That’s right, coked-up rooster –- it has been 15 years since NBC’s Saturday Night Live alerted us to the insane deals to be had at Mega-Mart’s decidedly perilous Black Friday sale.
I’m an easy laugh, but it takes something really special to bring me to the point where I am gasping for air and tears are spilling out of my eyes. “Black Friday at Mega-Mart!” did that.
My favorite SNL bits are the ones that have a cumulative effect — where as soon as the joke reveals itself, the sketch just hammers away at it again and again and again, in quick, merciless succession. Think “Farewell, Mr. Bunting” (Dead Poets Society meets ceiling fan), “A Christmas Carol” (Martin Short’s Scrooge unwittingly slaughters paupers), or “Black Friday’s” immediate ancestor, the “Underground Rock Festival” series.
Debuting 15 years ago (on Nov. 20, 2010), SNL‘s “Black Friday” came at a time when brick-and-mortar stores still ruled. Boffo post-Thanksgiving sales had cemented themselves as an annual ritual, but the rules kept escalating. Stores opened earlier and earlier, and “door buster” specials veritably encouraged mobs to form outside of locked doors during pre-dawn hours.
Enter Bobby Moynihan, two years into his nine-season SNL run, as a Mega-Mart employee here to tout a Black Friday promotion that invited mortal injury for those who braved it while hopped up on Four Loko.
“Oh my God, 15 years…. I have a very fond memories of that particular one,” Moynihan shares with LateNighter. Though credited as penning the piece with Bryan Tucker, “I remember that being a gift I was handed,” the actor says. “I think Bryan had the majority of writing that; I just got to be on-screen a bunch.”
For Moynihan’s role as the sale-hyping Mega-Mart employee, “I remember that Jodi Mancuso, who’s in charge of the hair department and is a very close friend, spiked up my hair because she said I looked like Otho (Glenn Shadix) from Beetlejuice,” Moynihan says. “That’s what we were going for, for some reason.”
At the fictional retailer’s Black Friday sale, the doors open at 4 am, there apparently are a few copies of an unpublished Harry Potter novel to be had, and the floors of the narrow aisles have been freshly waxed. (How else to “slide into savings”?) Everyone braving the 12-minute spree will be armed supplied with a box cutter, the tunes spun by DJ Thunderthrust are sure to muffle any screams, and every security guard has been removed to make room for more merch.
The only other on-camera speaking role went to host Anne Hathaway, playing a mullet-rocking shopper who made peace with her God before storming Mega-Mart in search of a Disney scrapbooking kit.
“The second you called about this, I remembered that Anne Hathaway just crushes it,” Moynihan effuses. “She’s got one line, and every time I see her in that I’m like, ‘She’s amazing.'”
Given that he himself yells, increasingly louder, at the viewer for the entire two-and-a-half minutes, Moynihan affirms that he came away from the shoot feeling hoarse as well as “exhausted.”
“I remember the distinct moment where they were like, ‘Cut! We’re finished,’ and I was completely out of breath,” he recalls. “I had just screamed for, like, six hours!”
One of the “Black Friday” elements that Moynihan best remembers, of course, is “the joke about Kirk Douglas” being on hand to sign copies of his 1988 biography, The Ragman’s Son. (“Catch him! Touch him! Win!” the ominous voiceover told potential shoppers.)
Prior to Douglas’ passing in 2020, had SNL ever heard from the Hollywood icon about his wholly random inclusion in the raucous ad parody?
“I think they heard from him after,” Moynihan deadpans, “which is insane.”
Bobby Moynihan currently plays forensics whiz Woodrow “Woody” Browne on CBS’ NCIS: Origins (airing Tuesdays at 9/8c). He also will co-star in the midseason NBC comedy The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, headlined by fellow SNL alum Tracy Morgan.
Is the voice over here the same guy as the Ya Burnt! voice overs?