Where Have All the SNL Catchphrases Gone? A Forensic Investigation.

During this perpetually heralded 50th season of Saturday Night Live, the celebrations, excavations, examinations, contemplations, and ruminations  looking across the half-century of the singular cultural institution have been inescapable. 

But one particular retrospective by The New York Times of the show’s 50 most memorable catchphrases contained within it a glaring and unaddressed mystery: the overwhelming majority came from the first half of the show’s history. And there really haven’t been any new ones in a long time. (The Times‘ list ended in 2010!) 

Like buffalo that once roamed the plains of Studio 8H in great herds, the catchphrases were plump and plentiful… and then one day they were gone. But why? 

To conduct a thorough investigation, we sought the insights of four SNL alums and friends to this site whose experiences extend across the prime catchphrase eras, as well as the years when they became scarce and then ultimately disappeared:

• Alan Zweibel, one of the SNL‘s original writers from 1975 to 1980.
• Robert Smigel, a writer and eventually a featured player from  1985 to 1993… who then rejoined the show from 1996 to 2008.
• Harper Steele, a writer from 1995 to 2008… who served as head  writer from 2004 through 2008. 
• Bobby Moynihan, a writer and cast member from 2008 to 2017. 

First, let’s define the term “catchphrase,” at least for the purposes of this exploration.  A catchphrase is established through repetition, sometimes multiple times  within a single performance or sketch. It becomes a signature whenever it is said subsequently when the sketch or the character recurs. 

By this definition, a memorable line uttered once—“I can see Russia from my house,” for example—doesn’t qualify. Nor does the name “Debbie Downer,” which was grouped among the catchphrases cited by the Times.  (Although the saying entered the lexicon and became a shorthand for a certain kind of person, other than in the lyrics of the jaunty theme song at the top of the sketch, Debbie Downer’s name is never even uttered in the sketch.) 

Catchphrases have been a consistent comedy component going back a  century or more, from Oliver Hardy’s “Well here’s another nice mess  you’ve gotten me into” to Lou Costello’s “Hey Abbott!” to Rodney  Dangerfield’s “I can’t get no respect.” 

For decades, it seemed every sitcom had one or more. The Honeymooners had “One of these days,  POW, right in the kisser” (along with the “Bang, zoom” variant); Get Smart had “Missed it by that much” and Good Times had “Dy-no-mite!”  

The Looney Tunes stable of cartoons had one for every character from  Bugs Bunny’s “What’s up, doc?” to Porky Pig’s “Th-th-that’s all Folks!” Many of the first catchphrases that seeped into our consciousness as children came from animation. As Robert Smigel recalls, “The first catchphrases I heard in my life were, like, ‘Yabba Dabba Doo!’ (The Flintstones) and ’Good  grief.’ (Peanuts and the various Charlie Brown specials.) 

Lastly, it’s worth highlighting SNL’s most direct predecessor: Laugh In. From 1968 to 1973, the wildly popular counterculture sketch comedy series featured a steady parade of catchphrases, including, “You bet your bippy,” “Very interesting,” “Here come de judge,” and especially “Sock it to me,” which penetrated pop culture to such an extent that even Richard Nixon appeared on the show to say it in the lead-up to the 1968 presidential election. (Sound familiar?) 

Which brings us to SNL. It’s well chronicled that in 1975, Lorne Michaels  was very deliberate and declarative about making a conscious break with  all that came before in TV comedy/variety, citing The Carol Burnett Show as representative of what he saw as an outdated approach to the form. 

Nevertheless, the use of catchphrases was one long-standing comedy tradition that was in frequent practice on the show right from the  outset. 

“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not” was first uttered on the fourth episode of the show’s first season on November 8, 1975. Certainly that line, and the use of Chase’s real name helped establish him as the show’s first breakout star. It also set the table for how countless catchphrases would be performed presentationally in a direct-to-camera address, often at the “Weekend Update” news desk. 

(Al Franken would later take the idea of repeating his own name during Update editorials to heightened levels of absurdity when he declared that the 1980s would be the “Al Franken decade” and turned the repetition of his own name—coupled with a corresponding chyron—into a catchphrase.) 

Alan Zweibel says that nothing was written during those first five years at SNL with the intent of creating a catchphrase, believing that if they’d done so, it would have come off as inauthentic. 

“It’s almost like those kids in grade school who come to class and try to give themselves a nickname. They say, ‘From now on, I’m Ace. OK? Everybody call me Ace!’ And nobody calls ‘em that. Because it didn’t come out of something organic, it just doesn’t stick. That’s what I think about when I think about catchphrases. It’s something that comes out of a character and then the audience picks up on it. That’s how it catches on. But it’s not premeditated. The fact of the matter is, you do it once, and then you say, ‘We’re going to do this again. What worked about it?’ And so the repetition of it became part of the verbiage of that character.” 

To illustrate his point, Zweibel retraced the steps of one of SNL’s earliest  recurring characters with a memorable catchphrase. Gilda Radner’s Emily  Litella was an elderly lady who delivered editorial replies on “Weekend  Update” that were rooted in the idea that she was there to voice her  outrage about a story she misheard. She would deliver a hilarious rant, and then when corrected would sweetly and simply say, “Never mind.”  

“I wrote, I would say, like, 90% of them,” Zweibel says. “However, that  character was based on a nanny that Gilda had growing up. The nanny’s  name was Dibby. And Dibby was hard of hearing. But I didn’t come up  with ‘Never mind.’ I want to say Gilda did. I don’t know if Dibby said that.”  

Litella’s first appearance was not on “Weekend Update,” but rather in a talk show sketch called “Looks at Books.”  The character wasn’t quite fully formed yet, and she didn’t say “Never mind.” 

