Well, let’s see. In the past year I’ve written one fairly fun Halloween Movie post for this site. That is exactly one (1) more posts than last year. In the business, we call that progress! Can’t be a prolific poster without the first post, right? Exactly! I knew we were on the same page!

And here – ladies, gentlemen, and all in-betweeners – we go again! Somehow, unbelievably, we are back for our 10th year doing these brackets. We made it! We’re in double digits, baby! In our 9th year I had just a fantastic time running this thing as we all picked our favorite Fictional Band’s Song, which came down to the wire with “Scotty Doesn’t Know” from Eurotrip getting the win by 3 votes! This beaut gets into the Clumsy Optimist Hall of Champions along side our 8th year favorite commercial jingle of all time with the Toys ‘R’ Us jingle “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” which came out victorious, joining 7th year bracket which found our favorite Disney song with Aladdin‘s “Friend Like Me” winning their championship by one vote! These winners are welcomed to our group of champions with 6th year Champ – our favorite holiday movie Elf. 5th year Champion of our favorite fast-food joint was one of our closer finals matchups as Whataburger was crowned. Our fourth-year winner of favorite TV theme song was won in a rout by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This joins our third-year winner for favorite breakfast food: Breakfast Tacos and Burritos. Our second-year bracket crowned The Sandlot as our champions of the Best Sports Movie Bracket. Our first champion was in the music bracket where The Beatles reigned victorious. It’s my pleasure to announce our topic this year in honor of Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary: SNL Sketches.

Before we get started I wanted to do something I still honestly feel a little awkward about but here it goes again. We’ve done this thing for a full decade now and the cost of the hosting sites keeps going up like crazy. If you enjoy what we do here and feel so inclined to throw a couple dollarbucks my way to help pay for the sites and whatnot, feel free to Venmo me @ josh-sorensen-5 or PayPal @ JoshSorensen5 (apparently there are 4 other Josh Sorensens on both apps that beat me to the punch lol). The tip jar is out! I truly do appreciate all you people and have loved doing this for all these years. Please don’t think I’m doing anything here but begging haha. Anyway, back to the stuff that we all care about!

So, this topic honestly fits perfectly. Between Saturday Night Live currently celebrating 50 seasons and March Madness being upon us, it was a no-brainer. As it is, I’ll be singing this perfection, that somehow didn’t make the final 68 sketch bracket, for the next month…

---

Mrs. Clumsy Optimist and I talked it over and pulled about 30 of the seeds you will see in this bracket off the tops of our heads. After some research, I had made a spreadsheet (there’s a spreadsheet for everything!) which had ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN of the best/my favorite SNL sketches of the last 5 decades. Which is the best? Which goofy sketch will reign over all? That is for all of you to decide.

A few notes on how we decided what would qualify. Starting with 127 and having to get to 68 was daunting and there are some all-time sketches left of the cutting room floor. I am seriously bummed about some of these that didn’t quite make the final list. Fifty-nine cuts is easily a record. This was the toughest time we have had formulating our four 16-spot brackets.

I’d recommend clicking on every single one of these YouTube links. There are some of these SNL sketches that may not be as well known as the others but, I’m telling you, there is solid gold in there! I also plan on making a few posts here and there detailing the ones that fell just short of making the Tournament.

Like previous years, “scores” will be posted as the percentages from the polls.

I’ll set up polls in each round. To keep from completely swamping everyone’s Facebook and Twitter timelines, I’ll post the polls here and put a link up at the start of each new round on my Facebook , Threads, and Twitter accounts. *Shameless plug* Give me a follow! You can also click the little Subscribe button down at the bottom of these posts and get updated in your inbox whenever I post some super sweet goodness.

---

Last year, we had more of a difficult time coming up with 64 spots than we typically do. Not this year! Usually we end up cutting 20ish spots to get to the final regions and feel like we cut some biggies but in at least one of our 4 regions, we are stretching thin to make it to 16. This year we made 59 cuts, the region with the least amount of sketches still had 22, and we feel like…no, we know… we left off some classics. Some that didn’t make the final cut just barely got beat out. It’s life. There’s gotta be some bubble teams, right?

As always I’m sure there are going to be quite a few issues taken with how I ended up seeding some of these sketches, but I think where we landed was as good as it was going to get. We try to limit our personal biases around these parts, but that’s impossible with something like SNL.

Typically we have tried to make our regions have something in common or specifically relating to the topic at hand and this year we were able to really get things grouped in a way that makes sense and avoid the dreaded “Miscellaneous” Region. Having a clear group of decades to work with made it somewhat easier on us.

This year, we pay homage to those titans of comedy that were taken from us all too soon. Our regions will be named in honor of John Belushi, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, and Norm MacDonald. With 5 years in the 1970s and 2020s, we combined those with the decades around them. So the Belushi Region will be sketches from the 70s and 80s, the Hartman Region will be comprised of the 90s, the Farley Region will give us sketches from 2000-2009 (not calling it the aughts…even though I’m sure I will later lol), and the MacDonald Region will be filled with all the goodness SNL has thrown at us in the 2010s to 2025. Once again, seeding is almost entirely based on my biases so if you don’t like it, take it up with management. Oh, btw, I’m also management.

The first round of voting will start today Thursday, March 20 and voting will close Sunday, March 23 at 5pm. The second round will begin on Monday, March 24. I will do my best to get the new write-ups and brackets posted as soon as possible but I make no promises. Especially early on, extra especially the Round of 32 post, these posts are hella long. New rounds will begin on Mondays and Thursdays. I will set the polls to only allow one vote but in case I miss that checkbox on a couple of these, please only vote once per match-up.

Note that this first round is massive so I will post each region’s polls separately because the page doesn’t like loading 64 YouTube previews at once. Links to each region’s votes are below the bracket and will be posted as individual posts on the homepage. We should only have to do it this way for the first round but please let me know if y’all have problems loading the Round of 32 when that gets posted. Let’s get to voting!

---

John Belushi Region

Click here for the Belushi Region voting page

Phil Hartman Region

Click here for the Hartman Region voting page

Chris Farley Region

Click here for the Farley Region voting page

Norm MacDonald Region

Click here for the MacDonald Region voting page

---

Well, there we have it! I have tons to say about these match-ups, but I don’t want to push the vote one way or another. I feel like I know how almost all of these lean, but y’all have surprised me on more than an occasion or two. There’s already more than a few that I have no idea how to vote on and we have just gotten started! Let’s get to voting and see who gets into the Round of 32!