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Kieran Culkin's a Horse Racing Ska Singer in SNL's "The Jockey" Short
Kieran Culkin goes from Succession to Secretariat in the silly Saturday Night Live digital short, "The Jockey."
The Olympic Games and Saturday Night Live have one thing in common (well, two, if you count Tahiti surfing commentator Colin Jost): A big part of the fun is in the unpredictability of what's about to unfold on your screen. And while you'll only see Snoop Dogg making up new "Gin and Juice" lyrics to soundtrack a dressage horse's routine on NBC's Olympics coverage, SNL put forth its own horse-related musical number with "The Jockey" short starring Succession's Kieran Culkin.
The pretaped short made its debut during the Emmy-winning actor's November 6, 2021 SNL episode. In it, Culkin plays a skateboarder who turned into a horse jockey. He also happens to front a Mighty Mighty Bosstones/Reel Big Fish/Bowling for Soup-style ska band, and the sketch turns into a horns-driven music video halfway through.
When a jockey's injured right before a big race, horse owner (Mikey Day) scrambles to find a replacement. A stable hand (Chris Redd) tells him that he knows "someone great" for the job. That someone: A teenage skateboarder named Toby Bird, played by Culkin.
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Kieran Culkin sings in SNL's absurd "The Jockey" horse racing sketch
"Yup, that's me, riding a horse like a skateboard. You're probably wondering how I wound up here," says Toby in a voiceover, inexplicably backed by a ska soundtrack.
Toby's revealed to be standing on horseback — literally standing on a horse's back — as it gallops alongside the rest of the jockeys and their equine partners. "Well it's kind of a crazy story, and it goes a little something like this."
Toby, dressed in the '90s-style skater uniform of a long sleeve shirt under a short sleeve with a flannel tied around his waist, tells the story of how he went from a skate park to Churchill Down. Really, he sings it in ska-punk style.
So there I was, doing skate tricks at the park / then I jumped with too much force and I landed on a horse," Culkin's jockey exposits.
"Great Scott," Day's horse owner exclaims as he watches Toby's exploits on the track.
"If I lean right or left he'd follow my every move, and if I wanted him to go faster, I'd just give him a bag of chips," Toby continues, sharing a training routine that would make any Olympic equestrian competitor turn pale.
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"He can do an ollie and a backside 182, and if I ask him nicely he'd do a kick flip," he sang, as the horse indeed flipped mid-run. "Then we went to a track and we won our very first race — but afterwards he didn't stop, so we toured the United States!"
After conquering Mount Everest and winning races together, Toby sadly has to leave his horse behind (his new college has a strict "NO HORSES ALLOWED" policy). As he sing-wonders whether the horse's new guardians will "turn him into glue," the startled stallion throws him off, and the crowd gasps in horror.
"That pretty much sums it up. That's how I won the Kentucky Derby! And wouldn't you know it, they even made a video game about my life: Toby Bird's Pro Jockey," Toby says as the cover of the Tony Hawk-esque game flashes onscreen. "Not bad for a guy who died later that day. Not bad at all."
The Olympics' equestrian events have never been this wild (and thank goodness for that).
