Saturday Night Live's vintage "Wake Up And Smile" sketch sees a bland chat show go into meltdown without a teleprompter to guide the hosts. SNL is the show that introduced the world to stars like Bill Murray, Kristen Wiig, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murray and many more. Its success rate with skits can be very up and down, but its also produced true classics like "Two Wild & Crazy Guys," "MacGruber," and "Papyrus."
Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy.
Some of Will Ferrell's most famous sketches on Saturday Night Live include "The Roxbury Guys" and the evergreen "More Cowbell" with Christopher Walken. Another gem is 1995's "Wake Up And Smile," where Ferrell and Nancy Carell play the hosts of the titular cheery morning chat show. They share some harmless, canned banter fed from the teleprompter, but things quickly go right to hell when it breaks down.
This forces the hosts and weatherman Tim Baker (David Alan Grier) to improv while its fixed, but without the teleprompter to guide them, they simply can't function. SNL's "Wake Up And Smile" keeps cutting to fake commercials for sitcoms like Kerry And The Gang,with the show itself becomes more and more unglued the longer they go without a teleprompter, with Carell's host continually getting Baker's name wrong or Ferrell making bizarre statements about poor people to fill the dead air. Saturday Night Live "Wake Up And Smile" descends into gruesome chaos, with Ferrell's host and Grier's weatherman fighting for the right to "lead" in a post-teleprompter world, which ends in the latter's surprisingly gruesome decapitation.
Of course, the teleprompter does start working again, so the bloodied hosts try to resort back to form as Ferrell's character still holds Grier severed head. "Wake Up And Smile" is a bit darker than the typical Saturday Night Live skit, milking some comic mileage out of just how bland the series is before the whole thing comes unglued. Adam McKay also wrote this particular sketch and the inability to break from a teleprompter would later lead to one of the best gags in Anchorman, which he directed.