Bobby Moynihan Names His Personal ‘SNL’ Heroes
Long before he was doing Guy Fieri and Drunk Uncle on Saturday Night Live, Bobby Moynihan was a Saturday Night Live superfan. “I’m the only one who bought the SNL action figures,” he says. “I still have them all.” Moynihan came of age in the ‘90s, so when I asked him to name his personal SNL heroes, it was no surprise that he cited two heavyweights from the era: “Chris Farley and Phil Hartman were the two that taught me comedy. To me, they were the two perfect sides of comedy.”
In terms of their favorite sketches of his, Moynihan went for some deep cuts. For Hartman, he cited the commercial parody “First Citywide Change Bank,” explaining, “It was Jim Downey and Phil Hartman, and the whole joke of the bank was that they only had change. It was like, ‘You come in here with $10, and we’re not going to give you 10 singles. We’re going to give you 40 quarters.’ It was them doing a very calm bank commercial explaining that they only have coins.”
“For Farley,” Moynihan continues, “there’s one where Janeane Garofalo and Tim Meadows are Christmas villagers. They’re all proper and they’re ice skating and, somehow or the other, Farley falls through the ice. It was fake ice — they probably built a set and put a hot tub under it — but it’s this juxtaposition of sweet, Christmas Carol kind of people and Farley falling through the ice and screaming bloody murder for a minute and a half. The whole joke is, ‘Isn’t it hilarious that this man is in pain and screaming and begging for help and no one is helping him?’ It’s just him. It’s what I love best about SNL: Here’s a funny idea, but the reality of it is, let’s just watch this guy have a blast for a couple of minutes.”
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Moynihan compared Farley’s ice skating sketch to a Maya Rudolph bit a decade later. “It’s like Maya Rudolph’s cold open where she did the national anthem,” he tells me. “It was the World Series that week, and some woman sang the national anthem — I don’t even remember who it was. She kind of went off, and SNL made fun of her. It’s just a three-and-a-half minute cold open of Maya Rudolph singing the national anthem and just fucking with it. It’s a perfect three minutes of comedy. I watch it when I’m sad. It’s the best.”
“That’s why I love SNL,” Moynihan concludes. “It’s just them allowing her to have a blast.”
