Sometimes the best Saturday Night Live sketches are far from perfect. Watching trained actors flub a line or two because the concept is so weird or funny is refreshing, and sometimes make everything that much funnier. Saturday’s Daniel Craig-hosted episode, in fact, revived a sketch concept that famously broke nearly everyone involved with it. And it later featured a sketch where Craig himself had trouble not laughing.
The setting is a board game night with a few couples and one single woman, played by Heidi Gardner. The game Settlers of Catan is on the table, and it seems like we’re getting to the end of the night. A rideshare is called, but Gardner offers that they play a new game.
“Or we could quote,” Gardner’s character said. “Say quotes from movies and guess them.”
Things start innocently enough, as the first quote is from Harry Potter. But Gardner’s character is the most specific, then goes next and picks a pretty obscure quote. A… deep quote.
“I need two new suits off the rack,” she says. “One light, and one dark.”
Everyone else was stumped at the “vague as hell” quote, but not Craig, who thought for a moment and remembered it was from The Aviator. Gardner is impressed, and the two start “deep quoting” much to the discomfort of everyone else in the room.
The sketch quickly goes off the rails, which Craig’s character — married to Kate McKinnon’s — getting extremely sensual with Gardner in a hurry. The absurdity of the sketch made it tough for both Craig and McKinnon to stay focused. She laughs early in the sketch, and her smiling eventually breaks Craig, who does his best to get through it, at one point calling himself “the biggest flick daddy you’ll ever meet.”
The innuendo keeps going as the quotes get shorter and shorter and, somehow, all are from Captain Phillips. Eventually, Craig and Gardner just start making out. The latter is a pro in this sketch, staying in character and being extremely weird, enough so that McKinnon can’t keep a straight face right up until the end of the sketch. It’s probably not a game you should recreate at home on your board game night, but it certainly made for an interesting concept here.
