Before becoming one of the best characters on Curb Your Enthusiasm and turning himself into a sought after comedic character actor, JB Smoove was a writer on Saturday Night Live. He was only there for a couple seasons, but many of the cast members and writers who overlapped with his tenure, talk about the wild ideas he pitched with great fondness. Now I can see why.
Smoove was recently on Kelly Ripa’s podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera. Not surprisingly, the topic of SNL came up, as Ripa hosted the show while Smoove worked there. During their chat, he brought up a sketch he pitched for Johnny Knoxville, and it’s way too good not to share. Apparently he wrote a crime show sketch where the Jackass star would sniff people’s urine and use whatever he smelled to help solve the case. Here’s the elevator pitch he dropped in the writer’s room…
Urine Detective! I wrote that for Johnny Knoxville when he was gonna be the host. You know Johnny Knoxville. He’d do crazy shit on his show Jackass. He was a detective, and he’d solve crimes based on your urine sample. He would taste your urine sample and say, ‘This man didn’t do this murder, but he did a lot of other shit!’
Smoove recounted the old pitch as part of a new pitch he was making to Ripa about what he’d do if he were ever asked to host the show. Apparently, he has a long list of all his favorite ideas he pitched for the show that never got on the air. He wants to act out bits of them during his opening monologue, which sounds absolutely amazing.
During his chat with Ripa, he brought up some other sketches that never made it to the air including Helicopter Family, which is about an entire family of helicopter pilots who all walk all hunched over and shout at each other at a high volume. If you think that sounds hilarious, you’re not alone. Seth Meyers, who was formerly the head writer at SNL, actually loved the sketch idea so much that he separately brought it up during an interview he did with Howard Stern in which he called Smoove the greatest Monday Morning pitcher in the history of the SNL writing room.
Unfortunately, Smoove wasn’t quite as successful with getting his sketches on the air. According to Meyers, it was mostly because so many of his sketches were hilarious ideas that were hard to stretch out for enough time. During the Ripa interview, Smoove said he also thinks he had trouble because he was mostly writing material that he personally thought would be funny and he’d be a good fit in, even if he wasn’t actually a cast member.
SNL has a long history of launching many of comedy’s biggest stars, but that doesn’t mean SNL actually used all those people to their full potential. The show’s alumni rolls are filled with a ton of famous faces who didn’t quite fit including Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr and of course, Smoove’s longtime co-star Larry David who once repackaged his own rejected pitch about replacing an answering machine tape into one of Seinfeld’s most famous bits.
Here’s to hoping Smoove gets his chance to host and we get an opportunity to fully appreciate all these amazing pitches that didn’t make the air. We don't know the rest of the hosts for Season 50; so, there's always a chance we could be in for a huge surprise.
