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By Gabriel Escalera

Pass the Popcorn: 50 Years of SNL – What’s Your Most Memorable Sketch?

January 30th, 2025

When you hear the phrase, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night,” a very specific image probably comes to mind. But chances are, your mental image is different from mine.

For 50 seasons now, Saturday Night Live has been bringing its own brand of pop-culture commentary to the small screen. In honor of this landmark year, NBC recently released a mini docuseries on Peacock, titled SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night.

Internet sources say that 167 cast members and 290 writers have worked on the show over the years, to bring you a live, 90-minute program, assembled in six days.

dds up to a lot of sketches. So when I ask you, what’s the most memorable SNL sketch you’ve ever seen, there’s no telling what you’ll come back with.

I’ve heard my dad reference the 1978 “Cheeseburger, Chips and Pepsi” sketch featuring John Belushi more times than I can count. And my son has discovered SNL clips on YouTube and loves the fake commercials.

Years ago, I read an article that said in general, people discover SNL in their early teen years when they’re staying up later on the weekends, exploring new media and developing a cultural awareness — but don’t yet have a drivers’ license so they’re home bound. For SNL fans, the sketches and cast members during these prime watching years are usually cemented as the best of the best.

But even if you don’t stay up late on Saturday nights to watch the show, or these days, stream it the next day at a more reasonable hour, the show has still had an impact on you.

SNL alums have gone on to write and star in movies, headline comedy tours, host late night TV shows, publish best-selling books, start bands, perform in theater productions and even recently, alum Bill Hader helped Los Angeles ABC7 news reporters cover the wildfires in his Palisades neighborhood.

Chances are, if I say “Coneheads” or “Wayne’s World” or “Blues Brothers,” you immediately know what I’m talking about.

Love it or hate it, Saturday Night Live is a comedy powerhouse that’s been changing the entertainment game and pop culture for generations.

SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night is available to stream on Peacock. The show is described as: A behind-the-scenes look at the creative process of the legendary sketch comedy show, with fresh insights into the show’s history.

The series is broken into four episodes showing you: a look at the harrowing 5-minute audition process each cast member goes through; what a week inside the ‘SNL’ Writers Room” looks like, there’s an episode dedicated entirely to the “More Cowbell” sketch which turned into an unlikely phenomenon, and finally there’s “The Weird Year,” recapping the infamous 1985 season that nearly destroyed the show.

The four episodes are standalone, meaning you can watch them in any order or pick and choose which ones to watch.

For me, the thing that ties the episodes together and makes the docuseries so touching is seeing how genuinely emotional the cast members and writers get when talking about their time on the show. No matter how much time has passed since their auditions, they still can’t believe they’re one of the lucky few to book one of the most coveted gigs in comedy.

At its heart, SNL is a celebration of laughter, and everyone from the show’s stars to the casting directors to the stage crew to Lorne Micheals himself is doing their best at a notoriously hard job.

And that means, you and I and the millions of other audience members sitting at home are actually watching peoples’ dreams come true on live television.

What other show can say it does that? Let alone has done it for 50 years.

By Christine Burright, a graduate of the UNO MFA in the screenwriting program, filmmaker, and aspiring TV writer, for KVNO’s Pass the Popcorn.