When the decision was made to bring the character back, she was  modified to fit the format of “Weekend Update.” And that’s how the now-familiar template was crafted. A misheard false premise culminating with “Never mind.” The birth of a catchphrase. 

Zweibel then broke down the process in bringing her back for another Update desk piece. “After Gilda said ‘Never mind’ the first time, I can’t even imagine what else she would have said the second time because we  had created a formula.” 

Zweibel went on to explain how judicious they were in returning to the well. “We had done ‘presidential erections,’  ‘endangered feces,’ and it was really fun. But then the audience got ahead of us and started sending in their own Emily Litellas and we went, ‘Well, wait a second.’ 

I remember even Lorne saying, ‘Maybe we should shelve this character.’ I wanted to extend the lifetime of it, so what I did was, I wrote an Emily Litella when Jane Curtin was doing “Weekend Update.” (Following the departure of Chevy Chase as anchor.) But I extended the life of the character by giving Jane a diatribe. Having her say, ‘You know you come on the show every week, you get the editorial wrong, you’re an embarrassment, you’re an embarrassment to journalism, you should not be here again, blah blah blah. Am I making myself clear?’ After which Gilda apologized, took a beat and then, under her breath, crystal clear, said, ‘Bitch.’ Then the audience started to look forward to hearing the word ‘bitch.’ It’s a weird combo. On the one hand, you wanna be a moving target. You don’t wanna be predictable but there is something they enjoy about the predictability and the repetition of it.”  

Future SNL writer/performer and self-proclaimed “SNL nerd” Smigel  agrees with Zweibel. 

“Yeah, I don’t think most people engineer things to be catchphrases. They just write a sketch or a character and then the character says something that makes them laugh. I mean that was the whole bit, that she had to say ‘never mind’ at the end of her rant. A lot of it was knowing that it was coming. Because you’re just watching Emily Litella dig herself a bigger hole with her conviction about whatever malaprop it was. So it really didn’t almost matter that you saw ‘never mind’ coming. As long as they were creative enough about the malaprop. But yeah, then ‘bitch’ became the secondary catchphrase because Jane Curtin didn’t have the same tolerance. I think that just kind of evolved just from the fact that Chevy wasn’t there anymore and she had to play off a different anchorperson and that anchorperson’s persona itself being more combative.” 

Another Zweibel/Radner collaboration was Roseanne Roseannadanna.  She too began life in a slightly different form before becoming a “Update” commentator and Zweibel was quick to cite the personal origins of her catchphrase. “‘It’s always something’ is something my grandmother used to say,” he explains. “Gilda used it and it became a catchphrase.” Radner would ultimately became so identified with that catchphrase that it became the title of her memoir about her battle with cancer.  

Numerous other catchphrases were birthed on “Update” in the show’s early years—from Dan Aykroyd’s cutting Point/Counterpoint retort, “Jane, you ignorant slut,” to John Belushi’s perturbed protestation, “But nooooooo!” (Both of which invariably elicited rapturous applause breaks from the show’s studio audience.)  

Garrett Morris landed on his most enduring catchphrase by taking a similar  path to “Weekend Update” as Emily Litella. But unlike Radner, he arrived at the news desk with his catchphrase  already in place. Prior to appearing on “Update,” Morris portrayed retired baseball player Chico Escuela in a sketch. 

Zweibel explains, “I had a big hand in that character with Brian Doyle Murray. And that phrase was written by Brian. Chico Escuela was an after dinner speaker. The big joke was that he came and they gave him a lot of money to speak. And he just got up to the podium and said, ‘Baseball been berry berry good to me.’  And then he went to go sit down. And then Brian had whoever was the M.C. of the occasion say, ‘Is that all, Chico?’ And he goes, ‘No no no no.’  He went back to the podium and said, ‘Keep your eye on the ball.’ Now that didn’t become the catchphrase. ‘Baseball been berry berry good to me’ did.”

Following that initial appearance, Escuela became a popular “Update” fixture. And the catchphrase came from the fact that he was a character who was tasked with speaking on a topic but had very little to  say. So he said it over and over. (Not unlike like a certain motivational speaker  that we’ll talk about later.) 

While not all of the catchphrases in those early years of SNL were performed and popularized on “Weekend Update,” the show’s news segment established itself as a  key incubator for characters with a strong point of view, which Zweibel  believes is key to the creation of a resonant catchphrase. 

Still, beyond the confines of “Update,” Chevy Chase’s “Landshark,” Steve Martin’s “We are two wild and crazy guys,” (which he transplanted from his stand up act) and the rhythmic “Cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger” from the Olympia diner sketch, are all legendary catchphrases from SNL’s infancy, as well. 

After five legendary years, Lorne Michaels left the show that he created. Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had already moved on, and now the remaining cast and writers exited as well, taking with them their characters and catchphrases. 

This would be the first of many upheavals that SNL would endure, with the sixth season under Michaels’ immediate successor Jean Doumanian being the show’s first “weird year” (to borrow a phrase from the recent Peacock documentary about Season 11).

Ultimately Doumanian didn’t even last a year. She was fired and NBC installed Dick Ebersol, who was tasked with overhauling the drowning franchise. He determined that only two members of Doumanian’s ensemble should be spared: New York standup comedians Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy.

Famously, it was Eddie Murphy who saved SNL. The brilliant comic’s meteoric rise and total domination during his four short seasons cannot be overstated. 

Curiously, two of Murphy’s most indelible recurring characters were rooted in pop culture figures from a long bygone era—Buckwheat and Gumby. The former’s catchphrase was just a cheerful revival of “O-tay,” based on Murphy’s impression of the Little Rascal’s unique mispronunciations from those depression-era short films. The latter being Murphy’s reimagining of an aged version of the green, slanted-headed claymation character. 

