When the ‘Wild and Crazy Guys’ Debuted on ‘Saturday Night Live’
Guys obsessed with sex but clueless about how to get it have long been a staple of comedy. Saturday Night Live made one of the most enduring contribution to the genre with the Festrunk Brothers, more popularly known as the "wild and crazy guys," who made their debut on Sept. 24, 1977.
The sketch, which appeared on the first episode of the show's third season, teamed host Steve Martin with Not Ready for Prime Time Player Dan Aykroyd as, respectively, Georg and Yortuk Festrunk, brothers who had escaped their hometown of Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, a few years earlier and were now settled in New York City in the midst of the disco era and the Sexual Revolution.
Dressed in tight, plaid pants and loud, unbuttoned shirts that revealed large medallions, they encounter two women (Jane Curtin and Gilda Radner) playing ping-pong in the rec room of their apartment building.
Fancying themselves swingers, but lacking all self-awareness and subtlety, the Festrunks proceed to put the moves on the women in heavily accented English, calling them "foxes," praising their "big American breasts" and proposing they all go up to their apartment. The women aren't interested and, to get rid of the brothers, suggest they meet somewhere first: the glass booth in the middle of the Holland Tunnel.
Martin and Aykroyd reprised the characters two other times that season, and once more in Season Four. The recurring phrase uttered by Martin, "We are ... two wild and crazy guys!" became a pop-culture catch phrase, and he even titled his 1978 hit comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy. Martin became so synonymous with the phrase that he's still called a "wild and crazy guy" in headlines more than 40 years later.
Watch Two Wild & Crazy Guys on 'Saturday Night Live'
Over the years, Saturday Night Live continued to develop recurring characters who had no skills around women -- from Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) to the head-bobbing, Haddaway-loving Steve and Doug Butabi (Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan).
The latter pair, known as the Roxbury Guys, were pretty much the spiritual children of the Festrunks. A 1998 episode of SNL even found the Butabis lose out to Martin and Aykroyd, playing the Festrunks for the first time in 20 years, when they finally got the girl, played by host Cameron Diaz.
They made one last appearance in March 2013, as the contestants on a Dating Game-like show in competition with "Dick in a Box" singers Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg. The woman, played by cast member Vanessa Bayer, chose to date all four men.