So the folks out at Lions Gate sent me one of their growing number of DVD titles, The Best of Will Ferrell, celebrating some of the best sketches that Will Ferrell was involved in back in his Saturday Night Live days.  And thankfully, these are plenty of laugh-inducing bits, and sometimes, plenty of that awkward comedy that Ferrell made famous.

There’s no real plot synopsis here, if for no other reason that there’s no real plot here.  You’ll be getting a series of sketches that Ferrell made famous, including his George W. Bush impression, his Roxbury sketches, the “cowbell” sketch that’s actually made it to meme status, and plenty more.

See, back in the late nineties, the Farley-Spade era had pretty much disintegrated thanks to Chris Farley’s phenomenally drugged-out death.  And we were all starting to wonder what would replace it.

Will Ferrell was that replacement.

With Chris Kattan generally serving as his straightman, Ferrell went on to produce several years of exciting bits and big laughs, then moving on to do movies, many of which weren’t that funny.  But anyway, his Saturday Night Live years were some fantastically funny stuff, and you’ll see a lot of that here.

Most of the bits they chose, gratefully, are indeed pretty funny.  They’ve thrown in a couple of those great Saturday Night Live commercial parodies and a few montages of rapid-fire lesser Ferrell bits.  Sometimes, not even the actors can keep from laughing, and that has something of an alternating effect.  Sometimes it’s distracting, and sometimes it actually ends up making you laugh too.  At least, that’s what I got out of it.

And as an added bonus, you’ll also get a terrific history lesson about life in the late nineties.  From Sisqo’s Thong Song to pre-9 / 11 George Dubya, you’ll get a good long look at a lot of the things that made up the nineties into the early 2000s.  No, Celebrity Jeopardy wasn’t quite as easy as Saturday Night Live made it out to be, but it wasn’t too far off.

This ends up making Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell a fantastic combination of factors–a nostalgia frenzy for everyone who saw this stuff once way back when, a history lesson for those who haven’t, and an abundance of laughs for both, it may not be perfect, but it’s probably as close to the best of anything as Saturday Night Live can get.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell an eight out of ten for accomplishing a whole lot of different goals at the same time.