-Files instead.
• Never Heard That One Before: In the 40th Anniversary Special, during the Wayne's World sketch, one of the top 10 reasons why SNL is great is because every season, some reviewer titles their review "Saturday Night Dead" (usually in a review about how weak and lame the show is/has become), and acts like they're the first person to come up with that.
• New Season, New Name:
  • When this show first started, it was called "NBC's Saturday Night" because there was already a show on ABC called "Saturday Night Live" (this one had Howard Cosell as a permanent host). The NBC version wouldn't be officially called Saturday Night Live until season three (in season two, the "NBC" part of the title was dropped and the show was called Saturday Night).
  • The 1980-81 season was renamed "Saturday Night Live '80" in order to differentiate it from the five Lorne-produced seasons before it. The "80" was dropped in January 1981 (and the rest of the Jean Doumanian season was dropped a month later).
  • On most anniversary seasons, specifically the 15th, 20th, 25th, 35th, and 40th seasons, the show is referred to in the opening credits and commercial break bumpers as Saturday Night Live, plus the corresponding number (SNL 15, SNL 25, SNL 35, and SNL 40).
  • The name of "Weekend Update" changed a couple of times during the Dick Ebersol era. It changed back to "Weekend Update" when Lorne Michaels returned in 1985.
• News Parody: Weekend Update, which has been a part of the show since the beginning, is arguably the Trope Maker for this genre.
• Nice to the Waiter: Jonah Hill's recurring character Adam Grossman, a 6-year-old who inexplicably talks like an Alter Kocker insult comic whenever he's dining at Benihana, but is somehow popular enough that he and the teppanyaki chef (Fred Armisen) know each other by name.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: One Weekend Update brings up the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty, which is supposedly "based on the crayon drawings of a 5-year-old after his parents were murdered."
• No-Hoper Repeat: When "Vintage SNL" appears on Saturday night at 10PM EST, you can rest assured NBC had nothing else to put in that timeslot.
• No Indoor Voice:
  • The Loud Family, with Bill Murray and Jane Curtin as the parents, and two daughters played by Gilda Radner and Special Guest Carrie Fisher. They're visited by one daughter's boyfriend, a soft-spoken Dan Aykroyd; then by the other daughter's boyfriend, John Belushi as an airport signaller who still has his hearing protection on and never notices; then by the police.
    Bill: WE ACTUALLY HAD THREE DAUGHTERS, BUT ONE OF THEM PASSED AWAY IN A SKIING ACCIDENT!
    Dan: I'm sorry... how did it happen?
    Bill: AVALANCHE!!
  • Will Ferrell as Jacob Silj, who's apparently been diagnosed with Voice Immodulation Syndrome. The details remain sketchy due to him still being the only patient by 2018.
• Noodle Incident: The "Celebrity Jeopardy!" skits typically start off with Trebek apologizing for some kind of noodle incident that occurred during the previous, unseen, round of the game, e.g. "I apologize for what happened before the commercial, and would like to assure the audience that all three contestants are now wearing pants."
• Non-Standard Prescription: Christopher Walken has a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.
• No Product Safety Standards: Dan Aykroyd's recurring character Irwin Mainway. He's a corrupt salesman; in his first appearance he is trying to persuade a TV reporter that his company's toys are fun and safe for children. The products include a teddy bear with a built-in functioning chainsaw, Johnny Switchblade Adventure Punk, and Bag O' Glass (a bag of real broken glass! Also try Bag O' Sulfiric Acid!), etc. More Hilarity Ensues when he then tries to "prove" that other, safe toys are extremely unsafe. In a later appearance he's running an Amusement Park of Doom that works on similar (un)principles; the sketch ends with the host attacking him out of sheer horror!
• Nostalgia Filter: Those who grew up with the show are among the most vocal critics of its current shape. Also, because 60-minute cable reruns and video compilations have trimmed a lot of the weaker material from the older shows, it's easy to forget that even during its good seasons SNL had bad moments (from lousy hosts and musical guests to recurring characters and sketches that suffer from being underdeveloped and/or annoying — though this can apply to the stuff that people actually remember or have currently seen). The DVD box sets of uncut and complete seasons of the show, in the original order and from the beginning, may be helping to undercut this.
• NOT!: In Undercover Boss: Where Are They Now?: Kylo Ren, Kylo Ren goes undercover as the intern "Randy" and learns that the interns do the "bitch work." He asks a stormtrooper who is in charge of fuel invoices and the stormtrooper tells him that he's looking for "Deez Nuts."
