Nate Bargatze Showed Off Golf’s Chaotic Side on a New “SNL”

The comedian played a golfer with terrible luck

SNL Golf sketch
Nate Bargatze played a golfer experiencing terrible luck on a new "SNL."
NBCUniversal

When it comes to professional sports, golf ranks particularly high when it comes to the importance of decorum. It’s one of the reasons why most comedy involving golf involves bad behavior and slapstick comedy: Caddyshack, Happy Gilmore and that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David kills a swan. On this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live, the show’s cast and guest host Nate Bargatze offered their own take on a golf game going very wrong.

Specifically, they did so in a sketch where Bargatze’s character, playing in a charity tournament, faces some spectacularly bad luck as he tries to catch up with his rival. The first example of that luck finds the unfortunate golfer driving a ball directly into the path of a bird, which promptly explodes.

If you read that, you might predict that Bargatze’s golfer would, over the course of the sketch, accidentally escalate his destruction of various animals in the vicinity. You would be entirely correct in this prediction; where the sketch stands out is in the different ways that the golfer unwittingly decimates the local fauna.

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In addition to the slapstick inherent to this premise, there are also a few subtler visual jokes that crop up over the course of the sketch. It might not be quite as refreshing as a pimento cheese sandwich, but it is a solid entry in the place where golf and comedy converge.

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