AndySamberg-Nic-Cage

Warming Glow is the TV blog around these parts, so you can see Ufford for the full SNL recap, but I couldn’t resist posting this clip of Andy Samberg as Nic Cage.  Andy Samberg is the best SNL cast member by miles (Jason Sudeikis is underrated) and there are about a million different ways you could go with a Nic Cage bit — he’s broke, he steals chihuahuas, he’s a furrie, he punches women, he’s buyin’ snake venom and seein’ invisible iguanas, he’s doing a Nazi initiation with Werner Herzog… these are just ideas, but call me any time, NBC, I’m always home.  Point being, there’s a wealth of timely material, but they go with the most obvious angle, the Nic-Cage-is-just-like-his-National-Treasure-character angle.  Obvious or not, Samberg knocks it out of the park, because Nic Cage is a comedian’s dream.  And a caricaturist’s nightmare.

I know this is only tangentially related, but it’s a good story: I was talking to a friend of mine who told me that the last time he was at the Fresno Fair, he and his wife were having a contest to see who could see the most depressing thing (the perfect game for any carnival, state fair, or tractor pull).  At some point, he saw a group of retarded people who were clearly on a group outing.  One of them, an extremely goofy-looking kid with Down Syndrome, was sitting in front of the caricaturist’s booth.  My friend said he saw this from about 50 feet away facing the kid and couldn’t contain his curiosity, immediately sprinting full speed in a wide circle around the booth to get to an angle where he could see what this poor bastard commissioned to do a funny-but-not-insulting portrait of a funny-looking retarded person had drawn.  I imagine the scenario is straight out of the caricaturist school final exam; the caricaturist Kobayashi-Maru, if you will.   Pop quiz, Hotshot: a man in an eyepatch whose tongue hangs out of his mouth because of a rare birth defect sits down for a portrait. What. Do you. Do?

[Sorry for the Hulu vid, non-U.S. types. If I could find another version I'd post it. Have you tried a proxy IP address?]