Don Roy King | Swimming Instructor / 2013 [TV (SNL) episode]

he likes you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Roy King (director) Swimming Instructor / 2013 [5:30 minutes] [TV (SNL) episode]

 

The endless TV series Saturday Night Live has had so very many LGBTQ+ sketches, particularly under the directorship of Don Roy King, that it is sometimes difficult to know how to choose among them. If nothing else, one might argue that they constitute some of the best satires of the vast catalogue of satiric sketches that the television hit ever produced.

    In Swimming Instructor, a basically unexperienced would-be swimmer, Terry (Will Forte) goes in search of an Olympic gold by signing up with the supposedly legendary swimming instructor Doug Frangello (John C. Reilly), who has apparently taught many an Olympic athlete how to become a winner.

     What hasn’t previously come to light is that his method is not to get into the pool with the would-be swimmers, but to strap them on to the front of his body where, as he attempts to teach them the basic swimming maneuvers he also frots them with his own body, resulting in loads of pleasure for the overweight teacher and a great deal of disconcertion for his uncomfortable students. He explains that they will have a year of “dry-dock” training before he actually takes him into the water. As Doug comments during their go at the crawl stroke: “He likes you!” Soon after he pauses to adjust his penis.

     Escape is nearly impossible, since they are quite literally strapped in and trapped. No one explains why they might keep coming for more lessons.

     In this case, after a year of land training, we are told, Terry finally hit the pool where he sank immediately and lapsed into a coma. After 40 years, Terry came out of the coma and took the gold medal 2048 Coma survivors Olympic in Tel Aviv. Actually, it was third place, but that too was a “gold” medal.

     It’s hard to imagine how such an obvious expression of male-on-male sexuality might be received today. In the 1990s and the first two decades of this century things were seemingly much more open on TV than they are today.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).