What SNL Has Taught Us About Love

Live From New York...This week, Saturday Night Live kicks off its 38th season and another year of not being funny for the past 20 years. SNL refuses to die, no matter how much hate monopolizes the audience's love-hate relationship with Lorne Michaels' sketch comedy mainstay. In that sense, it's an encouraging analogy for fraught relationships and their pesky ebbs and flows. It used to be that watching SNL implied a lack of weekend romantic options (unless it acted as a soundtrack to coitus). DVR has made the show a less solitary pursuit, and, as with dating and everything else, brought America's rocky, indomitable relationship with the show into the digital age. Here are some sketches that have kept the stalwart frisky:

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The Festrunk Brothers

This iconic skit premiered during Season 3 and introduced a number of all-time classic SNL lines. Brothers Yortuk and Georg Festrunk (Dan Akroyd, Steve Martin) are "two wild and crazy guys" from a barren Czechoslovakia intent on doing little else in their new land than "holding big American breasts." Disastrously mixing paisley and plaid, the Festrunks' plunging necklines and suffocating pant crotches somehow don't keep the brothers from shimmying across any surface they touch. Despite discouraging game reviews from friends and repeated vows to "never swing again," Yortuk and Georg endured to become a garish, endearingly naive monument to the libidinous days and nights of disco.

The Ladies Man

Banish the regrettable movie spinoff from your mind on the off-chance it's lodged there and remember the joys of this skit starring Tim Meadows as Leon Phelps, self-deluded ladies man, afroed blaxploitation relic and randy talk show host. The setup continued SNL's proud tradition of public access television satire and was a welcome piece of retro goofiness when the series was fanatically intent on mocking every angle of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. (Lewinsky appeared in the sketch.) Phelps' sex advice, much of it "involving the butt," could be lewd, bringing an edge to the series and reminding viewers why it was still not ready for primetime. A sample ode to Cupid: "You're an angel my dear, of this much I'm certain. So this Valentine's Day, let's do some bumpin' and squirtin'.

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Boston Teens

With its famed stable of Harvard Lampoon-trained writers, SNL is in prime position to mock Boston area eccentricities. And so in 1999 the show gave us Denise "Zazu" McDonough (Rachel Dratch) and Pat "Sully" Sullivan (Jimmy Fallon), a pair of often plastered Nomar Garciaparra fans calling each other "retahded" and dry humping in New England locales including an ersatz colonial village and a boozy prom. The mostly physical humor and regional barbs may not be as sly as in the other skits, but credit Denise and Sully for making copulation a reality rather than a Clarvin-style New Age treatise or Yortuk strikeout.

The Lovers

Professors Roger and Virginia Clarvin (Will Ferrell, Rachel Dratch) debuted during Season 26, and over seven appearances dispensed unwanted advice in the art of unconventional lovemaking to strangers they happened across in a scarily accurate send-up of a brainy-crunchy Berkshires college town. Over aphrodisiacal spiced meats-lamb shanks were a favorite-the Clarvins exercised their erotic erudition while recalling their own earthy sexual peaks (such as the time Roger rubbed Virginia's "nubile body with fruit liniments and Noxzema") and playing Kama Sutra to an array of acquaintances and potential lov-ahs gamely played by everyone from Katie Holmes to Christopher Walken.

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