It’s premiere week, so it feels appropriate to invoke a classic Westerosi saying to describe what happened on last night: . As it turns out, this epitaph applies just as well to ill-advised and overlong comedy sketches as it does to brave knights who went down in battle. Last night, Will Ferrell, John Oliver, Rachel Dratch and Bowen Yang fulfilled the second part of this prophecy for “Mr.
Kotter,” an sketch that bombed so hard in rehearsals it never made it to the main stage, much less to air—until now. It’s not hard to see why. The sketch, which Ferrell described in a post-performance Q&A as “a confident 13 pages” (apparently the standard script length is 11) is far more “novice college improv troupe you were forced to see because your friend is in it” than Studio 8H.
Ferrell plays an off-putting office worker who is so obsessed with ‘70s sitcom star, Gabe Kaplan, that he models his entire look off of him. When Kaplan himself stops by the office, Ferrell’s coworkers repeatedly deny him the chance to meet his hero. The sketch failed for a number of reasons, the main being that Kaplan just isn’t that relevant or funny of a reference.
“The dress audience maybe hadn’t thought about Gabe Kaplan for a long time, so you asked them to do a lot of work,” Meyers prompted during the Q&A, to which Ferrell responded, “We should have probably passed out like a leaflet that night at the show explaining what to look for.” It’s not like Kaplan was set to m.