NFTs come to Saturday Night Live in rap sketch

Published at: March 28, 2021

The craze behind nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, has seemingly reached peak parody after NBC's famed Saturday Night Live sketch comedy show addressed NFTs in a skit featuring Kate McKinnon as United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.

In Saturday’s show hosted by former cast member Maya Rudolph, Yellen is speaking at a university economics class when a student asks her to address exactly what non-fungible tokens are through the medium of rap.

“What the hell’s an NFT? Apparently cryptocurrency. Everyone’s making so much money — can you please explain what’s an NFT?”

The sketch features an absurd list of real and invented NFTs, including images of “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Chuck E. Cheese” and Family Guy character Peter Griffin dunking a basketball. The cast of characters mainly consists of Pete Davidson as a student portraying rapper Eminem dressed as Batman sidekick Robin, Chris Redd as Morpheus from The Matrix franchise, and a hapless "man with a mop" — played by musical guest Jack Harlow — who provides the most succinct explanation of the tokens.

"Nonfungible means that it's unique," he rapped. "There can only be one like you and me. NFTs are insane, built on a blockchain. A digital ledger of transactions, it records information on what's happening. Once it’s minted, you can sell it as art."

Highlighting the sudden surge in the number of unusual artworks, animations and other assets in digital marketplaces, the comedy rap sketch may cause some in the crypto space to recall Elon Musk's musical NFT offering earlier this month. The billionaire Tesla CEO posted a music video clip that featured a pair of diamond hands underneath the moon, which is being circled by Shiba Inu dogs. Musk later said he didn't "feel quite right selling" it as an NFT.

In the final seconds of the Saturday Night Live sketch, the four characters are cut out of a still frame and pasted onto The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, creating an NFT selling for 420 Ether (ETH) — roughly $718,000 at the time.

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