TORONTO — Former Saturday Night Live staffer Dean Obeidallah said Thursday he doesn’t believe the NBC show plagiarized a sketch that aired on the CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
“It is highly unlikely that the writers of this sketch plagiarized from the Canadian show,” Obeidallah opined in a column posted at CNN.com. “What writer would risk his or her reputation, and possibly career, for a four-minute comedy sketch?”
In the SNL sketch that aired last weekend, Taran Killam is the host of a Win, Lose of Draw-type show and Bobby Moynihan is a contestant asked to draw the Prophet Muhammad to win $1 million.
According to Islamic tradition, physical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are considered blasphemous.
The sketch was quickly compared to one that aired in January on 22 Minutes, in which Shaun Majumder played the game show host and Mark Critch was the contestant.
Obeidallah, who worked on SNL for eight years, acknowledged “the premise is the same and there are similarities in the jokes.”
But, he added, “it’s inconceivable in our social media obsessed world that any writer could think such a rip-off would go undetected.”
Obeidallah said comedy writers and performers “typically process topics through the same comedic prism” so it should come as no surprise that “comedy bits would look similar.”
He said senior writers and producers at SNL “would never knowingly allow a plagiarized sketch to go on air.”
BELOW: Watch the SNL sketch from May and the 22 Minutes sketch from January.
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