Murphy presented Gumby as an old (and implicitly Jewish) man whose frustration at being a legend in decline was reductively expressed in an aggrieved, impotent cry of “I’m Gumby, dammit!” 

Ebersol’s last season as executive producer was another anomalous one.  Eager to compensate for Murphy’s departure, he retained a handful of core members of the company and then boldly signed several seasoned veterans to one year deals. 

While that year was an ideal showcase for Martin Short’s distinctive brand  of madness, several of his recurring characters came with him from the Canadian cult comedy series SCTV, bringing their catchphrases across the border with them. Among those imports were the shampoo-horn coiffed Ed Grimley, complete with the verbal tic, “I must say,” and Tin Pan Alley songwriter Irving Cohen who would launch into half-baked ditties with a command to an unseen pianist… “Give me a  ‘C!’ A bouncy ‘C!’”  

But the real phenomenon that season was Billy Crystal’s Fernando. Although Crystal portrayed numerous other memorable recurring characters including Buddy Young Jr. (AKA Mr. Saturday Night) and Joe Franklin, “You look mahvelous” eclipsed them all and remains one of the top catchphrases in the history of SNL. (As does Fernando’s secondary catchphrase, “It’s better to look good than to feel good.”) 

Like Short, Crystal had honed Fernando to perfection prior to SNL, but much of the excitement was attributable to the format of those heavily improvised “Fernando’s Hideaway” sketches. 

Forty years on, Robert Smigel remains enamored of Fernando’s catchphrases. “Well, those were great because that was just all about show business and the obligatory fawning of celebrities talking to each another. Every f*cking podcast I listen to is ‘you look mahvelous,’ basically. Like, I went on the Carvey show (Fly on the Wall) as Triumph and I sang a song about modern podcasts. It was just (singing in Triumph’s voice) ‘Old white people complimenting old white people.’ So Billy Crystal’s catchphrase was entirely organic to Fernando Lamas. I don’t think he was force-feeding it. It was a perfect distillation of show-biz insincerity.” 

Smigel eagerly adds that he was also a great admirer of Crystal and Christopher Guest as the masochists, with their catchphrase, “I hate  when that happens.” “Those are my favorite characters ever, practically.  Those Willie and Frankie guys. It’s as good as anything. And what I love  about that particular catchphrase is that people to this day still say it  without having any idea that it came from a sketch on SNL. That’s how  ingrained it is and how much it reflects everyday life. It just seeped into consciousness because it struck such a lovely chord as opposed to  having to be associated with some high energy comic performer. To me, the most impressive thing you can do is [to] infiltrate the culture without anything but an idea that just resonates.” 

Which brings us to Season 11 and the so-called “Weird Year.” Lorne  Michaels returned and he brought Al Franken and Tom Davis with him. A  lot was riding on that team. It was also Smigel’s first year on the writing staff, and he recalls how daunting it was. 

“I was hyper-conscious of the ‘70s show to the point where everything on a very superficial level felt like our attempts were to recapture that. I think a lot of this came out of an acute awareness in my head of the fact that I was on the new SNL and we were always chasing the ghosts of ‘70s SNL, which represented, in my mind, an idealized vision of that era. Absolute comedy pureness. Now, people who were there (back then) might laugh at me suggesting that, but that’s how it felt because it was so new and so brilliant that it felt like it was all emerging from an organic pool of genius. When I would write irreverent stuff, it was always rooted in my admiration for the ‘70s show and what that represented to me. And part of it was rebellion. But it was the Ronald Reagan era and a lot of the wind had been taken out of the left wing movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. And I was hyper-conscious of that.  Because there was a part of me that ached to have the show feel more like the ‘70s version of the show. (Original SNL writer) Anne Beatts once said to  me, ‘You would have fit in with the ‘70s staff.’ I never forgot that. It made me feel so great. Even though I don’t necessarily believe it. I still think I would have been like a terrified nerd compared to those people.” 

Michaels’ return was experimental in many ways, but one is especially  relevant to this investigation. Fewer of his ensemble cast members had the  stand-up or sketch experience of previous casts. So while Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. were all wildly talented  actors, as a veteran of the renowned L.A. based improv group The  Groundlings, Jon Lovitz was better equipped to succeed. (The criminally under-utilized stand up Damon Wayans could have also shined with the characters and catchphrases he later showcased on In Living Color. Sadly, Homey didn’t get to play that.) 

But while the show mostly floundered, Lovitz managed to score big with his pathological liar Tommy Flanagan and his now-classic catchphrase, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.” 

Lovitz’s liar was an immediate hit. Indeed, it was the ticket. Although the character and the catchphrase didn’t break on “Weekend Update,” the presentational style of the “in one” monologue framed as a public service  announcement essentially adhered to the same construct. And he  ultimately went on to appear on “Update” numerous times. In fact, all told, Lovitz  appeared as the shifty Flanagan in more than half of the episodes  that season.  

Smigel recalls his ambivalence toward catchphrases at the time. “I came out of Chicago and none of the characters on my  sketch show that I worked on… that I got hired off of… I don’t think there were any catchphrases that came out of that show because everything was more premise oriented. So when I got to SNL and Jon’s character took off, there was something in me that wanted to make fun of that. I would tease Lovitz because the whole idea of a catchphrase becoming something that people talked about amused me because it represented the idea of comedy as a marketplace as opposed to a creative endeavor. I would make up headlines like ‘America Loves a Liar. TV’s Jon Lovitz is SNL’s Breakout Star. And That’s No Lie!’ They were just imaginary stories that I would tell Jon about just to give him sh*t for no reason. And I love Jon. I got along with him really well. But it was just a way of teasing him that he enjoyed, as well. He would repeat it to me. ‘America LOVES a liar!’” 

