Celebrity Jeopardy! (SNL)

Norm Macdonald created Celebrity Jeopardy! after noticing how much easier the real show's celebrity clues were than its regular ones, and admitted the premise was lifted from SCTV's "Half-Wits," in which Eugene Levy's host Alex Trebel was driven mad by dim contestants; Macdonald phoned Levy for permission. He later said he wrote it "purely as an excuse" to do his Burt Reynolds impression, deliberately playing Reynolds as if he had never aged past 1972. The first sketch aired on December 7, 1996, with Will Ferrell as Trebek, Macdonald as Reynolds and Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery, on a mock-up of the real show's new Naomi Slodki set.

The formula never changed, which was the point. The sketch opens at Double Jeopardy! with the celebrities already at zero, below it or a few dollars above; they can't pick a category, so Trebek does it for them, and the board drifts from "Movies" to "Colors That End in 'urple'," "Countries Between Mexico and Canada," "Famous Kareem Abdul-Jabbars" and "Automatic Points." "Potent Potables" is on every board and never chosen until the 2015 special. Connery, Trebek's "arch-nemesis," misreads "Therapists" as "The Rapists" and takes "The Pen Is Mightier" for a product, insults Trebek's mother, and turns his Final Jeopardy! wager into "SucK it Trebek." Reynolds insists on being called Turd Ferguson because he thinks the name is funny. The week's host usually played the third contestant, Jimmy Fallon appeared six times as six different people, and across fifteen sketches the contestants essentially never got a clue right, though Phil Donahue and Tony Bennett came close.

Hammond played Connery in the first sketch, then Phil Donahue and John Travolta in the next two, before Connery became the fixture from May 1998, admitting that the impression slid from accurate into a "bastardization" the audience preferred. Trebek shaved his mustache in 2001; Ferrell kept his, and the clean-shaven real Trebek walked on at the end of Ferrell's last sketch as a cast member in 2002. Trebek said he loved the impression and was asked about it at every taping. The real Jeopardy! repaid the compliment: "'S' Words" and "Swords" shared a column in May 1999, a September 2001 board included "Sean Connery," "Surprise Me, Trebek!" and "Therapists," and a 2015 contestant with no idea of the answer wrote "The Love Ballad of Turd Ferguson."

Ferrell returned to host the sketch in 2005 and 2009, and it was revived for the SNL 40th Anniversary Special on February 15, 2015.