12 ‘MADtv’ Cast Members Name their Favorite Sketch on the Show’s 30th Anniversary

Mo Collins on ‘Shakira: Whatever, Don’t Matter’

In 2001, Shakira had just released the video for “Whenever, Wherever,” and that was exactly the kind of thing MADtv loved to parody — music videos, pop stars and all the cultural moments in between. We were shooting that sketch at the end of the day, and time was slipping away. If we didn’t finish before a certain hour, production would owe everyone overtime — and at Fox, that was a hard no. So there was pressure. It wasn’t even one of those sketches we’d rehearsed; it was more like, “Okay, Mo, go out there and be funny.” We knew the song, but nothing was choreographed.

First off, I was being scrambled into the outfit, which was literally sewn to my body. Wendy, our wardrobe woman, was racing to get me dressed, and she was sewing up the side of the pants as I was wearing them. Then I stuck my finger into the waist. I pulled it out, and I was like, “Oh my God, you put a stitch through my skin!”

She literally sewed me into my pants, but my adrenaline was running so high that I didn’t feel it, although she almost passed out and threw up.

Then came the hair situation. The team had this beautiful wig ready for me, and the first thing they did once we started shooting was dump water all over me. Matthew from hair was incensed. The wig needed to be blow-dried for the top of the video, which, of course, we hadn’t shot yet.

But the real showstopper was during the performance when I was down on the ground, hanging onto my feet. As I rolled back and forth, the pants split from the North Pole to the South Pole — the whole thing. And because the outfit was so tight, mama wasn’t wearing any undergarments. 

So there it was: The biggest clit you’ve ever seen, hanging out.

Ike Barinholtz on ‘Kenny Rogers’ Punk’d’ and ‘Teaching Jordan Peele How to Drive’

Maybe the hardest I ever laughed in a MADtv sketch was the first time Will Sasso came back after he had left. We did a parody of Punk’d, but it was “Kenny Rogers’ Punk’d.” That was the first time I performed with Will Sasso, and I remember thinking, “Oh, this is the funniest person ever.”

I also did a bunch of stuff with Bobby Lee and Jordan Peele. At the time, Jordan didn’t know how to drive — he was a New Yorker. So Bobby and I wrote a short of us teaching him how to drive on the lot.

This was very early on when companies were doing product integrations, and someone was like, “Toyota has this new car called the Yaris. You can use that in the sketch.” Bobby and I obviously weren’t getting paid money for it — the show was, but we weren’t. So while we were shooting, we had someone there from the car company or the ad firm or whatever and they were very nice, but they were telling Bobby, “Oh, don’t smoke a cigarette in front of the car” and things like that. 

Toward the end of the shoot, Bobby, who was a little crazier then than he is now, was sick of being nitpicked and getting notes. So on the last take, he crashed the car into a giant cement pillar. It was only at like, eight miles an hour, but still enough to give it some bumper damage.

Michael McDonald on ‘The People’s Court’

My favorite sketch is probably when Daniele Gaither played this insane woman on The People’s Court who, because her neighbor’s tree had leaves that fell on her lawn, she had the woman’s children taken away. Her performance and commitment was so fucking great, and it was just really well written. It just ripped me to shreds when I watched it. It’s just so simple. There’s nothing to it. Also Nicole Parker is in it, and Stephnie Weir does Judge Milian.

One of the early strengths of MADtv was that they weren’t afraid of killer, funny women. Just destroyers — so, so many of them. Not that they aren’t on SNL. I mean, in our world of sketch, we all came largely from either stand-up or sketch comedy troupes. So we all know each other and I don’t want to disparage them. But one of the things I liked about MADtv was that I don’t think I heard the women say, “Oh, the boys are getting all the attention.” They took care of themselves.

Arden Myrin on ‘Coffee Twins’

I’m going to go with “Coffee Twins,” written by Katie Dippold, who went on to write the all-women Ghostbusters and The Heat. It was a sketch I did with Crista Flanagan; we were two women who worked in an office together, and we had this inside joke about having matching coffee mugs and, because of that, we said we were coffee twins. The sketch was about eight minutes of us nonstop laughing about how funny we thought it was that we were coffee twins. Then we’re driving out in the world, and we’re still laughing and calling each other. At the end, I’m still laughing in bed, calling her, laughing and thinking about it. Bobby Lee plays my husband, and he’s trying to get up to speed about what’s so funny and he doesn’t get it. I tell him, “I hope you die in a car crash!” 