  Randy: Hilarious. Said no one ever.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: In the December 03, 2016 cold open, both Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump and Kate McKinnon as Kellyanne Conway look into the camera and point out that Trump really did retweet a 16-year-old boy.
• Nuclear Family: In the December 19, 2020 episode's skit "Christmas Morning", the family consists of a mother, a father, a son and a daughter.

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• Obfuscating Stupidity: In the "Celebrity Jeopardy!" Sketches, most of the contestants are hilariously stupid. It is implied that regular guest Sean Connery is not nearly as stupid as any of the other contestants, behaving as such just to get a rise out of Trebek.
  Ferrell/Trebek:... And Tom Hanks is caught in a dry cleaning bag.
• Obituary Montage:
  • 'Lindsay Lohan/Jack White': There's an award show for psychics with a montage of people who are going to die that year. Needless to say, this comes as a bit of a shock to the people seen in the video. Ultimately including the entire audience of the show, it predicts them to die when the theater catches fire.
  • "40th Anniversary Special": It shows a genuine montage, introduced by Bill Murray, featuring the cast and crew members who had passed on. To lighten things back up, the final tribute was for Jon Lovitz, with the camera cutting to a very alive and confused Lovitz sitting in the audience. Additionally, it ends with an update coming from Spain: "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
• Obvious Stunt Double:
  • Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy do a jazzy dance behind a sheet, so we only see their outlines. McCarthy's is about 150 lbs thinner than she is.
  • Played for Laughs in season 48, when host Keke Palmer and Cecily get into a Cat Fight. Not just because Keke is pregnant at the time, but the stunties start doing pro wrestling moves and trashing the furniture — Cecily's stuntie even has kneepads!
• Occidental Otaku: Jonathan Cavanaugh-"san" and Rebecca Markowitz-"san", the hosts of Jpop America Funtime Now!, a campus TV programme, are about the most caricaturistic weeaboos you can possibly imagine, much to the frustration of their (white) Japanese studies professor and faculty advisor, Mark Kaufman (Jason Sudeikis).
  Prof. Kaufman: If there is such a thing as a loving version of racism, I think you found it.
• Odd Organ Up Top: An episode (hosted by Jon Stewart) had a sketch where he plays the founder of several boy bands and presents his latest such group, which he genetically engineered himself. It's also revealed that he contaminated one batch and the resulting members came out wrong. One of these members, Ass-Face, has... well, look at his name and guess.
• Old People are Nonsexual: In one "Ladies' Man" sketch, a caller talks about using Viagra with his wife. Leon is briefly disgusted when he learns that the caller is 76 and his wife is 80... then adds, "Um, but, I must say, after all those Viagra I took, it doesn't sound that disgusting, you know!"
• Old Shame: In-universe, there's a TV Funhouse cartoon where a boy and a girl gain entrance to the "Disney Vault", which is filled with old shames from the Disney legacy (such as a really racist cut of Song of the South). Mickey Mouse argues that you have to take the bad with the good.
• Once a Season: This was basically the frequency of John Goodman's and Alec Baldwin's hosting gigs in the -90s.^note Goodman hosted in every season during that decade; Baldwin hosted in every season except 1991-92, 1997-98, and 1999-2000. Also of Steve Martin's and Buck Henry's in the '70s, although in their case they usually hosted more than once a season.
• Once per Episode:
  • The cold open always ends with, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!"
  • The host's monologue always ends with, "We've got a great show tonight, [musical guest] is here, so stick around!"
• Only in Florida:
  • That sketch from the Margot Robbie episode about the news report where the anchors are less concerned about the sinkhole they should be reporting on, and more about why the incredulously attractive Alexandra Kennedy would marry the hilariously Gonktastic Matt Shatt, is set in Florida.
  • From Weekend Update:
    Cecily Strong: A 72-year-old man in Florida attacked the man in front of him for trying to check out more than 20 items in the express lane. Incidentally, "20 items or less" is Florida's only law.
  • Another Weekend Update features Kenan as the policeman who arrested Justin Bieber, and when asked about pulling over a major celebrity:
    "I work in Miami, nothing surprises me. Most cars we pull over have a tiger in the back seat, and an alligator in the trunk guarding the cocaine."
• Only Sane Man: Alex Trebek in the "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketches, who just wants to run a simple quiz show but has to keep dealing with self-absorption, vapidity and bullying from the celebrity guests.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Fred Armisen can't seem to decide on what accent Lawrence Welk actually had.
