For literal decades, the writing staff of Saturday Night Live has found the language and structure of pharmaceutical commercials to a gold mine for comedy sketches. (Say it with me: “Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.”) So it wasn’t surprising that this week’s episode featured a sketch, starring host Ryan Gosling, that was structured as an ad for a medication called Otezla, which, the voiceover notes, can be used to treat plaque psoriasis.
The gist of the sketch is that no one is entirely sure what Otezla is: not the people using it, not the scientists involved with its development and not the company tasked with selling it.
Over the course of the sketch, various possibilities present themselves, each a little more unsettling than the last. It’s possible that Otezla is some sort of keystone for human evolution, like the monoliths in 2001. It’s also possible that it’s some sort of Lovecraftian entity that transcends the boundaries of space and time in ways that can destroy the minds of those who behold it. Or it could be an alien that just enjoys eating plaque psoriasis. No one’s really sure.
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Shane Gillis returned to host the show for the second timeCan narrative ambiguity be funny? The aforementioned “Happy Fun Ball” sketch is a classic, and – more recently, 2023’s “Pongo” also featured a mysterious being at its center and remains both incredibly funny and hugely disturbing. This sketch also makes good use of Gosling’s enthustic screen presence without having to worry about his tendency to break during live sketches. That’s one condition Otezla probably can’t help with.
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