Tom Hanks was a huge hit during his recent appearance as the host on Saturday Night Live, and a lot of the laughs came from the Halloween-themed sketch about a guy named David S. Pumpkins. He wore a black and orange pumpkin suit and danced the scariest dance ever to be featured in a haunted elevator. With the help of his two backup dancing skeletons, David S. Pumpkins immortalized himself as an unforgettable SNL character. Recently, Saturday Night Live writer/dancing skeleton Bobby Moynihan revealed that David S. Pumpkins really does have a middle name, saying this:
David Simon Pumpkins. Me and Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell were trying to write something together. We like working together. Me and Mikey just wanted to do some weird dancing thing, and it was a lot of weird ideas, and around 5 o'clock in the morning. Mikey just went, 'What if he was David Pumpkins?' And then I said, 'What if it was David S. Pumpkins?'
There you have it, folks. The biggest mystery of live sketch comedy in 2016 has been solved, and we can enjoy the rest of this year's SNL without wondering about the middle name of the enigmatic David Pumpkins. We can rest easy tonight knowing that the S stands for Simon, which fits pretty well.
All things considered, it sounds about right that "David Simon Pumpkins" emerged from a bunch of weird ideas in the wee hours of the morning. Part of what made the David Pumpkins sketch so funny was just that it was so incredibly bizarre. My biggest laugh of the sketch actually came when the skeletons randomly added the middle initial and announced that his name is David S. Pumpkins. It raised the ridiculous level to hilarious heights.
Bobby Moynihan went on in his chat with EW to explain this about the thought process behind "Simon" as the middle name for David Pumpkins:
[It's Simon] for no reason whatsoever. It was a lot of the idea of just, 'Why is this person here?' Because he is. And we just thought that was funny.
The writers weren't the only ones who thought it was funny. The sketch went viral after it aired live on SNL and has already been viewed more than 6 million times on Youtube. A fan on social media took the time to insert David S. Pumpkins and his dancing skeletons into classic scenes from horror movies, and Tom Hanks even dressed up as David S. Pumpkins for Halloween. Why not? The sketch is as great now as it was when it first hit the airwaves. Take a look:
I'm hoping that David S. Pumpkins will return to SNL sooner rather than later. Sure, Halloween comes only once a year, but David S. Pumpkins deserves to be showcased for all major holidays. My fingers are crossed that Tom Hanks will reprise the character, and definitely sooner than Halloween 2017. Emma Stone will be the next host on SNL, so be sure to tune in to NBC on December 3 at 11:30 p.m. ET to see her in action.