America did love a liar. And it was pretty much love at first sight. An emboldened Lovitz quickly set about creating more characters with  catchphrases, hoping that lightning would strike twice. 

Only two episodes after debuting Tommy Flanagan, Lovitz introduced his next recurring character: a hopeless ham-branded “Master Thespian,” who would perform with broad theatricality and then proclaim with a flourish, “Acting!” Lovitz scored again, even as little else on the show was clicking. 

Smigel recalls his internal struggles at the time. “‘Even though I thought those sketches were outstanding and very funny, there was a temptation to mock it from a comedy marketing perspective. Just because we were so desperate to make our own mark.” 

Certain tried and true tenets of comedy were proving to be reliable. But much like Michaels’ mission statement at the outset of the show a decade earlier, the drive to separate from the comedy of the past…  even the past of the very show they were trying to revive… was challenging. 

Smigel remembers, “[Lorne] said to me once when I was a young writer, [Lorne impression] ‘When you’re a young writer, you define yourself by what you aren’t.’ Which I thought was very astute. And observant. Because that’s a lot of what I was doing. A lot of what I was writing was based on comedy that I thought, ‘That’s not me, so I’m going to make fun of it.’” 

Smigel hadn’t gotten a sketch on the air since the first episode of the season. But he was a perspicacious student of comedy and understood  what needed to be done. “Let me admit something right now. Which is that somewhere in my first year, I realized that it would be thrilling to come up with a catchphrase. Like, I saw Lovitz’s take off and I was acutely aware of the ones that I loved when I was a kid. I didn’t want to consciously  create one… that would have been beneath any good comedy writer in my mind. But at the same time I loved the idea of, ‘Oh man. Wouldn’t it be  cool if something I wrote became something people said?’ That just  became part of the excitement of working there. And then I wrote this  sketch where comedians are talking to each other, which basically saved  my job. And that sketch, not only did it work really well, but it felt like it had  the potential to be a recurring thing. But [host] Tom Hanks wasn’t a cast  member. I did it once with Jay Leno [when he hosted] or something, I can’t remember.  But it wasn’t the same. But had Tom Hanks been a cast member, I probably would have tried to run it into the ground and made, ‘I mean, hey’ like something that people would say. Again it had happened organically. It was just an observation about hacky, Jerry Seinfeld knock-offs.” 

The “Weird Year” ended with a cliffhanger that was conceived and written by Smigel. Season finale co-host Billy Martin sets the studio on fire and Michaels hilariously rescues only Jon Lovitz. As the end credits rolled, a question mark appeared behind every name. 

The real question was would the show itself come back. Mercifully it did, with most of the ensemble now replaced by powerhouse improv comedy trained sketch performers and heavy-hitting stand up comics… like Dana Carvey.  

The cold open of the first episode of Season 12 featured Madonna reading a prepared statement that the previous season had only been a dream. “A horrible, horrible dream.” Then, later in that season premiere, almost as if prayers to the gods of comedy were being answered, Carvey’s “Church Chat” made its debut, complete with its infectious catchphrases “Well, isn’t that special?” and “Satan??!” And just like that, SNL was back.  

Responding to the suggestion that the most prolific purveyors of catchphrases during his SNL tenure were Dana Carvey and Mike Myers,  Smigel quickly exclaims, “You are correct sir!” Acknowledging that he affirmed their catchphrase supremacy with evidence of that dominance, Smigel laughs. 

“Well that was just something I noticed Ed McMahon said now and then. That was never meant to be a catchphrase when we did it. We were just aping their rhythm and then [laughs] ‘You are correct sir” turned into something that people actually liked to say.”  

From Hartman’s obsequious “Yes!” to Carvey delivering Johnny Carson’s  bemused “Weird, wild stuff” and “I did not know that,” SNL’s Tonight Show parodies were part of a renaissance during which sketches often had  myriad catchphrases. Regarding that observation, Smigel offers further insight into Carvey’s process. “He probably would have looked at them as  ‘hooks’ as opposed to a catchphrase that people are going to repeat. But  certainly that’s what they were.” 

Expanding on that notion, just as a “hook” in a great pop song is key to what makes it a hit with music fans, over the next several years, Carvey and Myers ascended as SNL’s top hitmakers. 

While “Weekend Update” continued to be a reliable launch pad for visiting commentators with catchphrases, “Fernando’s Hideaway” and “Church Chat” worked within another presentational conceit: characters who live inside the reality of hosting their own show. This construct would appear repeatedly through this period.  

“Pumping Up with Hans and Franz” was in the format of an exercise show featuring two Austrian bodybuilders who sounded remarkably like Arnold Schwarzenegger as they berated their viewers. Carvey and Kevin Nealon would flex, but conspicuously they never demonstrated a workout. 

Their signature catchphrase was so popular that eventually the studio  audience would join in on the single clap whenever they recited, “Pump  (clap) you up!” 

Smigel offers, “The only one that I felt was more like, ‘Well, this sounds like a contrived catchphrase’ was ‘Pump You Up’ because they opened their show with it. But ‘hear me now and believe me later’ ended up being like the funniest one that they would repeat a lot just because it was such a clever jumble.” 

The duo also made frequent use of numerous other highly repeatable phrases, including “girly man” and “flab-alanche.” 

During George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Carvey’s portrayal emerged as one of the most popular impressions in the history of SNL, featuring the  catchphrases, “Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture,” “It’s bad… it’s bad!”  and “Not gonna do it,” which eventually devolved into “Nah gah dah aht.”  

The direct-to-camera addresses from the oval office became a cold open  fixture, informing the institutionalization of political cold opens to this day. Remarkably, President Bush himself appreciated and embraced Carvey’s  characterization. 

