30 of the Best SNL Skits Ever

Rolling Stone recently selected the top 50 Saturday Night Live (SNL) skits of all time ("50 Greatest 'Saturday Night Live' Sketches of All Time"). This inspired me to pick (for now) 30 of my favorites, which appear below. There's a definite bias toward older skits since that's when I watched SNL more faithfully. Still, all of these are pretty good. Most of the titles are my own and reflect how I recall them, which may not always be entirely accurate. If you click on the pictures of the sketches, they should link you to the videos.

1. Dead Honky (1975): Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor

2. Bassomatic (1976): Dan Aykroyd

3. Conehead Family Feud (1977): Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin -- the Coneheads are great. Bill Murray is hilarious as Richard Dawson.

4. Samurai Hitman (1977): Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray -- Actually, there are several "Samurai" skits that are quite good. This is just one. Belushi was brilliant. The first of many SNL alums to die too soon.




5. Roseanne Rosannadanna (1978): Gilda Radner: One of many classic Roseane Rosannadanna commentaries on Weekend Update. This one's about smoking, but she quickly strays off on one of her tangents. A reminder of how good Radner was. Too bad she died so young. I don't think Gene Wilder (her husband) ever got over it.

6. The Perfect Circumcision (1977): Dan Aykroyd: Parody of a car advertisement extolling the virtues of its shock absorbers, which allow the cutting of a diamond while driving.

7. Baba Wawa (1978): Gilda Radner and John Belushi (as Henry Kissinger) -- Another one of Radner's great characters. 

8. No Coke, Pepsi (1978): Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner

9. King Tut (1978): Steve Martin -- A classic when Steve Martin was at the top of his game.

10. The French Chef (1978): Dan Aykroyd -- Supposedly, Julia Child loved this skt.

11. Two Wild and Crazy Guys (1978): Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner -- One of many featuring the Festrunk brothers.

12. Jane, You Ignorant, Misguided Slut (1978): Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd

13. Medieval Barber (1978): Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner

14. Killer Bees (1978): Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd, Elliot Gould, Jane Curtin, Lorne Michaels -- the Killer Bees sketches were great. I tried to track one down, "The Bad News Bees" (featuring Walter Matthau), but I couldn't find a video of just it. To see it, you have to watch the entire episode (although it's pretty funny).

15. Blues Brothers (1978): Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi -- Before the movie, before the album. Aykroyd's dancing is hilarious. Belushi's is pretty good too.

16. Buh-Weet Sings (1981): Eddie Murphy

17. Mr. Robinson's Christmas (1984): Eddie Murphy

18. Ronald Reagan (1986): Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, A. Whitney Brown, Kevin Nealon, Dana Carvey, Nora Dunn -- Hartman is wonderful as Reagan. Another SNL alum who died too soon.




19. Church Lady (1988): Dana Carvey, Al Franken (Pat Robertson), Phil Hartman (Jimmy Swaggart) -- "That's so special"

20. Hans and Franz (1990): Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, and Patrick Swayze -- We're here to "pump you up!"

21. Chippendales (1990): Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze

22. Living in a Van Down by the River (1993): Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Christina Applegate, Julia Sweeney, David Spade -- Ranked #1 by Rolling Stone

23. The Chanukah Song (1994): Adam Sandler -- One of my favorite "Christmas" songs ("100 of the Best Holiday Songs")

24. Celebrity Jeopardy (1999): Norm MacDonald, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Darrell Hammond.

25. More Cowbell (2000): Will Ferrell, Christopher Walken, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, Chris Parnell, Horatio Sanz -- if I were to rank them, this would be a candidate for #1.

26. The Bush's Go Hunting (2000): Dana Carvey and Will Ferrell -- Dana Carvey's multiple portrayals of the elder Bush are wonderful, and this is just one of them. However, when you add Will Ferrell as "W," then you have a classic.

27. Katie Couric and Sarah Palin (2008): Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. An instant classic.

28. Dusty Muffin (2010): Betty White, Molly Shannon, and Ana Gasteyer -- some folks prefer "Schweddy Balls," but this is my favorite "Delicious Dish"

29: Pandora Intern (2012): Bruno Mars -- I'm not a huge Bruno Mars fan, but he's amazing in this

30. Boy Dance Party (2013): Bruce Willis, Kenan Thompson, Bobby Moynihan, Taran Killam, Jay Pharoah, Beck Bennett. I had to include at least one from the past season.

