Seducing the Babysitter

I started work on a Chris Elliott-on-Saturday Night Live DVD set last night, and eventually got to a sketch that for years has been a shining example of the absolute worst SNL has had to offer.

The scene stars Elliott and Mark McKinney. In it, McKinney is playing a youthful female babysitter and Elliott's character is driving her home. Elliott's character then has sex with her, and is thrown in jail, screaming that given the chance he'd do it again and again.

That's it. That's all it is. It's a porno setup at best. But SNL tries to play this "getting a teenager drunk and having sex with her" scene for laughs. And amazingly, there is a smattering of laughter heard from the audience throughout the scene, despite the fact that there are NO JOKES! Then when the non-comedy is over, the lemmings in the audience cheer wildly as the applause sign is illuminated before the commerical break. I would have thrown my shoe on stage.

Now this is something that I have mocked with my friends for years and years, and it had apparently gotten so deep into my subconscious that I actually had a dream about it months ago. A dream I didn't remember until last night.

In the dream, I'd traveled back in time. Time travel seems to be a recurring theme in my dreams, by the way. Also part of that recurring theme is time travel for the most ridiculous purposes ever, and in this case, I'd found myself back in time around when that sketch was conceived. Now I'm not entirely clear on the rest of the details, but either it turned out that *I* was the writer for that sketch (cue "Twilight Zone" theme) or I was trying to persuade the writer that the sketch would be a bad idea and was somehow convinced otherwise.

Many (if not all) of my dreams are bad "B"-movie plots.