Saturday Night Live alum Dana Carvey has released video of a sketch that never aired on the venerable comedy show featuring himself alongside cast members Jon Lovitz and the late Phil Hartman.
The sketch features Hartman as the host of a television show narrating an allegedly recently found clip of silent film star Charlie Chaplin (played by Carvey) hard at work making one of his classic comedies. The sketch revolves around Chaplin’s real life work process and shows him repeatedly trying to hone to perfection a simple scene of his Tramp character entering a bar, taking a seat and ordering a beer. Take after take is done as Chplin keeps coming up with new bits of business for himself at the expense of his scene party (Lovitz), all as Hartman offers sotto voice commentary. The result is outrageously funny and a more than a bit caustic right down to it’s final gut punch joke. But for whatever reason, the piece just went completely over the dress rehearsal audience’s heads.
The sketch was written by Robert Smiegel, a driving comedy presence on the show from the mid-1980s into the early 2010s, who has sited this sketch in interviews when asked about favorite pieces that never made it to the live show. Besides being a guiding comic voice on Saturday Night Live from the mid-1980s into the 2010s, Smiegel was the first head writer on Late Night With Conan O’Brien – the two first met during O’Brien’s stint as a writer on SNL – and helped cement that show’s comic sensibility. He also teamed with Dana Carvey for the comic’s short-lived self-named prime time sketch series. It was on The Dana Carvey Show that Smiegel first conceived of the animated shorts that would become the long-running TV Funhouse segments on Saturday Night Live.
Saturday Night Live is a show that is famously overwritten. Their production week starts with writers pitching dozens of sketch ideas, of which only a fraction get written. Those scripts then go through a table read where the best are picked for possible inclusion on that Saturday’s live show. But even then, the number of sketches that make it this far exceeds the number of that can be aired in the show’s ninety-minute time slot. A final round of cuts following the show’s dress rehearsal in front of a live audience earlier on Saturday determines which sketches will make it to the live show at 11:30 pm and which will not. The show has released some “cut after dress” sketches in the past, but this is one of the earliest to have been made public.
And besides, isn’t it nice to have a new Phil Hartman performance to savor?
This is one of my favorite #SNL short films. The brilliant Robert Smigel (@TriumphICDHQ ) wrote it – and recruited me to play #Chaplin. I thought its premise was inspired. And I never turn down an opportunity to play Chaplin. Unfortunately it never made it to air.
It played at… pic.twitter.com/4SpQcrDlom— Dana Carvey (@danacarvey) October 4, 2023