  Notice how when I pronounce the "th" in "Mother" it's "Mother", but when saying thank you it comes out as "tank yoo"?
• Operators Are Standing By: There's a TV ad offering courses on becoming call center operators. It, of course, ends with "operators are standing by".
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Played with. One sketch is about the three daughters of the king of the ocean, all mermaids — Cecily Strong and Sasheer Zamata are your typical mermaids, but Kate Mckinnon is Shud, who looks less like the vampiric siren you'd expect of a "different" mermaid, and more like that guy who took a toxic waste bath in RoboCop (1987), due to her fish half being blobfish.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • One sketch is about a super-duper-uber-long stretch limo pulling up to a drive-thru, populated by increasingly rich, self-absorbed, eccentric dingbats who opt to let the next guy in line give his order, causing the stretch limo to advance to the next window, one at a time, very very slowly. The payoff comes at the end, when the vehicle's owner reveals himself — Bruno Mars.
  • Weekend Update mentions the Golden Globes and Jacqueline Bisset taking a little too long to reach the stage after winning Best Actress (Miniseries), leading to an appearance by Jacqueline Bisset (played by Vanessa Bayer), who somehow manages to take even longer to reach the Weekend Update desk. They go back to the news stories and check back on her later... and she's still in her seat.
  • Also on Weekend Update, Seth and Cecily throw way too many jabs at the divorce of Bruce and Kris Jenner, one after another.
  • A season 41 Weekend Update somehow leads to Jon Rudnitsky's audition for the Dirty Dancing stage musical, to the tune of an extended version of "(I've Had The) Time of My Life"... which needs to be really extended as Jon's dance goes from botching the overhead suspending part to having to apply CPR, then hiding the body, then getting found by the police and riddled with gunfire...
  • A minor case in "Back Home Baller" when they mention having to help your parents set up their wifi router with a 20-digit passcode... and then recite out the whole thing.
  • "One Voice", a rap song where the lead rapper (Kenan Thompson) introduces a few guest rappers, but can never actually start the song because more emcees keep inviting themselves to the track.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: "Simu & Bowen", which starts off with Simu Liu and Bowen Yang congratulating each other on their representation milestones (Liu was the first Asian Marvel film lead, Yang the first fully Asian cast member). It then turns into the two of them trying to one-up each other in the awards they got for being the first Asian men to do the pettiest things, from "first gay Asian man to mispronounce 'boutique'", "first Asian man to do a Cher impression on SNL", to "the first Asian to avail of the You-Pick-Two promo at Panera Bread". The final punchline is that Bowen can outdo him in milestones simply by being a gay Asian.
• Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: There was a skit, Alex Karras as guest host, where Billy Crystal plays a guy at a soda company who sweats excessively at a board meeting.

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• Parody Assistance: Dionne Warwick loved "The Dionne Warwick Talk Show", where Ego Nwodim portrays her as a self-absorbed old woman who is clueless about today's pop culture. She popped up on the November 6, 2021 version of the skit to be interviewed by her impersonator, even singing a duet with her.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Chris Hemsworth Disguised in Drag to infiltrate a circle of girlfriends just to suss out the estrogen brigade's view of him in his movies. Somehow they think he's been a longtime part of their circle. And he didn't even shave.
  • The spoof of Undercover Boss with Kylo Ren as "Matt the radar technician". All the Starkiller base crew were onto him long before he inadvertently used Force choke in front of them.
• Parallel Porn Titles:
  • From the "Bambi 2002" sketch: "Pokahontass".
  • From the "Disney Vault" sketch: "101 Fellations".
  • One "Former Porn Stars" sketch has special guest Jonah Hill as "legendary" porn director Martin Porn-cese, responsible for such "famous" films as Bangs of New York, Raging Boner, The Departed (Hymen) and In Name Only The Wolf of Wall Street.
• Parking Payback: A memorable sketch had a man played by Christopher Walken on a TV show about pulling pranks, and the prank he played on a man who kept stealing his parking spot... murdering him.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Kate McKinnon as Mrs Santini, who settles the admittedly numerous complaints to her neighbors with the kind of little notes you'd rather not get.
  "How does your baby know my favorite song? [...] It was first recorded by Britney Spears when they push her face first into woodchipper..."
• Pass the Popcorn: A variation in season 48 — host Dave Chappelle deliberately sits out of one sketch and hands the role to Mikey Day, who ends up in a borderline blackface act as he's the one delivering the racially-tinged dialogue that would have been fine coming from Dave. All this while Dave is watching with glee while smoking.