“Coffee Twins” was during Katie’s first year on MADtv, and it’s so specific to her and her brain. That, to me, is one that just was so inside the brain of this person who was about to become this giant comedy writing God. It was just so dumb, but it made me laugh so much.

Crista Flanagan on ‘3 Minute Meal’

“3 Minute Meal” was a recurring sketch I did, and I just really liked the collaboration on it. Chris Cluess was the writer, and he asked, “How do you feel about cooking shows?” I was like, “Oh man, I’m terrible in the kitchen! I can’t make anything!” He was like, “That’s perfect for this.” So Chris and Maiya Williams set out to make a cooking show in three minutes.

On MADtv, we did some sketches pre-taped and some in front of an audience. When I saw that “3 Minute Meal” was going to be in front of an audience, I was surprised because it was a heavy lift. You have to remember, there were no teleprompters. We didn’t do cue cards and the script changes were coming in day-of — even night-of!

Not to mention, the timing of the physical comedy was very precise. I had to drop the tuna can, then somebody’s got to be on the ground to dump it out because it never dumped out when it fell. Then I had to go down, and you had to see my hands picking it up. Then, before I banged my head, I had to put blood on my head. So I had to put the tuna back in the can, put blood on my head, hit my head, come up covered in blood, and the whole sketch is like that! 

There was a lot going on, and people all around me were handing me things and moving things. It was so fun.

Nicole Parker on ‘The Disney Girl’

One of the characters I auditioned with to get on the show was a woman who was slightly delusional and saw her life through a Disney princess’ eyes. This was long ago, way before the movie Enchanted. It was mostly just an excuse to sing a lot in my audition. I really love to sing, and I figured I’d hopefully be doing a lot of music videos, which did become a lot of my job on the show.

I ended up doing two sketches with the Disney Girl. We first tried putting her in a sketch where she sort of broke into song, but it wasn’t very clear. For the second one, she’s living in the scummier areas of L.A., but she thinks that she’s in a magical fairyland kingdom where animals talk to her, even though everyone’s just telling her to get away. And at the end, we find out she’s a call girl. We were shooting that sketch everywhere in L.A., and somehow, with very little budget and very little resources, a lot of magic happened there. 

I sang this great song called “A Wonderfully Normal Day,” which won us an Emmy. Although I should mention, that song won an Emmy, but it’s always listed in Wikipedia that I won that Emmy, but I didn’t. I didn’t write the song — it was just my character. Still, it was a full-circle moment for me since I auditioned with that character and I got to live out my Disney princess dreams in the middle of Hollywood.

Dave Herman on ‘Pervert Senator’

In my favorite sketch, an artist played by Orlando Jones is seeking a government grant, and he presents his paintings to me, a senator. The paintings are of ambiguous ink blots, and the senator is certain they’re depictions of naked boys — sweaty, glistening naked boys — and he’s outraged the artist is attempting to get a grant for his graphic pedophilic pornography. And, there you have it. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

It was written approximately 30 years ago by the all-knowing, all-powerful Blaine Capatch. And it’s evergreen — sadly evergreen, unfortunately evergreen. I guess that we’ll live on forever satirizing this enduring phenomenon, with House Speaker Mike Johnson being threatened by nude bicyclists protesting in Portland to Senator Ted Cruz’s mudslide of a Freudian slip, urging his fellow senators to stop attacking pedophiles. And, of course, a certain set of files that’s shut down the government indefinitely.

Craig Anton on ‘MacDumpsters’

It’s funny: Looking back at stuff from MADtv on YouTube, there’s so much I have no recollection of, though I do remember a commercial parody we did called “MacDumpsters.” We were hanging out, and at some point, Orlando Jones kind of strolled up the street in a semi-zombie state in character, scaring the hell out of cars and stopping traffic and people. He was just having a blast.

We were all at the very beginning of MADtv then. At that point, we were still within the boundaries of what MAD Magazine was because they were great social critics. It was pretty edgy and dark and sometimes crass, but very politically aware. I felt like that was closer to the direction that I was hoping more of the show would go, but I was later told that this was really for 14-year-old boys, which I had no idea.

Paul Vogt on ‘The Lillian Verner Game Show’

The Lillian Verner Game Shows on MADtv were really fun. They were inspired by the Lillian Vernon catalog, which actually exists — they have all those weird items that would be sent to your house whether you liked it or not. So, the whole idea was a game show where you’d win those ridiculous things. 

