Charles Barkley is a Big Hit

Charles Barkley was the first host of the New Year for Saturday Night Live, and he helped revive a lot of mediocre sketches with great one-liners and hilarious jokes.

Some skits he helped refresh were the “Reel Quotes” sketch and the “Scared Straight” sketch. In “Reel Quotes” he played alongside Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, where Hader was the host of a game show, asking the two contestants (Barkley and Wiig) to finish famous movie quotes. Some of the more memorable quotes Barkley was finishing were “May the force be…equal to mass times acceleration,” and “Life is like a box of…dead people.”

Barkley also starred alongside Kenan Thompson in “Scared Straight,” were the two of them played prison guards trying to scare some sense into Hader, Adam Samberg, and Bobby Moynihan. Thompson continued to make uproarious jokes about prison punishments while Barkley’s reactions to what he was saying were exceptional.

Other funny sketches of last night’s SNL included Weekend Update with Seth Meyers, with special guest stars Nicolas Cage and New York governor David Paterson.

Sigourney Weaver will host the next Saturday Night Live with musical guest The Ting Tings, on Jan. 16 on NBC.