October's 7 Most-Watched SNL Sketches on YouTube, From GOP Ads to Upfront Heating
SNL aired three times in October. YouTube kept score, and the fake commercials beat almost everything with a plot.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min readSaturday Night Live was on the air three times in October: Dakota Johnson on the 3rd, Shane Gillis on the 10th and Inde Navarrette on Halloween, with a two-week nap in the middle. The show is judged on Sunday morning by critics and on every morning after that by YouTube, which has no taste at all and is therefore never wrong.
Here are the seven biggest sketches from those three nights, by YouTube view count as of Monday afternoon. Two are left off on purpose. The Halloween cold open (4.2 million) gets its own column today, and Chess Tournament (2.3 million) got one last month. What stands out is how many of the winners are fake commercials. A couple of minutes, a product, a price and a lie. The American people have been training for that format their whole lives. It's the one kind of television they can watch while also being sold something.
- 01
Republican Midterm Ads Cold Open (Oct. 3, 8.3 million views)
James Austin Johnson's Trump, Jeremy Culhane's JD Vance, Colin Jost's Pete Hegseth, Marcello Hernández's Marco Rubio and Mikey Day's Mitch McConnell film get-out-the-vote ads. It's the month's biggest by a mile, which tells you the audience wanted politics and got it, the way a man who orders the special gets the special.
- 02
Upfront Heating & Air Conditioning (Oct. 10, 7.2 million)
A commercial for a more affordable heating and air company, from the Gillis episode. It's the most-watched non-political thing SNL made all month, which is what happens when you aim a joke at the one group every American has been cheated by at least once.
- 03
Guns for Women (Oct. 3, 4.8 million)
A commercial for a new kind of gun made for women. SNL has been doing the 'product, but for women' ad for decades, and it keeps working, mostly because the real companies keep doing it too.
- 04
Mean, Scary Girlfriend (Oct. 3, 4.5 million)
Another fake ad from the Johnson episode, this one selling a new kind of girlfriend. The show liked it enough to post a behind-the-scenes clip, and that's more love than most real girlfriends get on the internet.
- 05
Sneakers (Oct. 10, 2.65 million)
James Austin Johnson pitches a shoe design to a board played by Gillis, Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day and Ben Marshall. A boardroom sketch is the oldest trick SNL has: five men at a table pretending to have power, which is also how the network runs.
- 06
Green Eggs & Ham (Oct. 10, 2.64 million)
Gillis tries to stop Andrew Dismukes's Sam-I-Am from feeding green eggs and ham to his dad, played by Mikey Day. It sits about 14,000 views behind Sneakers, from the same night. The two are running neck and neck like a pair of old horses nobody wants to bet on, and both are doing fine.
- 07
Paw Patrol: Special Victims Unit (Oct. 31, 2.17 million)
Navarrette's Ryder runs a rescue-dog squad of Thompson, Hernández, Culhane, Veronika Slowikowska and Grace Reiter through a grim crime procedural. It's the top non-commercial sketch of the Halloween show, two days in, and the only one in the history of television to make a cartoon for toddlers more depressing.