Saturday Night Live: The Best of David Spade

This was the best of David Spade??

I dread therefore to think what would have constituted the worst.

This is a dire collection, I didn't find a single sketch here that I found funny, and it wasn't for the want of trying. Some don't even have proper endings, they just fade away, either due to bad editing, or just lazy writing.

Spade can be funny. He can also be incredibly smug and annoying. This DVD is a good showcase for the latter, and whoever signed off on this as being his 'best' deserves a call from his agent.

SNL is hit and miss at the best of times, but this was a total miss from start to finish.

One of the nineties 'bad boys of SNL' gets a belated 'Best of' special of his own (yet Rob Schneider is still waiting), featuring a surprising amount of footage from the march 2005 show he hosted less than a year before this one aired. So we switch back and forth between young Spade and current Spade at least three times and get to see almost as much of the current SNL cast (even one seasoner Rob Riggle appears twice) as the ones little old Dave was actually a part of. Strangely enough, the controversial 'Sean Penn Celebrity Roast' sketch with him wearing a prosthetic penis on his nose is not included (at least not in the televised version, maybe the DVD has it). Only the monologue is taken from his first time hosting in November 1998, presumably because he was bragging about this upcoming special in the one from 2005.

For those wondering if Spade had enough stuff on his SNL resume to warrant a best of anyway, there's the classic Total Bastard Airlines (Buh-Bye) routine, Dick Clark's receptionist putting down everyone from Rosseanne to Jesus and 'Spade in America' (all showing his preverance to play the biggest a-hole of them all). The editors wisely chose not to focus on the Spadester's position as Chris Farley's foil, which we already saw on the tribute to the late great Chris. Here, Farley only appears prominently twice: in Gap girls and on a Weekend Update bit, leaving more time for lesser seen skits instead of the same overlapping stuff that's on every other Best of. The second of three 'Spade in America' reports features the extraordinarily humorless Sean Penn giving Spade a tattoo, during which our man Emperor Kuzco actually manages to make Penn laugh! This might well be the most unique footage ever put to film anywhere. To find out what kind of that joker Penn applied to the the man also known as Joe Dirt's arm, you'll have to watch the special.

8 out of 10