A comedy sketch group is alleging that Saturday Night Live stole their skits. New York City comedy sketch group Temple Horses claims that SNL plagiarized their comedic material.
Comedians Nick Ruggia and Ryan Hoffman, who make up the group Temple Horses, told Variety that SNL stole their original comedy sketches. “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,” Hoffman said.
In Saturday Night Live‘s “Pumpkin Patch” skit from last October, employees of a farm market are caught copulating with the pumpkins.
Temple Horses released a sketch in October of 2014 where pumpkin patch customers discuss which pumpkin would be the best for having sex with it.
In September of 2011, Temple Horses produced a skit called “Pet Blinders,” which was an infomercial for a product described as “the ShamWow of masturbation.” The product is a blindfold for dogs that stops them from staring at you during your most intimate moments.
Last month, SNL featured a skit called “Puppy Pound” that is a commercial for a product that is a huge dog-looking tent-like structure where couples can safely have sex without their dog interrupting them.
“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,” Hoffman said. Temple Horses started in 2011 and have filmed over 60 sketches.
Wallace Neel, the attorney for Ruggia and Hoffman, sent a letter to NBC on February 27th:
“This season, NBC Network’s sketch comedy program SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (“SNL”) has plagiarized entire sketches from Temple Horses. Nick and Ryan love comedy and revere SNL as an institution–but unless they’re paid writers on SNL, NBC has no right to broadcast or use their material on SNL by NBC. It saddened Nick and Ryan to learn that SNL has plagiarized Temple Horses at least twice this season. This is not ‘parallel construction’: Two separate instances of wholesale lifting of concept, setting, characters, plot, and outcome in the same season do not happen by coincidence. Someone(s) at SNL is plagiarizing material.”
NBC responded to the accusations of plagiarism by saying that the SNL bits were created without inspiration from the Temple Horses.