Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein's Monster

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein's Monster were a trio of characters on the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. Jon Lovitz portrayed Tonto, Kevin Nealon portrayed Tarzan, and Phil Hartman portrayed Frankenstein's Monster. The premise usually involved the three characters singing or performing some sort of holiday greeting in the pidgin English style previous portrayals of the characters had made famous (for example, the Christmas carol Joy to the World was rendered as "Joy to world/Lord is come/Earth receive king"). Another Christmas song was "Deck hall/bough holly," performed in a sing-song tone. Typically, Frankenstein would not actually enunciate any of the words, but would merely grunt, groan, and growl in time with the others. Occasionally he would become distressed and shout, "Fire bad!" at some point during the sketch. These sketches were usually very short (usually just the length of a few verses of the song) and typically took place in front of the band, with no set or props.