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A live-action sketch-comedy show on Nickelodeon that functioned as "Saturday Night Live for kids." Premiering in April 1994, All That launched stars including Kenan Thompson, Kel Mitchell, and Amanda Bynes while anchoring Nickelodeon's beloved "SNICK" Saturday-night block with its irreverent humor and memorable recurring sketches.
The Nickelodeon sketch comic who got her own show at 13, then carried a WB sitcom and a run of teen comedies from Big Fat Liar to She's the Man. She won Kids' Choice Awards for both television and film before announcing her retirement from acting in 2010.
Will Ferrell's exasperated Alex Trebek, Darrell Hammond's leering Sean Connery and Norm Macdonald's Burt Reynolds demanding to be called Turd Ferguson, playing a game nobody on the panel could or would play. The Saturday Night Live sketch ran twice a season from 1996 to 2002, and its categories got so dumb the real Jeopardy! started using them.
The sketch show that owned the mid-2000s. Dave Chappelle's Comedy Central juggernaut turned razor-sharp racial satire and absurd characters into the most-quoted comedy of the decade — "I'm Rick James, b****!" echoing down every school hallway.
Keenen Ivory Wayans brought irreverent Black sketch comedy to primetime and stacked the cast with unknowns named Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, and David Alan Grier — while the Fly Girls' dance breaks included a young Jennifer Lopez. It won an Emmy in its first season, and its live Super Bowl halftime stunt rewrote how the NFL books the big game.
Nickelodeon's 1996 cartoon anthology, hosted from inside a comic book by Henry and June, where no two shorts looked alike: thrown action figures in Action League Now!, magnet-faced puppets in Life with Loopy, and a stop-motion alien videotaping lessons for a caveman.
Bob Odenkirk and David Cross's HBO sketch show ran four short seasons, each sketch bleeding into the next Monty Python-style, with a cast that included Sarah Silverman, Jack Black and Paul F. Tompkins. Its audience on premium cable was small. Then the DVDs came out.
Seth Green's action figures, animated into eleven minutes of sugar-rush sketches on Adult Swim. Robot Chicken premiered February 20, 2005, dropping toy-aisle heroes into mundane adult life, and its Star Wars special got George Lucas himself into the recording booth.
Nickelodeon's wildest Saturday-night experiment: sketch comedy fused with full dance numbers and musical performances, taped before a live audience. Built around the "Anyfamily" and their everyday problems, each episode ended with the cast singing the theme a cappella over the credits. It debuted on SNICK's opening night in 1992.
PBS's answer to math phobia: a half hour of sketches, parody game shows and music videos about percentages, capped every day by Mathnet, the Dragnet spoof whose detectives carried calculators instead of guns. Five seasons, 230 episodes, and a generation of adults who forgot every formula but can still sing the theme.
Amanda Bynes was thirteen when she became Nickelodeon's entire comedy machine — a rotating cast of characters who never ran out of sketches or failed to land the joke. The Amanda Show ran from 1999 to 2002, and if you were there, you still remember exactly how kids danced in Judge Trudy's courtroom.
MTV's 11-person sketch troupe lasted four seasons and 25 episodes but launched half the comedy you loved in the 2000s. They wrote, acted, directed, and edited everything themselves — and left behind $240 worth of pudding.
A public-access nightmare on Adult Swim: fake commercials for useless Cinco products, amateur actors recruited off Craigslist, John C. Reilly as the dazed newsman Dr. Steve Brule, and editing that made every frame feel slightly broken. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim called it "the nightmare version of television," and from 2007 to 2010 it was either the funniest or the most hated thing on the block.
Nickelodeon's high-school comedy lived a double life: it kicked off as a sketch show before pivoting into a genuine sitcom halfway through its run. Set at Hawthorne High with a chaotic crew of teens and a perpetually flustered vice principal, it's the kind of show you caught between Salute Your Shorts reruns and forgot you ever loved.