The final sketch slot on Saturday Night Live is not for the faint of heart—or the dry-clean-only.
In the eighth episode of SNL’s digital short series The Rundown, SNL cast member Sarah Sherman is tasked with choosing the ten-to-one sketch she’d slot into the series’ all-star “fantasy” episode lineup.
Produced by SNL itself, The Rundown has been building a dream episode one slot at a time, with past installments seeing Colin Jost pick a cold open, Dana Carvey choose a live sketch, Bowen Yang select a “Weekend Update” feature, Chloe Fineman tackle celebrity impressions, Questlove weigh in on musical sketches, and Jack Black take on the host’s monologue slot.
Now it’s Sherman’s turn. For the uninitiated, the ten-to-one is the last sketch slot of the night—the place where the weirdest, riskiest, most easily cut material often lives. As Sherman explains, it’s also the slot where pages of dialogue can be removed while a sketch is being performed, just to make time.
“It’s the danger zone. It’s the weirdo zone,” Sherman says.
Among the sketches she considers are Molly Shannon’s “The Courtney Love Show,” which she says showed her at a young age that people could be “so crazy” and still be comedy; Fred Armisen’s “Punk Band Reunion at the Wedding,” which was memorably highlighted in Questlove’s 2025 documentary Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music; and “Acupuncture Gone Wrong,” whose blood-soaked stage magic Sherman calls “awesome.”
Sherman also reflects on her own relationship with the ten-to-one slot, including her googly-eyes sketch, which required her to perform while only being able to see when the holes in the eyes lined up just right. “Don’t tell Lorne,” she says, “I memorized so that I could pull the sketch off.”
But when it comes time to make her pick, Sherman goes with “Rookie Cop,” a sketch that starts with one rookie officer vomiting at the sight of a gruesome crime scene and escalates until just about everyone—including the dog—is getting sick.
“It’s a sketch that starts and goes and goes,” Sherman says. “And just when you think it might stop going, it keeps going.”
In other words: a fitting pick for the slot Sherman describes as both the “danger zone” and the “weirdo zone.”
Press play at the top of this post to see Sherman make her ten-to-one pick—and explain why, for her, the messier the sketch gets, the more classic it becomes.
