Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant stopped by the Weekend Update desk on this week’s Saturday Night Live to play the owners of Smokery Farms, an organization that offers animal lovers an ethical way to enjoy meat, promising to only slaughter “animals that are individually stupid and bad.” Maybe this would have been a good segment, and maybe it would have been a bad segment. The world will never know, because some hapless stagehand seems to have left a crucial prop under the stage lights a little too long: a giant basket of raw meat. So instead of telling jokes about the ethical consumption of animals, Bryant and McKinnon spontaneously improvised an entirely different sketch, about trying to endure the stench of rotting lamb chops without throwing up on live television. It was a great sketch.

Once the meat arrives, neither actress can so much as inhale without involuntarily recoiling in horror, which makes it difficult to convincingly deliver lines like “Yum!” or “I’m getting hungry!” McKinnon and Bryant are both hilarious, but no one gets more laughs than the basket of rapidly decomposing meat, which is almost a character in the sketch in its own right. Unless Lorne Michaels has lost his touch, the rotten basket of meat will become a recurring character, adding its putrid, hilarious stench to any sketch that doesn’t kill in rehearsal. Congratulations to everyone at SNL on the discovery of this exquisite new talent.

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