If Dana Carvey pioneered the practice of characters having multiple  catchphrases, Mike Myers took it to a whole other level, establishing  sketches that were refillable containers with medleys that could be strung together in almost any order. The first and inarguably the biggest was “Wayne’s World.”

Smigel marvels, “’Wayne’s World’ probably has the most catchphrases of  any sketch.” To name just a few: “Schwing!” “We’re not worthy!” “Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth.” “Excellent!” “Not!” “No way.Way!” “As if!” “He shoots, he scores!” And there were so many more. In  the words of Harper Steele, “‘Wayne’s World’ was a catchphrase machine.” 

“Wayne’s World” led to a blockbuster 1992 feature film as well as a steady stream of Myers-centric, catchphrase-rich sketches, including “Sprockets,” Simon, and “Coffee Talk.”

The early ‘90s was a boom period like no other and everyone on SNL, from the main company down through the featured players, seemed to be  successfully mining for catchphrase gold. Rob Schneider’s “Richmeister” offered greetings to everyone “Makin’ copies,” David Spade’s receptionist inquired, “And you are…?” and Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley asserted, “I’m  good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me!” 

In those years, if you had a recurring character, that character had a catchphrase.  So naturally when Robert Smigel eventually emerged as a featured player, it was due to being asked to appear in a sketch that he’d written that came with its own contagious catchphrase. 

“The Superfans” began its life on stage in Chicago during Smigel’s 1988 writer’s  strike project, “The Happy Happy Good Show,” which also featured Bob Odenkirk and Conan O’Brien. 

Says Smigel, “We said ‘the Bears’ even more in that version of the sketch. In the original sketch, it wasn’t a roundtable on TV. It was just three guys in their backyard with a cooler arrogantly talking about the Bears. It was just a conversation and the conversation kept coming back to [Chicago accent] ‘Reminds me of the inevitability of what’s gonna happen come January, my friend.’ ‘I know exactly of which you speak.’ And whatever conversation they had, it would  just turn back to a prediction that the Bears were going to win the Super  Bowl. It really wasn’t about creating a catchphrase. It was about how limited these guys were. Like literally… when I was in Chicago and first went to Comiskey Park when I was 22 and I saw these guys with their swagger and their sunglasses and their walrus mustaches and their outfits and in my head I just cartoon-ified them. And the first thing I thought was, ‘The Bears.’ Those two words said everything that was on their mind.”  

Smigel eagerly adds, “I love Chicago and in terms of the fans, I love obsessive hero worship. I relate to it as a nerd. So when I made fun of the Trekkies, when I made fun of the Star Wars kids online, it was a thousand  percent with a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ kind of affection. I was an SNL nerd. The biggest SNL nerd they had ever hired up to that point, I  think. So it gave me a lot of joy. Especially when we would perform the characters in Chicago. Which was quite often.” Smigel is also quick to  point out that he never wrote “Da Bears.” It was always “The Bears,” until it  caught on and was embraced in Chicago. 

Smigel’s deconstruction offers a key insight. Often, the formula for  character with a catchphrase is thinking reductively to make that character  so simplistic or singular of thought that they repeat the same thing over  and over because it’s practically all they are capable of thinking or saying.  

Chris Farley had his share of catchphrases during his time at SNL, although some were catchier than others. He and Chris Rock swapped  hip-hip inflected slogans on “I’m Chillin’” and he toasted alongside Smigel and Mike Myers during “The Superfans.” He even got to timidly gush “That  was awesome” to the likes of Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney on “The Chris Farley Show.” But perhaps the single greatest showcase for Farley’s raw power was a sketch that was originally simply titled “Motivation.” 

Smigel produced the sketch when it first aired, although it was written by Bob Odenkirk back when they were at Second City. 

Smigel remembers, “I watched Odenkirk and Farley in Chicago perform that sketch. But for some reason that I am still confused about to this day, they didn’t do it for the entirety of Odenkirk’s time (as a writer) at SNL. I don’t even know why. I can’t even remember if Bob even submitted it. I think Bob left after ’91, and we finally got around to it, on like my second-to-last show. The only reason I supervised it was because Bob wasn’t there. I feel usually when they cast somebody who’s  already got a catchphrase or a character that sticks, they put it on like right away. Like The Church Lady or Will Ferrell saying, ‘Get off the shed!’ A lot of times people audition, and Lorne can’t wait to get that character on television.” 

Despite its lengthy dormancy, when the sketch finally did hit the air, it was an  immediate smash. Farley repeats that he lives “in a van down by the river” seven times in the first version of the sketch. By the third time he said it, it received an applause break. 

“It was just something Bob wrote organically,” recalls Smigel. “It started with the idea that the guy didn’t have a whole lot to say, even though he was a motivational speaker.” (Once again, reminiscent of Chico Escuela, the scarcity of what the character had to offer, despite how he’s being platformed, creates both the comedy and a catchphrase.)  

“Motivation” was a departure from the “Update” and hosted-show formulas. It was situational, as opposed to presentational (even though Foley himself is presenting in the sketch). And it works beautifully. Other situational sketches of that period with catchphrases include “All Things Scottish,”  “Delta Delta Delta” and “Total Bastard Airlines,” which popularized the snarky, rhythmic send off “Buh Bye” by David Spade’s flight attendant. 

Despite the proliferation of sketches with catchphrases during his initial stay at SNL, Smigel’s reflections essentially align with Zweibel’s. “A lot of these sketches that work that end up having catchphrases are what The Kids in the Hall used to call obsession sketches. The obsession is what was funny. And then it just became a catchphrase.”  

