Ep 17. Saturday Night Live Presents A SNL Sports Spectacular

Saturday Night Live season 39 episode 17 is titled "Saturday Night Live Presents A SNL Sports Spectacular." The episode features a host of SNL alums and some special guests playing a variety of sports-themed sketches, parodying everything from football to figure skating. The episode opened with a parody of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell's recent press conference on the Ray Rice suspension, before moving on to a series of sketches that played on the tropes and cliches of sports broadcasts.

One particularly memorable sketch featured Kenan Thompson as a football commentator whose broadcast partner (played by surprise guest star Jim Carrey) was too into the game to actually call it. The two bantered back and forth, with Carrey's character repeatedly exclaiming "I love this game!" while Thompson patiently tried to make sense of what was happening on the field.

Another standout sketch featured Kate McKinnon as Olympic figure skater Oksana Baiul, who kept interrupting her interviews with stories about her tragic childhood growing up in a Ukrainian orphanage. The sketch was a pitch-perfect parody of the tearjerker human-interest stories that always seem to pop up during the Olympics.

The episode also included a hilarious "Weekend Update" segment in which co-anchors Seth Meyers and Cecily Strong interviewed a series of increasingly bizarre guests, including a Russian Olympic athlete with a suspiciously deep voice and a ventriloquist who had brought his dummy to the news desk.

Overall, "Saturday Night Live Presents A SNL Sports Spectacular" was a strong episode that played to the show's strengths, combining topical humor with absurdist sketch comedy. Fans of SNL's sports-themed sketches (like "Da Bears" and "Bill Swerski's Superfans") will especially enjoy this episode, which lovingly parodies the cliches and quirks of sports culture.