• Payment Plan Pitch: The sketch "39 Cents" parodies Darkest Africa charity commercials, as the poor villagers in the background quickly take offense to Charles Daniels (Bill Hader) asking for a donation of "only 39 cents a day." When he repeatedly refuses their urging to raise the amount asked for, they take him hostage and use the commercial to demand a $200 ransom.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: In the "Dr. Beaman's Office" sketch, Chris Parnell called Will Ferrell a "vondruke".
• Persona Non Grata: There are a handful of hosts who have caused so much trouble backstage (or on the show) that they can never host SNL again.^note Though there have been rumors that Lorne rarely holds grudges, and doesn't ever permanently ban anyone, and those that did just didn't appear again for some other reason altogether. Who are they, you ask? Well...
  • Louise Lasser: Hosted the penultimate episode of season one (July 24th, 1976). Michaels has gone on record in saying that Lasser was incoherent during her performance (due to cocaine abuse), locked herself in her dressing room causing the cast to split her parts and wouldn't appear in any sketches unless she was by herself or with Chevy Chase.
  • Speaking of which, Chevy Chase is allegedly banned from hosting after doing so eight times (the record for a former cast member) simply for being an abusive Jerkass toward cast members and the writing staff. He has made small cameos in a few episodes and anniversary specials, but hasn't hosted since Season 22 (1996-97). Made all the more egregious in that he was an original cast member.
  • Charles Grodin: Hosted the October 29, 1977 episode and was banned for skipping rehearsals and ad-libbing his lines.
  • Frank Zappa: Hosted the October 21, 1978 episode and was banned for doing a disastrous job doing so, where he regularly mugged for the camera and frequently noted to the audience that he was reading from cue cards. Notably, during the goodbye at the end, the cast (except John Belushi) stands away from him.
  • Milton Berle: Hosted the April 14, 1979 episode, where he consistently upstaged other performers, mugged non-stop to the camera, plugged his autobiography, had one of his hangers-on lead a standing ovation and gave an unscripted performance of "September Rain". Michaels not only banned him from the show in response, but kept that episode from appearing in syndicated reruns later.
  • Robert Blake: Hosted the November 13, 1982 episode and was banned due to his un-cooperative attitude during rehearsals. At one point, he crumbled up a script presented to him by Gary Kroeger and threw it back in his face. Blake appears in only two sketches plus the monologue.
  • Andy Kaufman: In 1983, the show held a poll to determine whether or not to let him continue making appearances. The audience voted to against him, making him the only person to ever be banned by the show's audience.
  • Steven Seagal: Hosted the April 20, 1991 episode, and was banned soon afterwards because he had difficulty working with the cast and crew, often pitching lousy sketch ideas and getting angry that none of them were picked. A later episode had Nicolas Cage lament to Lorne Michaels that his monologue made him look like "the biggest jerk on the show":
    Michaels: No, no. That would be Steven Seagal.
  • Martin Lawrence: Hosted the episode that came right after the infamous Alec Baldwin-hosted show with the "Canteen Boy Goes Camping" sketch (where Canteen Boy (Adam Sandler) is molested by his scoutmaster) in 1994 (Season 19), and got himself banned when he launched into a monologue about the decline in women's hygiene. All reruns have cut off Martin's monologue and replaced it with cards that explain why this can never air on TV again.
  • Adrien Brody: Hosted in Season 28 (2002-03) and got himself banned after introducing musical guest Sean Paul in a rude boy Jamaican get-up and ad-libbing. There was nothing obscene about it; it's just that Lorne Michaels didn't approve of the piece and warned Brody not to do it. Considering how shaky in quality SNL was in its 28th season, this was considered a highlight (along with Dan Aykroyd coming back to host the last episode of the season).
  • Musical guest Sinéad O'Connor was banned after ripping up a picture of the Pope and calling him 'the real enemy' after her second song (the segment has been edited out as well, replaced with the dress rehearsal version where she shows the audience a picture of a starving child from Africa).
  • The most famous was probably Elvis Costello, who in a 1977 appearance defied Lorne Michaels' order that he was not to play "Radio Radio" on air. The ban was in effect until 1989, when he was the musical guest for the season 14 episode hosted by Mary Tyler Moore. He was later allowed to disrupt a Beastie Boys performance to play the song again during the 25th anniversary special in 1999.
