Saturday Night Live's best car sketches, parodies and fake ads
MotorTrend Staff
MotorTrend
Saturday Night Live, the comedy sketch show that's on its 50th season, might be more famous for its political parodies, but it has a long, strong history of some hilarious car-related skits and fake ads. With classics popping up throughout the years (SNL's inaugural episode was way back in 1975), there's plenty of material to draw from, and with the show's 50th anniversary special airing this weekend on February 16 (Sunday special), what better time for our staff to highlight some of their favorites? Below you'll find the iconic SNL car sketches that keep our editors in stitches every time they watch:
The Adobe
I'm (just barely) old enough to remember the cheap-car craze of the mid-1980s, when the $4,995 Hyundai Excel and $3,990 Yugo GV popped onto the market to undercut established junk like the Dodge Omni ($6,209) and Chevrolet Chevette ($5,645). Buyers literally lined up with checkbooks in hand to buy these new cheapies, so just how low would the market go? SNL answered that question with the $179 Adobe, a Mexican import made out of clay. The Adobe's motto — inspired, perhaps, by Lee Iacocca's famous admonition, 'If you can find a better, car, buy it' — was , 'You can buy a cheaper car, but I wouldn't recommend it.'
One has to wonder if the genesis of this bit preceded the cheap-car craze. The idea of a clay car wrote its own series of visual gags: Phil Hartman making his own cupholder by smooshing a can of cola into the dash, Nora Dunn having a parking-lot oopsie and making an instant repair by remolding the fender, and a couple off for a tennis game, the backsides of their white clothes soiled with clay. Still, the funniest bit may well be the Adobe itself, which was made from a Renault LeCar. Even combined with the clay in which it was covered, the LeCar might still have been worth less than the Adobe's retail price. This was SNL at its best: A timely lampoon that we can still laugh at today. — Aaron Gold
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A December to Remember
As someone who has always rolled his eyes at Christmas car commercials of surprise new cars with big red bows, it's nice to see SNL take down the whole idea in such a hilarious way. From misunderstood finances to 'aper' (as in, APR, or a loan's annual percentage rate), this Lexus parody commercial is SNL at its best. — Christian Seabaugh
Mercury Mistress
Younger readers up to and including Millennials have thankfully been mostly spared from this phenomenon, but there was a time when car enthusiasts were more than just obsessed with their vehicles. Frankly, it got a little creepy. Enthusiasts, almost always male, once got so wrapped up in their cars they'd talk about them in ways bordering on the romantic and even sexual, anthropomorphizing their cars to a disturbing degree. This kind of mass hysteria became common enough to merit mockery on Saturday Night Live, giving us the hilarious and disturbing Mercury Mistress fake ad, introducing the world to the car you could literally have sex with (if you were male). Thankfully, changing social norms and ridicule on national television mostly put an end to this, with a late assist from Shania Twain's hit single and diss track "That Don't Impress Me Much." — Scott Evans
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Royal Deluxe II
A car with a ride so smooth, you can circumcise a baby in the back seat! That was the premise of SNL's 1977 ad for the Royal Deluxe II. This was the peak of the Malaise Era, and with horsepower having all but evaporated overnight, car ads of the time were focused on ride quality and interior appointments. In 1973, Mercury ran a commercial showing a Cartier jeweler splitting a $125,000 diamond in the back seat of a Marquis. How do you raise the stakes? Ask your friendly neighborhood mohel.
To establish the smooth-ride creds of the Royal Deluxe II (a barely-disguised Mercury Cougar sedan), SNL invites a rabbi to circumcise 8-day-old Benjamin Cantor in the back seat while Garrett Morris navigates the rough roads around Temple Beth Shalom in Little Neck, New York. As Morris darts around various suburban hazards and Dan Ackroyd provides deadpan commentary, the expected hilarity ensues. It's a one-joke bit played to perfection, and while all appears to come out okay, only the adult Mr. Cantor could tell us for sure. – Aaron Gold
Toonces the Driving Cat
First appearing in 1989, Toonces the driving cat endured as a recurring absurdist sketch over the years. As the name of the skit implies, Toonces is a cat, and somehow it's given the opportunity to drive — encouraging its owner, played by Steve Martin, to convince his character's wife to let the cat take them for a drive. Obviously, Toonces cannot drive, and mayhem ensues. The sketch follows a predictable arc, but between the fake cat driving — and the real cat superimposed in the driver's seat for the credit rolls set to a ridiculous jingle — it's somehow always funny. — Alexander Stoklosa
Mercedes-Benz AA-Class
Perhaps overlooked when it first aired in 2016, this fake ad for a Mercedes-Benz AA-Class combined believable-enough product placement (it uses, interchangeably, two generations of silver C-Class sedans), real-life Mercedes ad video clips, and plausible vehicle naming (AA-Class? Mercedes makes an actual A-Class...) seems more timely today. That's because the AA-Class represents the latest electric vehicle from Mercedes-Benz... and its innovation, if that's the word, is that it runs on AA-sized batteries. The punchline lands early in this fake spot, which is expertly presented by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but the continued highlighting of the AA's various "features" go hard in the paint for anyone familiar with EVs and disposable household batteries. Almost in keeping with the ad's backwards-looking battery tech, you can only watch this sketch on NBC's website, linked here. — Alexander Stoklosa
Clint Eastwood for Chrysler
By now, Super Bowl viewers are almost expecting to see an overly dramatic, pull-at-the-hearstrings, rally-the-patriots, go-America-type ad from Chrysler, Jeep, Ram or Dodge. Sometimes in black and white, sometimes barely even showing a current vehicle from one of those brands' lineups, they're massively expensive ads that tend to run nearly two minutes. There is a clear through-line between Chrysler's "Born of Fire" from 2011, Ram's "Farmer" in 2013, Jeep's 75th-anniversary-celebrating "Portraits" in 2016, and this year's Jeep spot "Owner's Manual." These really kicked into high gear, though, with Chrysler's 2012 "Born of Fire" followup for the Big Game, "Halftime in America."
Emerging from its bankruptcy and shotgun wedding with Fiat, just as America was emerging from the financial crisis, the automaker nabbed Clint Eastwood, relatively fresh off his turn starring in the self-directed "Gran Torino", to essentially reprise that role as a gritty, growling elderly person to give the country a sports-themed, Chrysler-sponsored pep talk. SNL skewered the concept beautifully, with a series (here are parts two and three) of pre-taped sketches with Bill Hader playing Eastwood responding to real-life criticisms of the (real) ad, which go increasingly off the rails — and, fittingly, barely even mention Chrysler's products. — Alexander Stoklosa
Lincoln Ads
What more can we say? Jim Carrey playing Matthew McConaughey as Lincoln's spokesperson? The supercut of these sketches above traces a dead-on impression as it's taken to its ridiculous, McConaughey-y apex. — Alexander Stoklosa
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