Brow Beat

This Saturday Night Live Sketch With Emma Thompson Will Change the Way You Watch Beauty and the Beast

Cecily Strong, Beck Bennett, and Emma Thompson recreate a scene from Beauty and the Beast.
Some things can never be unseen. NBC

Emma Thompson hosted this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, and took the opportunity to revisit her role as Mrs. Potts, the anthropomorphic teapot she played in the live-action version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. She also took the opportunity to revisit her role as a ace sketch comedy performer: Although it’s hard to remember post-Branaugh and post-Merchant-Ivory, Thompson started out in sketch comedy as the first female member of the Footlights troupe at Cambridge, and her earliest TV projects—Alfresco, Emma Thompson: Up For Grabs, Thompson—were sketch comedy shows. But none of those shows ruined a Disney movie quite the way her Saturday Night Live appearance as Mrs. Potts does.

Wow. Wow. WOW. Here, for posterity, are the lyrics to the new verse to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s “Beauty and the Beast” speculating about the exact manner in which the Beast and Mrs. Potts have sex:

Tale as gross as slime, a thing you can’t unsee,

Barely even drunk, I brushed against his junk, accidentally.

How would they even mate? Strange to say the least.

Dong goes in the spout, baby cup comes out, Teapot and the Beast.

We all could use a little eyeball bleach right about now, so here are 50 seconds of Emma Thompson dancing around in brightly-colored jumpsuits singing Phil Collins’ “It Don’t Matter to Me” in the part of the opening credits to her 1985 sketch comedy special Emma Thompson: Up For Grabs that made it to YouTube:

Nope, still thinking about the Beast having sex with an anthropomorphic teapot. Thanks for nothing, Saturday Night Live!