  • F.E.A.R. (on the season seven episode hosted by Donald Pleasence, which is itself banned for its dark, disgusting humor) was banned after a profanity-laden and set-destroying performance. This was not helped by the people in the mosh pit, who caused at least $20,000 in damages.
  • The Replacements (on the season 11 episode hosted by Harry Dean Stanton) were banned after they performed while drunk, switched clothes between songs and screamed obscenities at the audience. However, Paul Westerberg later went solo and was allowed to appear.
  • Cypress Hill (on the season 19 episode hosted by Shannen Doherty) was banned after DJ Muggs trashed the dressing room and lit a joint on-camera.
  • Rage Against the Machine (on the season 21 episode hosted by Steve Forbes) were banned after they hung upside down American flags from their gear in protest of the host. Crew members stepped in to remove both the flags and the band from the stage, prohibiting them from performing a second song during the show and banning then for life.
• Pet the Dog: In the midst of the Mueller investigation, Robert Mueller (Robert De Niro) takes some time to reach out to Eric Trump (Alex Moffat), who's been suffering sleepless nights over the way everyone in his family is being affected.
• Phone Word: A Parody Commercial for a harassment agency's phone number is 1-800-HARASSS — "the extra "S" is for extra harassment."
• Pixellation: When Pamela Anderson guest hosted, she admitted to being nervous and remembered that the best way to combat stage fright is to picture the audience naked. When that didn't work, she surmised that you actually have to be naked. At that, she stripped and her breasts and pubic area were censored by pixellation (of course, she wasn't actually naked- if you look closely you can see she's still wearing underwear).
• Place Worse Than Death: The hometown of Olya Povlatsky (played by Kate Mckinnon), Krezynovichjorgjykultkuljkulchkulk (more or less), which translates into "desolation of smog".
• Plant Hair: There was a sketch recommending chia hair for people suffering from hair loss.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: In a season 44 sketch, Pete Davidson's Chad dies and is taken by an angel to the afterlife to find closure with his father Brad (Adam Sandler). The angel conjures up a baseball and two gloves, intending for them to bond over a game of catch. It backfires when it turns out Brad is just as oblivious and lazy as Chad.
• The Pollyanna: Willie, Kenan Thompson's recurring character on Weekend Update. His whole shtick is recounting horrific memories of his life to Michael Che, his neighbor. And yet, he never once complains about them and is always so undyingly optimistic that you just want to give the guy a hug.
• Porn Names: Several of the porn stars helping Brookie and the one in Witness Protection film their commercicals have ridiculous names like LeJean Noween, Girth Brooks, and James Franco.
• Poverty Porn: Parodied in the sketch "39 Cents" where Bill Hader plays Charles Daniels, an old white man asking for viewers at home to send a check of 39 cents to help the poor country he's in (while the natives are adamant that more than 39 cents in cash should be sent instead). Daniels makes the big mistake of guessing the country he's in is Africa, prompting the natives to hold him for a ransom of $200 cash.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • As a live broadcast, several F-bombs have accidentally dropped over the years, starting with Paul Shaffer in a 1980 sketch. The most notorious cases were Charles Rocket in 1981 (the mishap that effectively ended Jean Doumanian's brief tenure as producer) and Jenny Slate in 2009 (in her first featured sketch on her first episode).
  • Whether Prince actually swore in his 1981 appearance (on the same episode as Rocket's incident, which happened right after Prince's song) has been disputed, though.
  • System of a Down played a song that was already being bleeped for profanity, but an ad-libbed F-bomb got through.
  • Worth noting is that Kristen Stewart is responsible for one but got another hosting stint in season 45, showing that they've moved past it.
  • At the end of Weekend Update in the Eddie Murphy episode, Cecily Strong as Jeanine Pirro says "It's merry fucking Christmas", which got past the censors. The same episode has Murphy say "we can still win this shit!" in another sketch, though that got censored.
• Pregnancy Scare: One skit parodied pregnancy test commercials, with a couple who were really hoping their one-night-stand hadn't resulted in conception.
• President Superhero: The X-Presidents. Hey, a President who has left office is customarily called "President" forever, so they do count.
• Press X to Die: One Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch had "Don't Do Anything" as a category where players were penalized for ringing in. Of course, this being the Saturday Night Live version, the celebrities still manage to screw it up (with Connery admitting that did so out of malice for Trebek).
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy:
  • Weekend Update can rope in quite a few performers as themselves regardless of the subject matter, but Pete Davidson has had to adopt certain traits in certain occasions, such as showing up in a gold chain for a bit about the BET awards. The very first thing Michael Che does is shake his head.