We did these as a live sketch in front of the audience, and the first time we did it, the audience just stared at it. I talked to Scott, our head writer, and said, “Can we do one run where we just let go?” We did it again, and that’s where I had them whiten my teeth and I got super hyper like a game-show host. We all started improvising, and the audience was screaming with laughter. We were laughing our butts off for 22 minutes. It was the greatest time. Afterwards, they were like, “Oh, we have to cut this down to three minutes. I don’t know how that’s going to work.”

After that, everybody wanted to play these wacky contestants — just the craziest characters the cast could come up with. Michael McDonald was a giant in one of them, where he stands on this box and he has these huge ears. There’s one where Keegan-Michael Key talks really close to the microphone, and I walk over and rip it away from him and scream at him. Mo Collins did this character with no chin. She did this thing with a party hat where the string bounced from her chin to her lip to her nose. Stephnie Weir always played the cat woman who always won.

Phil LaMarr on ‘UBS Guy’ and Performing with KISS

My favorite episode might be the second one of the first season. I got to play the dumb, hyper UPS delivery guy in a sketch that Mary Scheer and I had done before on stage at The Groundlings Theater instead of on camera. Then, one of the best experiences was doing a sketch with the band KISS playing themselves fighting against me as Michael Jackson. That was probably the only time I played Michael, and the others were in makeup longer than me. It took the KISS guys a while to put on their KISS faces!

Pat Kilbane on ‘Dick Van Dyke ‘98’

On MADtv we did homages. We did Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company, I Love Lucy and stuff like that. We’d either add some anachronistic element, or we’d make it the Spanish version. Those were the two go-tos.

We did The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the switch was to make it Chris Rock instead of Carl Reiner’s Alan Brady that the writing team was writing for. The comedy came from us pitching him all these corny 1950s jokes — horrible puns and everything. Chris Rock is an edgy comedian who’s just disgusted that we’ve got him tap-dancing and making puns and all this stuff. Phil LaMarr did a great Chris Rock, and Mo Collins did this amazing Mary Tyler Moore. And there’s something about Alex Borstein that, whenever she put a period wig on, her face instantly set the clock back 50 years — she looked just like Rose Marie.

This was a Lauren Dombrowski sketch. Lauren passed away in 2008 from breast cancer, and she was really beloved on the show. She was one of those bright, bright lights who always saw the positive side of what was sometimes a really shitty business. She was a big Dick Van Dyke fan, and she wrote this sketch of her own love for Dick Van Dyke.

A week after it aired, Dick Van Dyke was shooting Diagnosis Murder nearby, and, at the MADtv offices, we got word that somebody showed it to him and he loved it. Lauren drove over to the set of Diagnosis Murder to meet Dick Van Dyke. She said he was just the most wonderful, warm, gracious person — he was everything she hoped he’d be. And Dick Van Dyke told her, “Tell that fella, he looked just like me!” 

She came back and told me that and I was over the moon. I mean, I’ll be on my deathbed smiling about that.

Will Sasso on ‘Hollywood Squares’

Anytime we were on set doing a pre-tape, without the audience, and it got to be midnight or later, and it was a fair amount of us in the same sketch, which wasn’t often, that was when things would really go off and you felt like you were in some college improv troupe having the time of your life. 

That’s the stuff that I really enjoyed. The more of us that would be in one sketch, the less the sketch made any sort of pointed sense. We’d do a Hollywood Squares sketch, and they’d erect a giant Hollywood Squares set and it would take everyone in the cast to execute the sketch and we’d just have a gas just trying to crack each other up. 

There was one Hollywood Squares where I was Bruce Vilanch and another where I played a contestant. I can’t remember which one it was, but there was one where Nicole Sullivan was Meg Ryan, and there’s some joke and Meg Ryan’s line is just “Weeeeeeee!” Anyway, it’s like a million o’clock, and you’re shooting the shit out of this thing and we’re all getting giddy and weird. There’s a lot of stopping and starting, and the director kept saying, “Okay, let’s go back. Let’s take it from Meg Ryan’s ‘Weee!’” 

That became a meme for the next two or three seasons. Like, “Where should we go from?” “Take it from Meg Ryan’s ‘Weee.’” And that would always bring us back to, “Oh my God, that fucking night.” 

Anytime all of us were together just getting weird, that was the best. It was like we were this bizarre family in a way, like a really fucked-up foster family because every single person on that show was an absolutely huge weirdo.