Why ‘Farewell Mr. Bunting’ is the best ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch of 2016
We know that there are so many great sketches that “Saturday Night Live” created over the span of 2016 — as a matter of fact, we’d go so far as to say that this is one of the best years of sketches in the entire history of the series on NBC.
Yet, at the same exact time, we’d say that the single funniest sketch of the year did not involve Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump, nor did it involve Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton. Instead, we’re going all the way back to the episode of the show featuring Fred Armisen as host earlier this spring. “Farewell Mr. Bunting” started very clearly as a tribute to the movie “Dead Poets Society,” but beyond that, we’re not going to say that it was entirely clear precisely what the sketch was going to be about given that for the first minute or so everything felt a bit straight-laced and serious.
As a matter of fact, we wondered at one point whether “SNL” had slipped into an alternate universe where Fred, often an a purveyor for all things weird, seized control of the show and was doing straight-up tributes to his favorite movies.
Then, Pete Davidson got up on the desk and life as we knew it changed in the sketch. The final minutes of this are sheer paradise when it comes to violet absurdity; it is the sort of twist you should have thought about at some point, but never did. We haven’t laughed harder at anything in all of 2016 than the end of this sketch, especially when we had no idea that it was coming. Admittedly, it doesn’t have the replay value of our #2 sketch of the year below in the first appearance of Baldwin’s Trump, but it succeeds brilliantly on the shock value and delivers a gory masterpiece. Is it for everyone? Probably not, but let this be a reminder that “SNL” does not need to mimic current events or have great celebrity cameos to be funny. It’s a show based entirely on ideas, and if we had more like “Farewell Mr. Bunting” on a regular basis, we’d have arguably a far more daring, interesting show — not to say that the one that we have is bad.
For those curious, we’ll be back tomorrow with our take on the favorite host of the year so far.
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