Background
During the May 2007 special Saturday Night Live in the '90s: Pop Culture Nation, Norm Macdonald revealed that he created the Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch purely as an excuse to do his Burt Reynolds impersonation. Macdonald also stated that Reynolds is a fan of the sketch and that there were talks to do a sketch where the real Reynolds would crash the game and punch out Macdonald. Reynolds would then play the remainder of the game, with his responses being even dumber than Macdonald's. However, Macdonald was fired from Saturday Night Live before that sketch could be written.
Both the host and contestants are played as caricatures of their real life personalities. Hammond said that, while his initial Connery impression was as accurate as possible, it would eventually morph into a "bastardization" of the actor, which audiences—and Hammond himself—found far more entertaining. Though Trebek shaved his trademark mustache in 2001, Ferrell retained it as long as he played the character, even in the twelfth sketch—Ferrell's last episode as a cast member—when a clean-shaven real Trebek made a cameo at the end.
At the end of almost every sketch (with one exception), all three celebrities have scores in the negative thousands of dollars, and in most cases, a humorous, often sexual, Final Jeopardy! punchline is delivered by Hammond's Sean Connery character.
Read more about this topic: Celebrity Jeopardy! (Saturday Night Live)
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