5 best SNL sketches 2017: Sean Spicer, Pete Davidson, Papyrus, and more

2017 may not have been a great year for many things, but we would say with a lot of confidence that it was a great year for Saturday Night Live. There were so many great sketches that aired over the past year, but this year was so crazy that it’s easy to forget about some of them in the sea of all of the stuff that’s happened. Some are funny because they’re just downright strange, whereas some of them are fantastic just when it comes to the social commentary that they offer up. All do serve a great purpose, though, and that is either getting us to laugh or making us think.

Below, take a look at our picks for the five best sketches of the year.

5. Papyrus – This sketch from the Ryan Gosling premiere episode was so ridiculous and strange that we love it — especially upon repeat viewings. Whoever knew that someone could be so upset over a really stupid font — one even used for the movie Avatar? The fact that this sketch came literally out of nowhere years removed from Avatar somehow made it even funnier.

4. Trump’s People’s Court – There are a lot of sketches featuring Alec Baldwin as Trump at this point that feel really like more of the same — yet, there was something refreshing and incredibly ridiculous about seeing Baldwin playing this version of the President on a mock legal show.

3. Totino’s Pizza Rolls – Over the past couple of years we’ve come to expect these weird, funny spoofs of the Pizza Rolls commercials featuring Vanessa Bayer and her “hungry guns.” We’ve seen these commercial parodies go off the rails in a wide array of forms, but seeing the sketch devolve into a strange arthouse romance starring Bayer and Kristen Stewart, right in the middle of the “hungry guys” watching the football game, somehow worked even though it had no reason to work. (Side note: How is SNL going to do these sketches without Bayer?)

2. Pete Davidson talks Staten Island – This is a fairly recent Weekend Update piece from Pete, and it may be one of our favorite comedic SNL pieces in a rather long time. Him saying that he wants all of Staten Island to fall into the sea was tremendous, but it was topped by him receiving a death threat from a local reporter and then also being constantly reminded that Colin Josh is better than him.

1. Sean Spicer press conference – We’re going back to the original outing, back when nobody knew that Melissa McCarthy was going to be playing the character. The sheer surprise of the appearance made this wonderful, and her acerbic dialogue and physical comedy turned this into the stuff of legend. It may not hold up as well in repeat viewing, but watching this live was one of the most joyous things we’ve ever seen as a viewer of this show.

What were some of the best SNL sketches of 2017 in your mind? Share in the comments!

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