The Temptation of Self-Righteousness

Self-righteousness is a powerful drug. It’s tempting to paint one’s ideological opponents as immoral, stupid, or both. It can make one feel, well, morally and intellectually superior, which is why it’s so tempting. Folks on the left often slam conservatives for being judgmental, but I've found that liberals are just as bad. The issues are different, but the put-downs happen just the same. It’s one thing to take a stand on an issue. It’s quite another to put down others because they take a stand that differs from your own. The former is OK; the latter is not. As Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman put it when he apologized for his rant against 49er wide receiver, Michael Crabtree, “No one has ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is.”

Resources for Following the World Cup

The first match of the World Cup is in the books with Brazil winning (ugly) over Croatia, 3-1. The U.S. doesn't play until Monday (6pm EST) when they take on Ghana, the team that has knocked the U.S. out of the last two World Cups. In this post I list a few resources that could enhance your knowledge as you follow the action. The first three are from the FiveThirtyEight website, which is run by the big data expert, Nate Silver, author of "The Signal and the Noise". The first provides a series of interactive graphs that present the odds that a team will advance beyond the group stage, as well as the odds that it will survive the knockout round ("FiveThirtyEight's World Cup Predictions").The second compares FiveThirtyEight's rankings with other sets of rankings ("How FiveThirtyEight’s World Cup Predictions Compare to Other Ratings"). The third compares the results from all of the World Cups graphically ("The History of the World Cup In 20 Charts").

The last is a podcast from the folks at Freakonomics ("Why America Doesn't Love Soccer (Yet)"), which features NFL quarterback Andrew Luck, who is a rabid soccer fan, as well as Sunil Gulati, an economist at Columbia who also is the president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and on the FIFA Executive Committee and Jonathan Wilson, a professor at Tufts university who is the author of Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. As the podcast's title suggests, it explores why the U.S. has yet to reach elite status in terms of mens soccer (but already has in women's soccer). You can listen to the podcast at the Freakonomics website ("Why America Doesn't Love Soccer (Yet)") or download it from iTunes. You can also find the audio transcript at the Freakonomics website.

Capitalism and Same-Sex Marriage

It is fashionable among those on the left to rail against capitalism because of how it perpetuates inequality. No doubt that is one of the reasons why Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has become this summer's must read book (although I'm willing to bet that most people who buy it won't finish it -- it does look impressive bringing it with you to the beach, though). And while capitalist economies produce inequalities, there's little evidence that non-capitalist economies (e.g., socialist, communist) perform any better, and quite a bit of evidence they often perform worse, with the economies of the former Soviet Union and China serving as poster children (see e.g., "The Document That Transformed the Chinese Economy"). Capitalism may not be perfect, but its probably better than the alternatives. Or, as Churchill might have put it, "capitalism is the worst form of economy, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (Piketty, after all, remains a capitalist.)

Even if one rejects the argument that capitalism produces fewer inequalities than other forms, there are still other reasons for those on the ideological left rethink its relationship with it. For example, as Steven Pinker has noted ("The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined"), the spread of capitalism has probably contributed to the downward trend in violence that we have enjoyed over the last few hundred years. Why? Because there's little incentive to kill others when you have a profitable trading relationship with them.

And then there's the issue of gay and lesbian rights. As a recent (June 2014) editorial in the conservative Roman Catholic monthly, New Oxford Review, notes, one of the primary movers behind same-sex marriage has been big business. Quoting from an article that appeared in the magazine two years before, it notes that

When it was first seriously proposed a decade or so ago, same-sex marriage encountered strong opposition from most Americans. But today, traditionalists find themselves on the defensive, and this is a battle they appear to be losing. While many factors account for this, a major one was the entry of a powerful new combatant into the fray: Big Business. Corporations such as The Home Depot, Target, Microsoft, American Airlines, Bank of America, Citi, Coca-Cola, and Google, to mention only a few, have thrown their weight -- and their capital earnings -- behind the push for same-sex marriage.

The editorial goes on to note that when the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the legalization of gay marriage, some of the loudest voices arguing in support of marriage equality have been Budweiser, Levi Strauss, Expedia, HBO, Kenneth Cole, Smirnoff, Nordstrom, and Kraft Foods (p. 14). Similarly, some of the biggest financial backers of the effort to defeat California's Prop 8 included executives from many of the world's largest hi-tech companies, such as Cisco (e.g., John Morgridge), eBay (e.g., Pierre Omidyar), Google (e.g., Larry Page), and Yahoo (e.g., Jerry Yang).

