Saturday Night Live has been accused of plagiarizing another sketch. This time, it’s the edgy “Picture Perfect” sketch that aired during Reese Witherspoon’s episode this weekend.
In the sketch, characters are playing in a gameshow called “Picture Perfect,” in which a player has to draw what is on the card and their teammates have to correctly guess what the image is supposed to be. Bobby Moynihan's character is told to draw the Prophet Muhammad, but he’s apprehensive. He hands the card over to Kenan Thompson, who also doesn’t want to draw Muhammad. Even though both of them fail to draw anything, Witherspoon still correctly guesses what they were trying to draw.
After the show aired, some viewers noted that the sketch was awfully similar to a sketch on the Canadian show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The sketch is shorter and aired back in January, in the wake of the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris.
In fact, Vanity Fair notes that two writers for 22 Minutes noted on Twitter that the SNL sketch was awfully similar to theirs.
SNL has been accused of plagiarizing sketches in the past. The most recent example came when the Los Angeles group The Groundlings said a sketch in the October Sarah Silverman episode was very similar to one they performed. Salon even put together a list of five other examples.
Here’s the SNL sketch:
And the 22 Minutes sketch:
image courtesy of Jennifer Graylock/INFphoto.com