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Michael Phelps Proves He's Not Great at Everything; Bombs Badly as SNL Host

Posted Sep 14, 2008 1:15AM By Will Brinson (RSS feed)

Filed Under: TV and Movies, Sports Media, Current Events

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There have been many athletes that have appeared on Saturday Night Live. And relative to other miserable on-stage performances, most of them have been pretty funny.

Okay, so most of them haven't been that great. But Derek Jeter's Taco Hole is absolutely killer and Peyton Manning might have been the funniest person on the show -- no, I'm not just talking hosts -- since Will Ferrell left.

Expecting that sort of show from Phelps seemed a bit aggressive. Being funny, after all, on live national television is not easy. But there's a big difference between not being funny and just being flat-out unentertaining and, well, flat.

Phelps was both on Saturday. One skit was funny and it drew on the softball Michael Phelps Diet joke, but that didn't matter since anyone with any sensibility (or charged with reviewing this FAIL-fest) had already turned off the television, since it came at the very end of the show.

Check out Video of Phelps' Performance!

Phelps got an immediate hookup on the performance -- Tina Fey decided to show up as Sarah Palin, juxtaposing the always foxy (I have a really weird obsession, sorry) Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton in what came off as a pretty funny intro skit and a misrepresentation of what would follow.


Throughout the monologue, it was pretty obvious that he was there to play the role of a straight man -- hence the Denny Crane Shatner cameo pimping Priceline. And also because they used both Poehler and Will Forte to try and inject some humor -- key word "try" -- into a short piece that was uninspiring at best. I thought he would be a little more excited -- he had mentioned he was pretty thrilled at the gig -- so I was relatively shocked when he said it was his "ninth greatest achievement". Oh. I see. That was a joke. Whoops.

Kudos though, to whoever decided that Phelps, with a blonde wig on top, would look perfect as a home-schooled Amish teenager. He did. Even up to the inability to hold back a grin in a fairly amusing "Quizbowl" skit that wasn't designed at all to try and make the swimmer humorous, although it did take shots at the public schooling system, amid obvious jokes.

It wasn't as obvious as the "Locker Room Skit" -- one that Manning killed -- making an appearance; Phelps somehow managed to dehumorize a line that includes the phrase "fudged my Speedo". And considering I laughed re-reading it, well, that's not good. In better news: Kings of Leon next week.

"Ugly Kids" (not the actual name, just the generic title I'm attaching to the SNL skit with socially awkward children amid parents and their guests) was, well, what it is always: primarily lame and awkward. I can't fault Phelps for his performance, even if it was a B-rate impersonation of Napoleon Dynamite, but this skit is never funny, so yeah, whoops. Again.

(Aside: Surely I'm not the only one who thinks Beverly Hills Chihuahua means an imminent collapse of Earth's center core and brimfire reigning down? Right?)

(Aside 2: I hope that Lorne Michaels took the "Weekend Update" break to slap Phelps around for somehow managing to flat-line even Lil' Wayne's introduction.)

And instead of an aside, I'm just going to ask you -- why is Darrell Hammond still hanging around SNL? He does like one skit a week, he's the only holdover left from the previous cast change and is he really that funny? Because his Bella imitation on "The Charles Barkley Show" was not. Yet, it was still funnier than Michael Phelps playing ... Michael Phelps. Sigh.

On the bright side, Phelps said roughly 30 words over the next two skits, four of which were funny. Oh no. Nevermind. They were horrible. That might be because after trying to spin off some Fave-5 T-Mobile joke about adultery, they let new cast member Bobby Moynihan get loose as a waiter in a skit that was, um, not good. Well, unless you count "Somehow making Phelps appear less worse" as "good." Then it was good.

NBC pulled out all the stops for this one, including a Jared Fogle (Honestly, how is this guy still relevant?) cameo in the middle of the aforementioned Phelps Diet skit, which is a shame. Because, just like Fogle's description of the Phelps diet, it "sucked a fat one."

I'd like to think that it wasn't all Phelps and that the writing has somehow come back down from a brief resurgence during the last season, but the fact is, he had some chances to be funny and didn't do anything to convert at all. Like, if he was in charge of writing this, he would totally not give himself the gold.

Tags: amy+poehler, AmyPoehler, bobby+moynihan, BobbyMoynihan, Darrell+Hammond, DarrellHammond, Derek+Jeter, DerekJeter, Jared+Fogle, JaredFogle, Lorne+Michaels, LorneMichaels, Michael+Phelps, MichaelPhelps, napoleon+dynamite, NapoleonDynamite, Peyton+Manning, PeytonManning, Sarah+Palin, SarahPalin, Tina+Fey, TinaFey

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