In short, perhaps the left needs to rethink its relationship to capitalism. It has more in common with it than it realizes.

Pentecost: It's Five O'Clock Somewhere (A Repost of Sorts)

The Day of Pentecost (Acts 2) traditionally marks the birth of the church, when after the Resurrection, God's Spirit descended on the disciples, causing them to speak numerous languages and allowing them to spread the Gospel to the world. It symbolically marked the reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) where when people sought to build a great tower, God prevented them by causing them speak in numerous languages so that they couldn't communicate with one another. On the Day of Pentecost, most observers were amazed, but a few thought something else was at work:

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. 

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken... Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They've had too much wine.” 

Then Peter stood up, raised his voice, and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people aren't drunk... It’s only nine in the morning!

I guess Peter didn't know that it's always 5 o'clock somewhere.

Networks and Religion

For years social scientists have known that when it comes to religion, networks matter. Aside from a handful of studies, however, it hasn't always been clear how, and interestingly most of these have been carried out by folks who do not specialize in social network analysis. Why that is so is unclear. The sociologist Christian Smith (2010) argues that one reason is that social network analysts see religion as a convenient straw man; they like to pit their scientific approach to reality over against the irrationality of religious faith. Smith is probably on to something there, but I suspect it also has roots in the belief that religion is an epiphenomenon (i.e., a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside a primary phenomenon) and thus, ultimately, unimportant.

Be that as it may, in this series of posts, I summarize most of what is known about networks and religion. To wit:

• Religious groups recruit primarily through their social ties
• People of faith cluster together just like everyone else: with similar others
• People on a religious group's periphery are more likely to leave than those at its center
• Religious ties sometimes coerce people people to attend church (or synagogue, temple, mosque, etc.)
• Religious ideas and practices can spread across religious networks
• Religious networks help facilitate volunteerism, civic engagement, and political activism
• Social networks of theologically conservative groups tend to be denser than theologically liberal groups
• Denser social networks among a congregation's youth lead to improved life outcomes
• Religious social networks are positively associated with life satisfaction
• Religious networks can foster conflict
• Dense and isolated religious networks are more susceptible to radicalization and violence

These topics are divided into four separate posts, which can be accessed by the links below (or simply by scrolling down the page):

• Networks and Religion: Ties that Bind

• Networks and Religion: Ties that Loose

• Networks and Religion: Ties that Build Up

• Networks and Religion: Ties that Tear Down

The network at the top of this introductory post is of Anabaptists involved in the Radical Reformation (Matthews et al. 2013). The network at the bottom is of the Noordin Top terrorist network. Both were drawn using the social network analysis software package, Gephi.

References

• Matthews, Luke J., Jeffrey Edmonds, Wesley Wildman, and Charles Nunn. 2013. "Cultural Inheritance or Cultural Diffusion of Religious Violence? A Quantitative Case Study of the Radical Reformation." Religion, Brain & Behavior 3(1):3-15.
• Smith, Christian S. 2010. What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Networks and Religion: Ties That Bind

1. Religious groups recruit primarily through social networks. People are much more likely to join religious groups where they know people than where they do not. Take, for instance, John Lofland and Rodney Stark’s (1963) study of people converting to the Unification Church (aka, the Moonies). Stark later remarked that when he and Lofland first began watching the group, it “had never succeeded in attracting a stranger" (Stark 1996). Everyone who joined already knew someone who was a member. Moreover, Stark and Lofland witnessed a number of people who were sympathetic with the group’s doctrines, but in the end did not join because they had numerous ties with people who disapproved of the Moonies. This led them to conclude that the people who ultimately joined tended to be those whose ties to group members exceeded their ties to nonmembers. Or to put it differently, conversion typically involved aligning one's beliefs and practices with those of one's friends and family.

