Ryan Goslings Resurrection: The Unlikely Rise of the Beavis and Butt-Head SNL Sketch

In recent memory, one of the most delightfully bizarre sketches on Saturday Night Live (SNL) has been the one featuring Ryan Gosling as Beavis and Mikey Day as Butt-Head. However, this popular bit faced a long road to the Studio 8H stage, with a failed first attempt involving a different star entirely: Jonah Hill.

According to Mikey Day, a longtime SNL writer and cast member, the concept of the sketch had been quietly circulating in the writers' room for years. They initially tried it with Jonah Hill, but the sketch itself wasn't ready yet. The host of Is it Cake? and his writing partner, Streeter Seidell, continued to work on the concept, attempting another version during Oscar Isaac's hosting week. Unfortunately, that iteration never even reached dress rehearsal due to the set requirements being too big. As a result, the sketch was shelved temporarily.

However, when Ryan Gosling returned to host SNL, everything changed. The revived version of the sketch aired to immediate praise and widespread fan love. Both Gosling and Day fully committed to their prosthetic-heavy transformations and vacant stares, with Heidi Gardner's barely-contained laughter adding to the charm.

This isn't the first time a weird Mikey Day sketch has gone viral after years of quiet development. In fact, it's become a specialty for Day and Seidell, whose writing partnership has produced everything from Tom Hanks' legendary David S. Pumpkins to a laundry list of breakout bits that help newer cast members shine. The SNL standout says part of the magic of working on the show is its unpredictability, which allows them to write whatever their brain can come up with.

When it comes to the origins of his sketch ideas, Day doesn't spend too much time dissecting where they come from. Whether they're sparked by an old commercial, a Disney ride, or a nostalgic cartoon from MTV's heyday, he believes that when it works, it just kind of works. And honestly, it's hard to argue with that logic. The Beavis and Butt-Head sketch is a perfect example of this, as it generated an article of the same type and output in English while keeping the original picture intact.