Best Athletes Who Have Hosted Saturday Night Live
10 Sep
Outside of swim practice and making $100M, Michael Phelps enters select company this weekend–only a handful of athletes have ever been guests on SNL. Over the past 3 decades, it turns out some athletes are way funnier than others, and some have very forgettable star power. In our attempt to find every sports person who has been a guest host we discovered 2 things: 1) NBC really sucks when it comes to releasing good content online, and 2) bad acting is hilarious.
Fran Tarkenton
“Team prayer…Dear Lord, help Frank Tarkenton keep from embarrassing himself like he did in the Superbowl”
Lebron James
Good sport. Horrible actor. The most recent sports person to host SNL stuck to recreating his Nike commercial.
Lance Armstrong
Lance was hilarious when he hosted the Espys a few years ago, but when you’re mostly famous for riding a bicycle there is only so much material to work with. Nonetheless, this brought us one of the greatest Stephen A. Smith impressions ever (not that there’s such a thing as a bad SAS impression, right?).
Tom Brady
Somehow Brady beat out his contemporary quarterbacks to be selected for SNL. Nowadays it might be the safest thing he can do. And yes, that’s Rob Riggle, now on The Daily Show.
Peyton Manning
Not to be upstaged by Brady, 2 seasons later Manning showed off his ability to sell anything.
OJ Simpson
Yup, there was a time when The Juice was one of the most popular athletes in America. This particular skit is 8 minutes long and not all that funny. Feel free to skip it.
The Rock
Dwayne Johnson hosted SNL twice, and the only skit available online was Brian Fellow’s Safari Planet. His 2 funniest scenes were Nicotril–where he helped smokers quit by beating them up–and a scene where he was a guest on a feminist talk show and the women were fighting over him.
Michael Jordan
MJ was fortunate enough to work with the late Chris Farley, making it impossible for his scene not to be funny. What is missing from the annals of online video is the scene where Farley does one of his great nervous interviews.
Honorable Mention
(I.E. athletes whose scenes we can’t find online bc NBC won’t put them up!)
Derek Jeter – HOW IS THIS NOT ONLINE!?
Alex Karras – Before starring in Webster, he played for the Lions.
Mr. T & Hulk Hogan – they co-hosted
Bill Russell
Howard Cossell
Billy Martin – How they kept this episode clean is anyone’s guess
Joe Montana & Walter Payton – also hosted together
Nancy Kerrigan
Jonny Moseley (Olympic skier)
Carl Weathers
Bob Uecker
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