Saturday Night Live: The Best of Chris Kattan

Chris Kattan might well be the greatest physical comedian they ever had on Saturday Night Live. Only Jim Carrey's work on "In Living Color" surpasses him. Like Carrey, Kattan is the kind of comedian that you either love or hate. Or you might love him at first but eventually he'll get on your nerves. Kattan also has this gay stigma hanging over his head, hindering a successful movie career like Carrey and Groundlings pal Will Ferrell. At least for now. This compilation opens with the first appearance of the Roxbury Guys, when Will and Chris were just trying out the idea and had not even found Haddaway's 'What is Love' to head-bop to. This made me expect some more Roxbury dancing later on in the show, but no such luck.

His many recurring characters appear one by one, including one of the most elaborate Mango skits they ever did (Mango vs. J-lo), Suel Forrester in court, the Zimmermans at Halloween (Chris and Cheri Oteri are a great match) and that other pair of dancing brothers, the DeMarco's, auditioning for Bon Jovi. For some reason Jovi seems to drag out the ending long past the stage of being funny. When it comes to his most energetic and far out character of all, I would not have picked the Mr. Peepers skit with Kevin Spacey as the best one. The ones with The Rock and Tom Hanks were much funnier. Besides, I think they edited it somewhat. My absolute favourite in this collection has to be the 'How do you say? Ah Yes! Show' with Antonio Banderas and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

During a montage of celebrity impressions it becomes clear Kattan is not the best mimic on the show, but his take on Pacino is absolutely hilarious. The White trash couple is pretty disgusting, especially when Amy Poehlerwants to suck his toe-thumb (don't ask). As usual Fred Armisen steals the show in the Buddy Mills sketch, and when they get to Goth Talk, it's the one where his character Azrael Abbys is pretending to be dead. Well I guess he was always more of a sidekick in that one anyway. There are three clips from Weekend update, one with Norm and two with Jimmy and Tina. Kattan's first appearance as Gollum is actually taken from the Superbowl Half-time show. It ends with the Siamese twins skit with Jennifer Garner that has Chris playing a normal, boring straight guy. I guess they had to reinforce that image one last time. Either that or it was an excuse to have more Jimmy Fallon in there. They should have put in another round of Roxbury if you ask me.

9 out of 10