Would “The Superfans” fall into that category? “Absolutely it’s an obsession sketch,” replies Smigel. “A hundred percent. Especially the original one I did in Chicago. And if the obsession is funny, it doesn’t feel like you’re force-feeding the audience. So to me, there’s nothing wrong  with catchphrases that come from an organic place. ‘I hate when that  happens’ is another example of a really funny concept that they’re doing  these awful things to themselves and they just persist in doing them and  yet they keep acting as though they are happenstance accidents.” 

Smigel’s departure at the end of Season 19 preceded SNL’s first patch of rough seas since “The Weird Year.” Season 20 was troubled, tentative, and ultimately transformative. After nearly a decade of relative stability, Season 21 represented the first major reset since the dawn of the Lovitz/Carvey/Myers era. And as new writers and cast members established themselves, ultimately it wasn’t just personnel that was changing. Gradually it would become clear that the  show’s approach to comedy was morphing as well. 

Some of that was attributable to external forces. In the wake of declining  ratings, NBC network President Don Ohlmeyer was exerting a heavier  hand. And in September of 1995, a brand new competitor appeared in the time period, as FOX launched their own late night sketch comedy series Mad TV on Saturday nights.  

Harper Steele joined the writing staff for Season 21. “Our period is incredibly unique,” she recalls. “It was a bigger upheaval than normal. More people left. More roles were recast. That was probably just the combination of people moving on to different careers and then Lorne getting rid of a few people and suddenly there’s a vacuum. And so our people came in definitely with an attitude, like ‘We’re going to do something different.’ Right before ’95, in the early ‘90s in New York, that’s the alt comedy world. That was Luna Lounge. And every writer’s room had those writers. I had people who performed in those spaces. And so I think it was just a style shift where people were just like, ‘Nah.’ The way that Lorne thought that Carol Burnett was of a different generation. And so I think that infiltrated slowly into the process.” 

And yet, early in Season 21, new cast member Molly Shannon debuted as an awkward young woman in a Catholic school uniform with a penchant for the theatrical. Brilliantly toggling between sad minimalism and acrobatic slapstick, Mary Katherine Gallagher was quickly embraced  as a self-branded “superstar.” 

When asked if there was still a drive to create recurring characters with  catchphrases, Steele expresses that there was hardly uniformity of  opinion. “We definitely went for catchphrases. Everyone knew that it was marketing. Everyone knew that that kept a sketch afloat. If you could get the catchphrase up and it became part of the Zeitgeist, Lorne just wanted it. But I think for some reason, we had a real disdain for what felt like the marketing side of a catchphrase. Not everyone. I swear, lots of people still wanted it. Everyone knew how useful and successful it was, too. If you got the catchphrase. Who knows. Maybe as a thirty-four year old writer I was sitting there going, ‘Please let this be a t-shirt.’ Because it just insured your job security. These things absolutely got marketed into t-shirts…  newscasters saying the lines to be funny… people were making ‘Wayne’s World’ dolls and on the box it probably said, ‘Schwing!’ I think because it was a marketing phenomenon, that probably played into some people’s  mindset. Like ‘I wanna do that. I want one of those.’” 

Steele concedes, “They are the handle to a character. But on the other  hand, for comedians around that time, it looked a little manufactured. They  were looking for catchphrases in a way that felt disingenuous to a lot of  comedians. Almost all of the comedians saw it as a kind of ironic laugh at  that point. I don’t think I feel that same way now. But comedy writers in their twenties are at their worst and their snarkiest. But I do think there  was a backlash against catchphrases, and yeah, I do think it was starting  to well up before.” 

So while a few members of the cast and writing staff kept the tradition going for a little longer, there were other dominant forces that were already pulling the show in another direction. “Molly had a bunch. She had ‘Love it, love it, love it,’ ‘I’m fifty!’ She had, ‘Superstar! obviously. Will (Ferrell), not so much. I can’t remember Will ever trying to do a catchphrase. I think it would bore him.”  

Steele also speaks to why the writing at SNL started to become far less  catchphrase-reliant. “The show gets shaped by the strongest writers. So  here are the forces during that era. You’ve got Adam McKay and then you  have Tina (Fey). But neither one of them, as far as I can remember, cared  anything about a catchphrase.”  

After leaving to launch Late Night with Conan O’Brien as the first head writer in 1993 and then run Dana Carvey’s brilliant but ill-fated network prime time sketch show in 1995, Robert Smigel returned in 1996 to a different SNL and in a very different capacity. 

He was essentially an island unto himself, writing, producing and voicing his “TV Funhouse” cartoons. But he felt the shift. On the one hand, he saw some who tried to cynically bio engineer catchphrases. While he’s reluctant to point fingers or name names, he allows, “It felt like that happened at least a few times in my time there. Yeah. In the late ‘90s, there were a couple characters where you knew that it started with the catchphrase and then they wrote the whole thing around the catchphrase. And everybody is just straight in the sketch and dealing with this person who is just nakedly wacky.”  

The ‘90s began with an escalating arms race of characters with  catchphrases, several of which found their way onto the big screen in  Lorne Michaels-produced feature films. But none came close to the success of Wayne’s World. So by 1999’s Mary Katherine Gallagher vehicle  Superstar and the Leon Phelps movie Ladies Man, the life had been wrung  out of that golden egg-laying goose. 

If there was a mile marker to indicate the end of the road for catchphrases delivered on SNL in earnest, it would have to be this “TV Funhouse” cartoon by Smigel from Season 25. And yet somehow, the fact that there’s an animated Lorne Michaels anchoring the piece makes it feel all the more  institutionally authoritative. (Even though at this point, Michaels hadn’t made any pronouncements about the use of catchphrases. Yet.)  

Smigel observes that by the dawn of the new millennium, the use of a  catchphrase became synonymous with comedy that was dusty and dated,  “To the point where people were embarrassed to have one.” However,  there was an occasional creative workaround. An exception. And so began the postmodern period of the satirical, ironic catchphrase. 

