The Strange Case of This Weekend’s SNL Ten-to-One Sketch

Andrew Dismukes cut for time — Screenshot: NBC

UPDATE, Tuesday: SNL answered the mystery late Tuesday morning, posting both installments of “Amazing Tales of Truth” to YouTube under its “Cut for Time” banner. The upload combines the segment that aired Saturday with the second installment that was cut from the live broadcast. Watch it at the bottom of this post.

For the first time in Saturday Night Live’s modern era, a sketch that aired live Saturday night still hadn’t made its way to the show’s YouTube channel by Monday afternoon.

And that’s not the only unusual thing about “Amazing Tales of Truth.”

The Andrew Dismukes-led piece that closed this weekend’s Dakota Johnson-hosted episode was actually only half of a joke.

Written by Carl Tart and Dismukes, “Amazing Tales of Truth” was conceived as a two-part runner, with separate installments designed to connect later in the show. Both survived dress rehearsal and were slated for the live broadcast. But as the show ran long, the second installment was cut for time, leaving only the first to air.

“Every day something amazing happens, something that challenges the very core of what we believe,” Dismukes explained to camera in a Rod Serling-style introduction. “Every day someone in the world experiences the impossible, this is: Amazing Tales of Truth.”

The scene that followed looked as though it might deliver on that promise.

Veronika Slowikowska played a daughter sitting beside her comatose father, played by James Austin Johnson, hoping that singing “Over the Rainbow” might somehow bring him back.

“Did it work?” Slowikowska asked after she finished singing.

Dismukes appeared again to explain that it had not: the man wasn’t going to wake up because his daughter sang to him. He had been hit by a bus.

And that was the sketch. As LateNighter’s resident SNL statistician Mike Murray first pointed out, at less than two and a half minutes, it was SNL’s shortest live sketch since Kim Kardashian hosted in 2021, nearly five years ago.

On its own, that extreme brevity was part of the joke: The show had gone to the trouble of creating an elaborate supernatural anthology setup only to arrive almost immediately at the decidedly non-supernatural explanation.

But at dress rehearsal, “Amazing Tales of Truth” had a second act.

Later in the show, another seemingly unrelated sketch began on a porch, where Tommy Brennan played a son mourning the death of the family dog with his parents, played by Johnson and Mikey Day.

Then the impossible happened. The dog came back.

That’s when Dismukes reappeared, revealing that viewers were once again watching “Amazing Tales of Truth.” There had been no resurrection. This was a different dog that looked like theirs, had dug up the dead dog and stolen its collar.

The explanation was another punchline in itself, but the bigger joke was the return of Dismukes and the realization that the two scenes connected.

That delayed recognition is part of what makes an SNL runner work. The show can plant an idea, move on, and then reward the audience for remembering it later in the night.

MacGruber is probably SNL’s best-known example of the form, with multiple installments scattered throughout an episode and each return building on what came before.

Another Will Forte sketch used the device more unexpectedly. In Season 35, Forte starred in the absurd “Closet Organizer” commercial. Much later, a seemingly unrelated bar sketch revealed that his character was the same man from the ad. The joke wasn’t simply that he returned—it was that viewers had no reason to expect him to.

“Amazing Tales of Truth” was designed to pull off a similar surprise. Instead, its second installment never made it to air.

Which makes what has happened since the broadcast all the more interesting.

By early Sunday, SNL has typically posted every sketch from that weekend’s episode to YouTube and its social feeds. More than 36 hours later, “Amazing Tales of Truth” still hadn’t appeared. The sketch can still be seen as part of the full episode on Peacock.

The YouTube delay may ultimately mean nothing more than that: a delay. But given the unusual circumstances surrounding the sketch, its absence raises a couple of obvious questions.

Has the show decided that, without the payoff, the sketch isn’t worth posting? Or is SNL considering presenting the aired segment together with the second, unaired installment, allowing online viewers to see the idea in the form originally intended?

UPDATE: As it turns out, it was the latter.

Late Tuesday morning, SNL posted both installments together to YouTube under its “Cut for Time” banner, effectively restoring the structure that viewers at dress rehearsal saw but the live audience did not.

In other words, viewers who wondered why the unusually short sketch had remained conspicuously absent from YouTube now have their answer: SNL apparently wasn’t interested in posting half the joke.

For “Amazing Tales of Truth,” the missing payoff finally arrived—just a couple of days late.