Saturday Night Live has been all over Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry since the show returned with new episodes this fall, but another common theme on the broadcast has been the new Joker movie. The film, which topped the box office for a second straight week, has inspired some jokes as well as Kate McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani as the titular Batman villain.
Saturday’s episode, however, finally spoofed the movie itself with a full-length trailer for a very different kind of origin story about Sesame Street’s Oscar The Grouch. The trailer starts with two men collecting garbage, of which there’s plenty of in a city that looks a lot like Joker‘s Gotham City. One man complains about the smell, but the other says otherwise.
“I don’t know,” host Dave Harbour says as he stares into a garbage can. “I kind of like it.”
A character with a ‘Grover’ name tag on his uniform says that if he loves garbage so much, he should live in it. Which got a pretty grouchy reaction from Oscar.
“Why don’t you bite me?” Oscar asks, which prompts Grover to call him a “grouch.” You see where this is going.
The trailer had a lot of hallmarks of the Joker movie’s depiction of Gotham City, though the sign on the garbage-filled, run-down street indicated a very different property is getting a gritty origin story here.
“From the studio that brought you Joker and the twisted minds at Sesame Workshop,” the voiceover said, setting up a montage of some familiar characters depicted in much seedier ways. There’s Kenan Thompson as a pimp named Snuffaluffagus. Bert and Ernie get robbed for a rubber ducky. Big Bird is an exotic dancer, naturally, and The Count is a drug addict. And Guy Smiley working for ABCDEFG News was also pretty good, too.
The movie hits all the notes the Joker did visually, and it even has an ominous singing of the Sesame Street theme song, so you know it’s a movie that actually could be released in 2019.
“If everyone calls you trash, and everyone treats you like trash, why not become trash?” Oscar asks. Honestly, it’s a question worth exploring.
