'Saturday Night Live' Writers Accused of Plagiary by NYC Sketch Group
Source: Youtube/NBC
Source: Youtube/NBC
The duo claims a pair of digital shorts from this season bear an uncanny resemblance to their own sketches.
Though there's no new Saturday Night Live to report on this morning, sketches from this past season are resurfacing for all the wrong reasons. According to a Variety report, NYC comedy duo Nick Ruggia and Ryan Hoffman, aka Temple Horses, accused the late-night institution of plagiarizing two sketches from their Youtube catalog in digital shorts that aired in the current season of the show.
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Neither premise is brain-busting. The 2014 sketch, "Not Trying to Fuck This Pumpkin," involved, you guessed it, a group of people looking to defile a giant orange gourd, and was allegedly tapped for the "Pumpkin Patch" short, featured in an October 2018 episode hosted by Awkwafina. Another sketch from 2011, "Pet Blinders," is the alleged source for SNL's "Pound Puppy" short, featured in a Don Cheadle-hosted episode from last month, in which lovers and self-lovers fit their dogs with devices that afford them a touch more privacy during intimate moments.
A letter from Temple Horses' legal rep states "This is not ‘parallel construction’: Two separate instances of wholesale lifting of concept, setting, characters, plot, and outcome in the same season do not happen by coincidence," concluding "Someone(s) at SNL is plagiarizing material."
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SNL has yet to respond to Temple Horses' claims, but it's far from the first time the program has come under fire for alleged plagiarism. Just last week, a minor Twitter war was waged over whether the show lifted the concept for their "Gold Diggers" sketch from a Zack Fox tweet in January.
Watch the sketches below.
