'SNL' Zillow Sketch Slammed With Plagiarism Accusations

One of the funnier sketches from this weekend's Saturday Night Live episode was a pre-taped [...]

By Daniel S. Levine

One of the funnier sketches from this weekend's Saturday Night Live episode was a pre-taped commercial for the property listing website Zillow.com, suggesting that browsing the site was as exciting as sex. Comedian Ted Alexandro was not laughing though, as he believes the show's writers stole the concept from one of his recent stand-up acts. In his act, Alexandro joked that instead of having sexting, he and his wife send each other listings as "dirty talk."

"Dear [SNL], since you stole my Zillow joke last night please Venmo me the sum of 1 million dollars. My full special Cut/Up is on youtube if you need more ideas," Alexandro wrote. He included a video where he cut in scenes from the SNL sketch with his own jokes. "[My wife] and I do not sext one another - no judgment if you do. We just don't sext. What we do is we send one another properties on Zillow or Trulia," Alexandro jokes. "That's like our dirty talk."

Alexandro gave SNL until kickoff for Super Bowl LV to respond to his allegations. NBC and the show have not, so Alexandro said he was planning a "press conference at halftime" to discuss SNL "stealing" his joke. He also retweeted comedians who voiced their support. "This is obviously stolen. Post Trump TV comedy is struggling. This is an obvious one, good for you Ted for speaking up," Yannis Pappas wrote.

This is not the first time SNL has been accused of plagiarizing for its sketches. Back in March 2019, Nick Ruggia and Ryan Hoffman of the sketch comedy troupe Temple Horses claimed two of their sketches were ripped off by SNL writers. One of those sketches was another commercial. During a 2019 episode, SNL aired "Pound Puppy," a parody commercial about a tent for couples who want to have sex without their pets watching them. The Temple Horses founders claimed this was a rip-off of their similarly themed "Pet Blinders" sketch from 2011.

"Imagine, one day you come home and it looks like somebody's robbed your house," Hoffman told Variety at the time. "What do you want from that situation? We feel like somebody took our stuff, and this isn't the kind of thing where you can just get it back or call your insurance company to have it replaced, so at this point we're just speaking out about it."

In 2017, Tig Notaro accused SNL of plagiarizing her short film Clown Service for a sketch in Louis C.K.'s episode, titled "Birthday Clown." Notaro claimed a writer on SNL was aware of her earlier short film. In both sketches, a person hires a clown for an audience of one. "I hesitated to even address any of this, but I think it is only right to defend my work and ideas and moving forward, I plan to continue screening Clown Service with the joy and pride I always have," Notaro said at the time.

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