Will Ferrell revives disastrous, unaired SNL sketch for Second Chance Theater

Ferrell was joined by John Oliver, Rachel Dratch, and Bowen Yang to perform "Mr. Kotter" on Late Night With Seth Meyers

By Emma Keates  |  June 13, 2024 | 7:12pm
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Will Ferrell revives disastrous, unaired SNL sketch for Second Chance Theater
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John Oliver, Bowen Yang, Will Ferrell, and Rachel Dratch on Late Night With Seth Meyers Screenshot: Late Night With Seth Meyers/YouTube

It’s House Of The Dragon premiere week, so it feels appropriate to invoke a classic Westerosi saying to describe what happened on Late Night With Seth Meyers last night: What is dead may never die. As it turns out, this epitaph applies just as well to ill-advised and overlong comedy sketches as it does to brave knights who went down in battle. Last night, Will Ferrell, John Oliver, Rachel Dratch and Bowen Yang fulfilled the second part of this prophecy for “Mr. Kotter,” an SNL sketch that bombed so hard in rehearsals it never made it to the main stage, much less to air—until now.

It’s not hard to see why. The sketch, which Ferrell described in a post-performance Q&A as “a confident 13 pages” (apparently the standard script length is 11) is far more “novice college improv troupe you were forced to see because your friend is in it” than Studio 8H. Ferrell plays an off-putting office worker who is so obsessed with ‘70s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter star, Gabe Kaplan, that he models his entire look off of him. When Kaplan himself stops by the office, Ferrell’s coworkers repeatedly deny him the chance to meet his hero.

Second Chance Theatre: Mr. Kotter (With Exclusive Q&A)

The sketch failed for a number of reasons, the main being that Kaplan just isn’t that relevant or funny of a reference. “The SNL dress audience maybe hadn’t thought about Gabe Kaplan for a long time, so you asked them to do a lot of work,” Meyers prompted during the Second Chance Theater Q&A, to which Ferrell responded, “We should have probably passed out like a leaflet that night at the show explaining what to look for.” It’s not like Kaplan was set to make a cameo in the episode or anything—Ferrell just randomly chose him to parody.

In the absence of that helpful cheat sheet, Ferrell says he “sucked all of the energy out of the building” during the dress rehearsal. “I was startled by the fact that you didn’t oversell just how unflinching and unremitting the silence was,” added Oliver, talking about watching the tape of that original performance for the first time. “This was a comedic catastrophe.”

While the performance last night went “demonstrably better” than the original, this sketch certainly won’t be winning an award any time soon. Still, it’s always fun to indulge in a little SNL history, especially when it brings titans like these four together again.

 
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