In another study, Rodney Stark and Bill Bainbridge (1980) looked at the role that social ties play in recruiting people to the Mormon Church. They found that when Mormon missionaries go door to door, their success rate is only 0.1 percent. Referrals provide a somewhat higher rate of success (7 percent for covert referrals and 8 percent for overt referrals), but their highest rates of success occurred when Mormons invited non-Mormon friends and relatives into their homes to meet Mormon missionaries. In those instances, they enjoyed a success rate close to 50 percent. This suggests that the best strategy for conversion is not cold-calling but forming friendships with non-Mormons. Stark and Bainbridge noted that an article in the Mormon Church’s official magazine provided detailed instructions on how to recruit new members, and a recurring theme was the importance of building close personal ties with non-Mormons. It also explicitly instructed its readers that they should downplay or avoid discussing religion while forming these ties. Only later were they to bring up that they were Mormons

Another way of looking at these findings is that missionaries do not serve as the primary instrument of recruitment to the Mormon faith. Instead, recruitment is accomplished primarily by the rank and file of the church as they construct intimate interpersonal ties with non-Mormons and thus link them into a group network (Stark and Bainbridge 1980:1386-87).

At about the same time the Stark and Bainbridge study appeared, David Snow and his colleagues (Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson 1980) published an article that highlighted the same dynamic: Successful social movements, religious or otherwise, recruit primarily through social networks of friends and families. All of the groups they studied, except the Hare Krishna, recruited over 50 percent of their members through either kinship or friendship networks with several recruiting over 90 percent of their members through such networks. The Hare Krishnas were the lone exception because they demand exclusive participation from their members and require them to sever all extra-movement ties. Thus, they have virtually no social ties outside of the group through which they can recruit, which forces them to recruit from public places. That's why they are so small. The moral of the story? Successful religious groups must maintain open social networks in order to grow.

2. People of faith cluster just like everybody else: with similar others. The phenomenon of homophily, "birds of a feather, flock together," appears ubiquitous to human nature. We tend to befriend similar others, and this is even true between and within religious groups.

For example, in the 1960s Samuel Sampson (1968) spent a year in a Roman Catholic monastery observing the social interactions among a group of monks. During his stay a “crisis in the cloister” occurred that was in reaction to some of the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council, known informally as Vatican II. These changes were an attempt to modernize the Roman Catholic Church and included changes, such as saying the Mass in the vernacular (rather than in Latin) and granting nuns the freedom not to wear habits (à la, Sally Field as "The Flying Nun").

This conflict ultimately resulted in the expulsion of four monks and the voluntary departure of several others. In the end, only four monks remained. While he was there, Sampson coded four types of relational data that he further subdivided into positive and negative ties. He had each monk rank his top three choices for each type of relation, which included esteem and disesteem, liking and disliking, positive and negative influence, and praise and blame. Some of these relations he coded at different points in time, which are captured by the three graphs below (Time 1, Time 2, and Time 3). What they illustrate is how, over time, the monks increasingly clustered into groups, based largely on their opinion regarding the changes from Vatican II.

Sampson's Monks: Time 1

Sampson's Monks: Time 2

Sampson's Monks: Time 3

Sampson's monks are not unusual. Subnetworks form in most large religious groups, and the same is true of religious scholars. They tend to cluster together into like-minded subgroups. One the face of it, this isn't surprising, but it can have profound effects on the conclusions they draw. As we will see below, when like-minded people come together to debate a topic or an issue, the group tends to gravitate to the most radical position held by a member in the group. Thus, we shouldn't be surprised of the conclusions of groups such as the Jesus Seminar, which fall outside the mainstream of even liberal orthodoxy.

3. People on the periphery of a religious group are more likely to leave than those who are located in the center. In the same study in which Rodney Stark and Bill Bainbridge (1980) studied Mormon recruitment, they also examined a "doomsday" group, which had formed primarily along kinship ties, and Stark and Bainbridge found that members who had direct kinship ties to the group's leaders were less likely to defect (i.e., leave the group) than were others. In particular,

Members who were direct kin of the leaders, only 14% quit. Of those who were related to kin of the leaders, but not directly to the leaders (e.g., in-laws), 25% defected. But of those who had no relatives in the group, two-thirds left prematurely. For those who had to abandon their families as well as their faith, defection was rare. But for those without familial ties to the group, defection was the rule! (p. 1383).

Stark and Bainbridge's findings have been replicated in other studies. For example, Pamela Popielarz and J. Miller McPherson (1995) studied voluntary organizations in general (not just religious groups), and found that they lose members located at the edge (i.e., the periphery) of their group faster than they do core members, primarily because members at the edge have fewer ties within the organization and more without than do core members. However, members on the periphery are also more likely to leave because they are more likely to have other groups competing for their time and money.