After he was well ensconced back at SNL, Smigel still occasionally  moonlighted doing bits on Late Night. And in 1997, he cooked up a  character of a canine comedian who was competing at the famed  Westminster Dog Show—a cigar chomping dog puppet with a thick  Russian accent named Triumph. 

Of Triumph’s origins, Smigel says, “I remembered a comedian I had seen named Timmie Rogers who would tell a joke and then would say, ‘Oh yeah! Oh yeah!’ So when I did Triumph as an insult comic, I wanted the comic to have a corny catchphrase like ‘Oh yeah!’ (laughs) So that’s where “For me to poop on’ came from. And originally the whole joke was supposed to be on the dog, not on the people. That the dog was so limited that he would just say a compliment and then he would go, ‘For me to poop on!’ And that was it. Like ninety-percent of it was making fun of the dog puppet, not everybody else and it just evolved into a regular character who happened to be a dog.” The character and his catchphrase remain with Smigel to this day, and perfectly illustrate the self aware, cake-and-eat-it-too approach.  

Fred Armisen joined the cast in Season 28, bringing with him a character of a Venezuelan entertainer named Fericito. Based on the Puerto Rican musician Tito Puente, Armisen debuted his timbale-playing alter ego at the “Update” desk on the first episode of the season, during which Fericito advised anchor Jimmy Fallon on the proper use of catchphrases like “Ay dios mio” and “I’m just keeding” with tongue solidly in cheek.  

While the catchphrase output during this period was nowhere near what it had been in its early ‘90s peak, a few more did sneak through. 

In his youth, Bobby Moynihan was a huge SNL fan… and catchphrases were his gateway. He recalls, “My first vivid memory is like taping the audio of the 15th anniversary special off the television with a tape recorder and listening to it on the bus on the way to school. I wasn’t listening to full sketches. It would be like ‘Cheeseburger  cheeseburger cheeseburger” and then, like, ‘We are two wild and crazy guys!’ So I knew all the catchphrases before I was old enough to go, ‘Wait a minute. Go back and watch the full sketches.’ So that’s how I got into it.” 

From that point forward, Moynihan remained devoted, enthusing, “I watched it my entire life. In college, I remember nights when people were  going to party and I was in the dorm watching SNL. I definitely remember being a bartender at Pizzeria Uno and like wiping the bar down and telling  people to quiet down and putting SNL on all the TVs and people were like,  ‘Could you put on something else?’ And I was like, ‘No.’” 

Moynihan agrees with Harper Steele that the show had already moved  away from a heavy rotation of frequently recurring characters repeating  catchphrases in the years prior to him joining the show due to the  sensibilities of the most dominant writers, saying “People like Seth and  Tina and Adam McKay showed up, and were like ‘We don’t wanna do that anymore. We got different ideas now.’” But Moynihan adds that there was another additional outside force at play, as well: YouTube. 

The now-ubiquitous video sharing site was founded twenty years ago today, on February 14, 2005. The platform and SNL famously collided when “Lazy  Sunday,” only the second SNL digital short by The Lonely Island, premiered on December 17, 2005. It quickly wound up on YouTube and went “viral,” becoming one of the first videos to do so, amassing millions of views and ultimately informing Lorne Michaels’ outlook.  

Moynihan joined the cast in 2008 for the thirty-fourth season. “I think the whole catchphrase thing died completely when I was there,” he says.  “When YouTube happened, it broke the SNL pattern which was, like, if you wanna see “Wayne’s World,” you gotta catch it when it’s on or you gotta catch it in repeats or you gotta wait a couple of weeks until they do  another one. But when YouTube was invented, it was like, ‘oh you can  watch it all day long every day.’ And Lorne kind of saw that immediately  and was like (Lorne impression) ‘Oh, no more characters like that. That’s  kind of gone now because of YouTube.’ I remember him saying the sentence (Lorne impression) ‘Yeah, you know, characters have kind of gone by the wayside.’ This concept of you can just watch YouTube came  from Lorne. I’m not saying that because I thought of this.” 

At that point, Moynihan believes that even characters that were an absurd  fun house mirror reflection of what came before fell out of favor. “It was kind of like Gilly (Kristen Wiig) was the last one where it was like with a  theme song (singing) ‘Her name is Gilly and she’s at it again…’ It was like,  that was old SNL. Here’s a character, a theme song, catchphrase, get out.”  

Even though Moynihan believes that “Gilly was making fun of it a little bit,” he thinks Michaels viewed it through a different lens. “I’m completely talking out of school when I say this, but I feel like when Gilly aired, Lorne was like, ‘Well that’s it. That’s old SNL.’ It felt like there was a big shift. I feel like I got hired to do characters with catchphrases and then went like, ‘Oh ok, I’ll change that.’” 

Moynihan recalls a subsequent time where he tried to introduce a new  character with a catchphrase. “When I went to get fitted for my wedding the guy who fitted me for my suit was this very cocky, very tall, very insane man. I was trying to buy my wedding suit and he just kept telling me to  stop wasting his time. I would be like, ‘I just want to be comfortable,’ and  he would be like, ‘Stop wasting my time. I know what I’m doing.’ And I  wrote it into a sketch and I thought, ‘This is going to kill. This is going to be  the next hilarious character I do on SNL.’ And every single time I said,  ‘Stop wasting my time,’ I could feel it losing people. It bombed. And then I  went, ‘Well at least I got that weird Drunk Uncle “Update” thing at the end of the read through.’ It was buried in the read through and then that got on.” 

