Welcome to 2026's 31 Days of Heistoween, a daily dose of spooky icons, spine-tingling oddities, and — most harrowing of all — memes. Check back every day from now through October 31 for each daily entry!
When it comes to recent Saturday Night Live Halloween sketches in the popular imagination, it's basically Tom Hanks as David S. Pumpkins and then...well, everything else. Every October we get new sketches, but most of the time Mr. Pumpkins as his dancing skeletons still come out on top as the most memorable SNL Halloween bit in years.
Unless you're a complete weirdo, like me.
All due respect to Mr. Pumpkins, but there's actually another SNL Halloween piece from roughly the same era that I love even more, not just because it's a bit more esoteric, but because it's got a genuine earworm at its core.
The setup's really simple here: A young couple (Pete Davidson and Sasheer Zamata) show up at a local graveyard to hang out and drink beer. Suddenly, the graveyard comes alive with song, as busts atop tombstones, a talking tree, and a Grim Reaper statue all warn that their new living guests are in mortal danger.
Oh, and also Paul and Phil are there.
As the other graveyard denizens soon explain, Paul (Taran Killam) and Phil (host Jim Carrey) are "some nice, casual ghosts who are just sort of always around." A pair of dead guys from the Hawkeye State who were best friends in life and remain so in the afterlife, they're simple men in flannel who just want to sing the bouncy, cheerfully eerie graveyard song. The song is meant to allow the tombstones, the Reaper, and the evil tree to lure unsuspecting visitors to their deaths, but with Paul and Phil around, everything gets derailed.
It's a very basic piece of structural comedy: Set up a conceit that we'll all recognize, then throw a couple of weirdos in the mix, but in this case the weirdos deviating from the norm are just some Midwestern boys who enjoy singing their own names. Which are, I should mention, Paul and Phil.
Paul and Phil, Paul and Phil...
See, it's just your basic "weirdo interrupts a relatively normal thing" SNL sketch, but I love the idea that friendly ghosts need a place to hang out and party too, and Paul and Phil just want in on the fun.
Paul and Phil.
Come knock on our door tomorrow for even more 31 Days of Heistoween treats.
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