Last night’s episode of SNL with first-time host David Harbour had a lot of solid sketches, and one of the strongest came early in the show with a movie trailer serving as the perfect parody of Todd Phillips’s Joker. Instead of a dark, gritty origin story of yet another comic-book figure, Phillips has now decided to set his sights on a character who has long lived and struggled on a particularly famous, rough street: Oscar the Grouch. Harbour — who, according to writer Mikey Day, came up with the concept for the sketch — stars as Grouch’s titular character, and the trailer teases out appearances from other Sesame Street regulars like Big Bird (Heidi Gardner), the Count (Beck Bennett), Elmo (Melissa Villaseñor), Bert and Ernie (Mikey Day and Alex Moffat), and Snuffleupagus (Kenan Thompson), who is now Prairie Dawn’s (Chloe Fineman) pimp. It’s absolutely twisted — and you’ll never hear the Sesame Street theme song the same way again after watching it.
SNL Parodies Joker With a Gritty Origin Story for Oscar the Grouch
