It’s hard to go wrong with a llama on SNL, even if it’s supposed to be unruly and in the middle of its mating season. Instead of ordering up a camel for this Nativity play, the church is forced to get a llama to play the part and it throws the entire thing off the rails. Our three wise men, played by Kevin Hart, Mikey Day, and Kyle Mooney, are not comfortable playing with a llama in heat and can’t stop saying the words to calm it down. It apparently kicked one of them before the show started, so you can understand why.
The llama also keeps eating all of the props, so the wise men have heads of lettuce instead — probably to also feed to the llama — and the baby Jesus is missing its head. All of this is just play to get to the final portion of the sketch when it is revealed that the llama has an erection and it is apparently enough to impress the kids in the play and Leslie Jones out in the audience. What any of this means and what it has to do with the nativity is up for debate. It doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the llama, one of the longest-running gags on SNL according to Vanity Fair:
Sometimes they send the wrong llama. Die-hard Saturday Night Live fans will tell you that there’s a long-running visual gag whenever the action of the show goes backstage. “I don’t know if you ever noticed,” Lee said. “When we shoot in the hallway, we go outside the studio. We always have, 99% of the time in the background, Abe Lincoln, a chorus girl—like Radio City—and a llama. We always have that.” The show actually didn’t always have it—the 80s and 90s were pretty llama-, showgirl-, and Lincoln-free—but since Seth Meyers started his writing tenure in 2001, the gag has been pretty frequent.
How many other jobs can say that they’ve had situations where someone has said, “order up a llama,” and it hasn’t been dismissing right off the bat? So while this sketch isn’t particularly strong, it does represent a fun tidbit about the show.
Also, who doesn’t like a llama?
(Via SNL)
