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Dateline: The Mystery of the Chopped Up Guy
SKETCH-O-VISION
A VERY GOOD USE OF YOUR TIME.
The setup
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The premise
Here’s the bit.
Bill Hader's Keith Morrison presents a Dateline special on the death of fisherman Elroy Valentine, though drifter Diego Pops admitted to the killing long before the cameras arrived. Determined to fill the hour anyway, Morrison interviews the man who found a severed arm, a coroner who will not let him see the body, Elroy's crude widow Martha and the cheerfully unrepentant Diego, reacting to every gruesome detail with barely hidden delight. Along the way he keeps recycling the program's single photo of Diego in sillier and sillier settings, and he signs off with a disturbing memory from his own childhood.
The funny people
Meet the cast. 6
Say it with us
Highly quotable.
Kill like a comedian at the Apollo?
Because it's Dateline, there's only one photo to use.
I must paint you.
A little extra
Notes from the archive.
This was Bill Hader's fourth appearance as Keith Morrison on SNL and his third Dateline sketch, following installments in November 2008 and March 2009.
Script
Automatically generated script; wording may contain errors. Speaker labels are inferred.
- 00:02
Speaker 1
Next on Naked, a Keith Morrison special investigation. Real-life crimes and stories of real people in bad situations.
- 00:10
Keith Morrison
Elroy Valentine was an ordinary man who went out one day to catch a bass. But instead, he caught a case of murder. It's the mystery of the chopped-up guy.
- 00:22
Witness
I was walking along the lake one morning, and I saw something floating on the surface.
- 00:27
Keith Morrison
Ah. Was it Wilson the volleyball?
- 00:32
Witness
No, it-it was an arm.
- 00:33
Keith Morrison
Oh. Did he slap you five?
- 00:39
Witness
No, it-it was a dead arm from a dead body.
- 00:42
Keith Morrison
Oh, that's terrible.
- 00:47
Witness
You seem kind of psyched.
- 00:49
Keith Morrison
No, I'm bummed. But I wasn't bummed. I was stoked. Police suspected a local drifter named Diego Pops. Que pasa, Diego? Tell me, what happened?
- 01:06
Diego Pops
What can I say? I like to kill.
- 01:08
Keith Morrison
Kill like a comedian at the Apollo?
- 01:12
Diego Pops
No, like murder. So I waited for Elroy, and when I saw him, I took a machete.
- 01:21
Keith Morrison
Oh, you gotta.
- 01:23
Diego Pops
And I hacked him to death. And I'm the one who did it.
- 01:26
Keith Morrison
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 01:31
Keith Morrison
Diego confessed, but let's ignore that. because this is an hour show so we've got to stretch this out because it's dayline there's only one photo to use there it is again floating downward next we talked to the coroner
- 01:49
Coroner
I did the autopsy
- 01:51
Keith Morrison
describe stuff
- 01:55
Coroner
well the victim had been bludgeoned and dismembered
- 01:58
Keith Morrison
uh-huh
- 01:59
Coroner
normally in murders this severe we suspect a crime of passion.
- 02:05
Keith Morrison
Gah, gah, ooh-rah-rah. Can I see the body?
- 02:12
Coroner
No.
- 02:13
Keith Morrison
Wah, baby sad. But why would someone want to kill Elroy Valentine? Diego said he was having an affair with Elroy's beautiful wife, Marfa. But I met Marfa, and beautiful should have sarcastic quotes around them. Martha, you're an unattractive woman. Why would a man kill for you?
- 02:41
Martha Valentine
I told Diego if he was a real man, he would get an axe.
- 02:46
Keith Morrison
Uh-huh.
- 02:48
Martha Valentine
And chop up my husband.
- 02:50
Keith Morrison
Oh, no.
- 02:53
Martha Valentine
And then I would let him stick his dong right up in my dump hole.
- 03:00
Keith Morrison
I must paint you. But some questions still remain. Like, how many more times can we use that photo? Maybe we'll put him on a roller coaster. Maybe we'll send him to Paris. Or maybe we'll make him friends with Big George Ford. Yeah. All right, Diego, how'd you kill him?
- 03:30
Diego Pops
I knocked him to the ground,
- 03:32
Keith Morrison
Yeah,
- 03:32
Diego Pops
but then he grabbed my ankle.
- 03:33
Keith Morrison
Did you say Lego, my Lego?
- 03:37
Diego Pops
No. Anyway, I dropped my machete, so I sawed his arms with my own keys.
- 03:44
Keith Morrison
Well, that's nuts. Tell me, did killing him get your rocks off?
- 03:49
Diego Pops
No. You know, I'm not weird like that.
- 03:52
Keith Morrison
Not even a little?
- 03:55
Diego Pops
Ah, what the heck, it got me off a little.
- 03:57
Keith Morrison
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
- 04:06
Keith Morrison
That's our show. For Dateline, I'm Keith Morrison. And when I was four years old, I saw a birthday clown drown in a pool. Where he just... flowed. Goodnight.
The rabbit hole continues
One more couldn’t hurt.
More from across the archive.