  • Aidy Bryant on the other hand wields this trope like a double edged sword — she's the unofficial frontman of the girl group music videos^note Which are usually co-written by her and Kate Mckinnon, and then there's Tonkerbell and several other of her characters.
  • Inverted in a sketch where John Mulaney is nervous about meeting his African-American fiancee's friends and family, but shows an unaffected rapport with them (one of them being his old frat buddy from Howard University), all while doing an intricate line dance routine to "Cha Cha Slide".
  • In the "Samurai Night Fever" sketch, Futaba (John Belushi) is Italian-American but dresses like a samurai, and his brother (O.J. Simpson) actually became black in the '60s, but decides to stop, because it's no longer countercultural in the '70s.
• Pretty in Mink: Some rich ladies in skits would wear nice furs, although there were a few instances of Fur and Loathing as well.
• Prisoner's Last Meal:
  • Invoked in the sketch "Parole Board" where a prisoner based on "Red" from The Shawshank Redemption is revealed to be a remorseless cannibal who is facing the death penalty. When told that the only thing he should be thinking about is what he wants for his last meal, the prisoner ultimately settles for Shake Shack, after his initial requests to eat another man or two boys or just one boy were curtly refused.
  • Referenced in a 1982 sketch where Eddie Murphy plays a prisoner on Death Row trying to come up with every excuse imaginable to stall for more time. In one failed attempt, the prisoner insists he get a last meal, and the guard reminds him he already had his last meal.
• Prisons Are Gymnasiums: The season 43 finale starts with a sketch about Donald Trump meeting up with several other people caught up in his scandals, like Michael Cohen contemplating the prospect of going to jail, whereupon Trump says "they have a free gym, you are going to get so jacked".
• The Problem with Pen Island: Sean Connery takes this up to eleven on Celebrity Jeopardy, who will always misread clearly spaced categories, typically as something sexual, such as "The pen is mightier" as "The penis mightier," "Catch these men" as "Catch the semen," and "Let it snow" as "Le tits now."
• Product Placement:
  • One of Kristen Wiig's recurring characters is the over-enthusiastic Target cashier.
  • All of the "former porn star" commercials feature actual brands. The execution is something else though.
  • "Office Christmas Party" has the boss "makin' it rain", handing out gift cards for actual brands.
  • There's a Recurring Element where they start the sketch like this, only to Bait-and-Switch at the end.
  "Burger King: At least we're not McDonald's."
  • Dana and Niff (Cecily Strong and Bobby Moynihan), world's worst employees, are somehow able to find employment at big-name places like Best Buy and McDonalds.
• Profound by Pop Song: In "Rude Buddha", a man comes to the Buddha and asks for council about the stress of his farming job. The Buddha answers by quoting the opening theme to The Facts of Life, deliberately doing so to mess with him and then remarks that the people who come to him are morons.
• Pronouncing My Name for You:
  • One sketch has Jon Hamm and singer Michael Bublé doing a TV spot for their new restaurant that serves "fine pork dishes and sparkling Champagne", Hamm & Bublé, the latter of which Jon pronounces like "bubbly". Michael corrects him: "Actually, it's pronounced BOO-blay," but Jon counters, "Well, Boo-blay doesn't work, so now it's pronounced Buh-blee."
  • In a Shout-Out to Liza Minnelli, Saoirse Ronan's monologue has her sing the correct pronunciation of her first name to the audience. People still pronounce it like "Cersei."
• Prophetic Names: In his first episode as a cast member, Luke Null appeared in no sketches.
• Proxy Breakup: In the sketch "The Understudy", Melissa Villaseñor asks Chloe Fineman to impersonate her and break up with a boyfriend. As Melissa admits, she's terrible with breakups.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • "I'M BARRY! EFFING!! GIBB!!"
  • Season 44 reveals the eponymous boxer (played by Matt Damon) for the Girlfriend of the Boxer in Every Boxing Movie Ever (Heidi Gardner), with the very Hollywood New England name of "Tommy. Ray. Donovan."
• Push Polling: During a 1982 episode of the show, Eddie Murphy presents a live lobster in a chef's kitchen on-air. He then opens a a phone poll so that viewers can decide whether to cook the lobster or not. Murphy deliberately tries to skew the poll towards killing the crustacean by enunciating the "cook" number slowly and clearly while speeding through the "spare" number. Despite this, the "spare" option wings; Murphy, however, cooks and serves the lobster anyways a week later due to racist remarks he received in the wake of the poll.