All Salute the Space Pants

Every once in a while, Saturday Night Live does a sketch that seems so incredibly dumb at first, but then gets more and more ridiculous until it becomes hilarious. When Peter Dinklage hosted SNL on April 2, he definitely landed in one of those sketches — and Gwen Stefani helped him out.

The sketch started out with the thinnest of setups: A character was in trouble for not paying the money he owed to some serious tough-guy types. The shakedown took place in a restaurant or club with a stage. Then Dinklage entered the scene, and he looked totally crazy: shiny silver jacket, blond bob wig, and space-print pants. (It was kind of the anti-Tyrion Lannister get-up.) He launched into a song — I guess you could call it a song, I mean — about his space pants, and it was so distracting that the money-extorting tough guys were too distracted to continue with the shakedown. The thing is: As silly as the space pants song was, after a while, it gets kind of catchy. (You really have to see it for yourself to get the full effect.) After a while, you can't help but want to salute the space pants yourself.

Just when it seemed like it couldn't get any crazier, Gwen Stefani came in, playing herself, with her own space shorts. And suddenly they looked awesome, and the song sounded even better, too.

The only thing the sketch didn't do was say where someone could pick up their own pair of space pants. Because now the song is stuck in my head, and I kind of want a pair of my own.

Image: Getty