‘Saturday Night Live’ video: Amy Poehler, Kyle Mooney star in glorious cut-for-time sketch

Here is something that may be rather difficult for people out there to digest. We had a sketch on this past episode of “Saturday Night Live” where Kenan Thompson encouraged Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as a director to act more like characters from “The Jeffersons.” Meanwhile, we had an excellent sketch featuring Poehler and Kyle Mooney that was cut from the show.

The idea of this holiday-themed sketch is simple: Before they can spend time with their grandmother on her “last Christmas,” Mooney and Poehler’s characters have to resolve their issues. Kate McKinnon played the mother who came in and yelled at them, as mothers often do. (For whatever reason, McKinnon is glorious at cranky mother / grandmother characters.) The sketch starts out odd, gets pretty funny, gets somewhat sweet, and then has a disturbing-but-funny twist at the end where they get out of the scene in a split-second.

We’re not going to pretend that this is in our top 5 sketches of the year, since it’s not. If it aired during the show, though, we’d probably say that it is one of the highlights of the night. It’s okay for a little melancholy to get into “SNL” from time to time if it is done in a way that also incorporates humor. Look at “Sad Mouse.” This is much sillier than that!

So why was this cut? Time constraints are a part of it, but we think the reason we got the “Jeffersons” sketch over this in the pecking order is because this one didn’t feature the show’s other host in Tina Fey, and presumably you want to get as many scenes with the two of them as possible.

We just feel bad for Mooney, though, given that he is the king of his sketches being cut at the last minute.

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