The 5 Most Insufferable ‘SNL’ Catchphrases
For 50 years, Saturday Night Live has been a catchphrase factory, churning out funny turns of phrase that get repeated ad nauseam in middle-school cafeterias and corporate team-building retreats. That’s the problem with catchphrases — one that makes you laugh when you first hear it might make you throttle someone when it’s repeated for the 10,000th time.
Here are the five overused SNL catchphrases that have caused the most forehead veins to throb…
More Cowbell!
“More cowbell” has made lives miserable from everyone to fans at sports arenas to Christopher Walken to the members of Blue Öyster Cult. Will Ferrell told Jimmy Fallon he went to see Walken years later in a play. “And he’s like, ‘You know, you’ve ruined my life. People during the curtain call bring cowbells and ring them.’”
As for Blue Öyster Cult, the oft-repeated sketch forced the band to change up their live shows. “We began playing the cowbell in ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ live. For 20-odd years, we didn’t use a live cowbell for our shows and never considered it,” said the group’s cofounder Buck Dharma. “We had to play the cowbell because there was just no getting away from it.”
Well, Isn’t That Special?
The Church Lady was an SNL staple in the era when it ran popular characters into the ground on the regular. Enid Strict appeared in a mind-numbing 18 sketches, with “Isn’t that special?” screeched into the nation’s television sets every time.
Carvey says “Isn’t that special?” happened organically one night while improvising in a club. Then, with the help of SNL writer Rosie Shuster, the phrase was rammed down our throats for multiple seasons. Carvey was “shocked the character got so popular, but I guess everybody knows a ‘church lady.’”
Yeah, That’s the Ticket
Jon Lovitz showed up during a thirsty time for Lorne Michaels. Not much was breaking out from the first cast he hired after returning to the show in 1985 — except Lovitz’s Pathological Liar character. It sounds like even Lovitz got sick of his “that’s the ticket” catchphrase, even though it made him a lot of cash.
“Next thing you know, everybody’s imitating it,” he says in SNL oral history Live From New York. “It was just unreal because I’d been working as a messenger. … I mean, I was broke, and then by the end of the year, I got a deal to do a movie for half a million dollars.”
We’re Not Worthy!!
No SNL sketch was responsible for more insufferable catchphrases than Wayne’s World. From “We’re not worthy” to “Party on!” to “Schwing!” the sketches and subsequent film versions created a fun vocabulary that never grew old — NOT!
But Mike Myers swears he doesn’t know how to invent an earworm. “I’m fascinated by how people talk, but I’ve never designed a catchphrase,” he told Vulture. “Like ‘Get in mah belly’ (from the Austin Powers movies)? That was an improv. It wasn’t like, “Ladies and gentlemen, my next catchphrase … ‘Get in mah belly!’ Very good!”
I Live in a Van Down by the River
Chris Farley’s biography, The Chris Farley Show, claims “van down by the river” found a permanent place in the national lexicon — and it sure felt like it.
Bob Odenkirk remembers the phrase’s Second City origins in his memoir Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama. “When I grew up in Naperville, there was a group of hippie types who hung out by the bridge over the sluggish, brown DuPage River — and I pictured that very spot for a desperate middle-aged loser to park his van and contemplate his empty, broken life.”
One reason the line continued to resonate despite the repetition? “The sketch was done the way I’d written it, except for the million flourishes of performance that Chris did, varied every time he performed it, every move adding character, tension, surprise, laughs.”