Drunk Uncle was as solid of a recurring character as any of his ancestors,  just minus that one component. “Once I figured it out, Drunk Uncle was like, come out and do this thing, say this joke, then go into this, start  crying and get out. There was a structure to it. But it wasn’t like, ‘When are  they gonna say it? I can’t wait until they say it. And when they do, we’re  not gonna need the applause sign.’ It was repeating the same beats, but it  wasn’t like I said ‘immigrants’ every single time. That just stopped.” 

In 2011, however, Moynihan finally got his catchphrase fix. As he gleefully recounts, “Bryan Tucker was a writer and I was gushing about my love of (comedian) Sinbad. And he was saying, ‘Well if you like Sinbad, you would love (catchphrase comedian) Shuckey Duckey.’ And I said, ‘What’s this now?’ (laughs) And he introduced me to Shuckey Duckey and I said, ‘Well I know what I’m writing this week.’ And I just wrote down the words, ‘Slappy Pappy.’”  

Similar to Smigel’s “The Stand Ups” in the ‘80s, “The Original Kings of  Catchphrase Comedy” lampooned a peculiarity of stand up while subversively smuggling an arsenal of new, preposterous catchphrases onto SNL. This nostalgic mash-up of The Original Kings of Comedy with a disparate collection of catchphrase comedy caricatures in the form of a digital short was the perfect approach and execution for its time. And it created a sandbox in which many of Moynihan’s cast mates could easily play. 

“We just had fun coming up with names and catchphrases. Dave Winfield is from the Yankees, I just thought that was funny. And we called him ‘Beef Jelly’ because I think I just said, ‘Kenan, you know (catchphrase comedian) Hamburger?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And I was like, ‘If you were to play a comic like that, what would  your catchphrase be?’ And I think literally he just went, ‘Beeeef jelly!’ We were like, ‘Thanks man!’ He was like, ‘Sweet, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ “We just went around at three o’clock in the morning going like, ‘Hey Paul Brittain, if you could be any comic with a catchphrase…’ And he was like, ‘Like (Russian comedian) Yakov Smirnoff?’ and we were like, ‘Yes!” 

As the sketch recurred, this ever-expanding group came to include a  broader array of prototypes, including characters based on contemporary  comics Sarah Silverman, Dane Cook, and the Sklar Brothers.  Eventually hosts and musical guests from Zach Galifianakis and Charlie Day to Adam Levine, Dave Grohl, and even Mick Jagger joined in.  

Every once in a while, a new catchphrase appears to be on the verge of  catching on. Kate McKinnon’s visits to the “Update” desk a decade ago as a mischievous Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg boasting, “That’s a Gins-burn!” had all of the characteristics of a classic “Update”  catchphrase. So it’s hard to know whether to call the catchphrase extinct at this point or just an endangered species. 

In processing this circuitous journey, some conclusions about the causes  of the contracting catchphrase become clear. At first, Saturday Night Live fostered an environment wherein all of its elements came together organically. 

But over time, the constructs became codified and were alternately embraced and rejected by each successive wave of new talent.  Even as a venerable institution, it had revolution baked into its DNA, and as such it was inevitable that it would attract change makers. 

And certainly all forms of media have been susceptible to the forces of digital on-demand availability and so the power that repetition once held might very well forever be diminished.  

However, apart from the unique properties of a catchphrase, every generation at SNL has continued to put forth recurring characters and sketches, often adhering to familiar formulas. One such template can best be described as “variations on a theme.” 

Whether it’s “The Californians” clumsily incorporating Los Angeles driving directions into soap operatic dialogue or the rhyming couplets of playful euphemisms for vagina and anus baked into the paranormal stories of Kate McKinnon’s Colleen Rafferty, audiences delight in the replication of those rhythms. The formula for Bill Hader’s Stefon Update pieces was always, “New York’s hottest club is…” and then “This place has everything,” followed by a list. 

Moynihan offers this analysis: “I feel like once Tina and all those people came up, it was like the game of the scene became important  rather than the catchphrase.” 

Upon consideration, Alan Zweibel added this, too, is nothing new. “I was there when Bill Murray would do the Oscar predictions (on “Update”). And when he got to the supporting actors and actresses, he took his hand and just wiped them all off the board and said, ‘Nobody cares about them.’ So that was something that people looked forward to, because they knew he was going to do it and it didn’t necessarily require a catchphrase.” 

In offering some analysis of how SNL has evolved, Zweibel notes, “The week is still the same. You meet the host on Monday, et cetera.” But he also observes that there seem to be fewer repeated characters on the current incarnation of the show and perhaps that’s one reason for the decline in catchphrases. 

Robert Smigel concurs, “Well nowadays, the only time we see recurring characters anymore is on “Weekend Update,” because at modern improv schools like UCB I think the focus is less on characters and more on gameplay.”

Looking back, Harper Steele offers this perspective: “I walked into SNL with a lingering, wafting feeling of alt comedy, because that’s the world I came out of. And when I wrote “Oops, I Crapped My Pants,” I think people thought that I was selling out a little bit. It took everyone a little while to catch up and go, ‘No, that was funny.’ I still think it’s funny. Why am I turning my back on what I thought was funny with Carol Burnett? And I think that’s sort of what was going on there. I think we all came in with a little bit of like, ‘We’re going to change the world. We don’t do this comedy.’ And then time catches up with you.” 

Steele isn’t so ready to write-off the idea of a catchphrase comeback. “I don’t think it dies because it got deconstructed and then can’t be done  again. What I think is that it gets deconstructed and falls out of favor for a  generation and then, who knows, at the SNL hundredth with robot Lorne,  there may be a bunch of new catchphrases running around.” 

Or perhaps we won’t have to wait that long. Hopefully this weekend we’ll  be treated to the revival of an old catchphrase or two. So SNL… go ahead  and kick, stretch and kick! You’re fifty!

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