Siskel and Ebert Reviewed an Episode of ‘SNL’ During ‘SNL’

Legendary film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert had pretty mixed opinions when it came to movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches. They gave Wayne’s World two thumbs up, but called Coneheads one of the worst films of 1993. And for some reason they were massive fans of Stuart Saves His Family? Really?

But the duo’s harshest SNL criticisms, oddly enough, happened during an episode of SNL.

Siskel and Ebert appeared in the very first episode of the Lorne Michaels-less eighth season. The hook? They would be reviewing the season premiere of SNL — as in the one that was in the middle of airing. As Siskel noted during the sketch, it was “history’s first live review of a television show still in progress,” which is a pretty clever meta joke. It arguably worked far better than the episode’s central, highly-irregular conceit: that host Chevy Chase was unable to make his flight from Los Angeles to New York, and therefore had to stay in Burbank and perform the whole show live via satellite on a TV monitor.

During their segment, Siskel and Ebert analyzed three sketches that had already aired, actually pointing out legitimate strengths and weaknesses, as well as suggesting ways that they could have been improved. Siskel even called out the SNL cast’s lack of diversity when discussing a sketch featuring Eddie Murphy, who was somewhat conspicuously the lone Black character. 

For their “Dog of the Week” segment (a staple on their show at the time), instead of picking a terrible movie, the critics singled out Chase as the worst part of the show. But as they were dunking on him, Chase appeared on the TV behind them and started making goofy faces. Due to the over-the-top gestures, the audience seemed to miss hearing Siskel, who was describing Chase’s hands in an earlier film role, utter the phrase “one of the great acting hand jobs of all time.”

Incidentally, the three of them would later repeat the gag in person, when Siskel and Ebert ripped into Chase’s film career during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

While the sketch ultimately went well, according to the book Opposable Thumbs by Matt Singer, the rehearsal “went poorly.” Why? Well, because Siskel and Ebert were squabbling over whose part was bigger, eventually prompting Ebert to “count every word of dialogue” to ensure that they “each had exactly the same-sized part.” 

The sketch was funny enough that Siskel and Ebert returned to SNL multiple times, including in 1985 for a special Saturday Night Live Film Festival, in which they presented, and critiqued, past SNL short films along with Billy Crystal.

Of course, their past association with SNL didn’t stop them from later eviscerating A Night at the Roxbury.

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