Michael Emerson and Christian Smith (2000) found that this phenomenon helped explain why a newly-formed Seattle church's attempt to establish an interracial church was unsuccessful. The church was founded by an African-American pastor, who prior to founding the church, visited white and black churches in the area where he told them of his vision of an interracial church and asked for volunteers to be charter members. After a year of preparation, the church held its first public service, and the congregation was almost evenly split between blacks and whites (p. 147). However, as the church grew, the congregation began losing its white members, and within three years of its founding, fewer than 10 whites remained within the congregation. The first few white members (who were charter members) who left said they left because they felt like outsiders, that their voices were not being heard. Regardless of whether this indeed the case, it had a spiraling effect on the church's composition. As Emerson and Smith put it,

there were fewer within-church social network ties to keep white there and recruit new white members. Whites leaving also meant an increasingly great number of social ties outside the church for the remaining whites, making the church less central for them, and making them feel increasingly like outsiders, and that there needs were not being met (p. 149).

4. Religious ties sometimes coerce people to attend church. Our social ties cannot only entice us to join a particular congregation, in certain social contexts they can also coerce us into attending worship services. Chris Ellison and Darren Sherkat (1995) documented this phenomenon in their study of the rural, southern Black church. Before getting to their study, however, a little background is in order.

According to W. E. B. DuBois, after the Civil War, the church became the central social institution in the African American community. It was its primary vehicle of communication, entertainment, and education. Black churches also functioned as mutual-aid societies that helped members survive financial crises, especially when loved ones died or became extremely ill. And for males it became a vehicle of power, upward mobility, and economic success, which is why black churches were often overflowing with aspiring ministers and preachers who literally waited in the wings for a chance to preach and hopefully gather a following for themselves.

The central role of the Black Church was especially pronounced in the rural south, which led some scholars to argue that the southern rural Black church is a semi-involuntary institution. By this they meant that in the rural south, church participation serves as a sign of social legitimacy. In order to be respectable, one needs to go to church, and those who don’t are sanctioned. This differs for Black churches in urban settings because urban settings offer more secular opportunities for achieving personal status and prestige. Thus, there is less pressure for people to attend church.

Ellison and Sherkat tested this thesis using data on church attendance of African-Americans. They expected to find that not only will the rural, southern black church will have the highest overall rate of attendance, but it will also have the highest percentage of people who attend at intermittent levels. Why? Because the highest percentage of people who don't want to attend but feel compelled to do so will be those living in the rural South. However, they won't attend weekly. Only often enough so that they're not sanctioned by the wider community.

Ellison and Sherkat found support for their hypothesis. Moreover, once they broke the analysis down by region and rural differences, they found that the frequency of contact with friends is a statistically significant predictor of church participation among rural southerners but not among non-southerners. This suggests that rural southerners do, in fact, participate in church activities for reasons other than religious ones while non-southerners do not. To be sure, this is not a direct test of the semi-involuntary thesis, but it's results are consistent with it. They suggest that in the rural south peoples’ social networks sometimes force them to attend church when they otherwise would not.

References

• Ellison, Christopher G., and Darren E. Sherkat. 1995. "The 'Semi-involuntary Institution' Revisited: Regional Variations in Church Participation Among Black Americans." Social Forces 73(4):1415-37.
• Emerson, Michael O., and Christian S. Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lofland, John, and Rodney Stark. 1965. "Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective." American Sociological Review 30:862-75.
• Popielarz, Pamela A., and J. Miller McPherson. 1995. "On the Edge or in Between: Niche Position, Niche Overlap, and the Duration of Voluntary Association Memberships." American Journal of Sociology 101(3):698-720.
• Sampson, Samuel F. 1968. "A Novitiate in a Period of Change: An Experimental and Case Study of Relationships." Unpublished Dissertation. Sociology Department: Cornell University.
• Snow, David A., Louis A. Zurcher, and Sheldon Ekland-Olson. 1980. "Social Networks and Social Movements: A Microstructural Approach to Differential Recruitment." American Sociological Review 45:787-801.
• Stark, Rodney. 1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge. 1980. "Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects." American Journal of Sociology 85(6):1376-95.