The Schoeners

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Fred Armisen (left) and Maya Rudolph as the Schoeners
Fred Armisen (left) and Maya Rudolph as the Schoeners

The Schoeners, also known as the Art Dealers, is a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live. It features Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph as Nuni and Nooni Schoener, respectively. and in one episode Will Ferrell played their son. It also features Chris Parnell as Tato, their very strange "maid", and later Andy Samberg as a similar character.

The Schoeners are quirky and irritatingly avant-garde art dealers who always have strange, post-modern furniture in their home, such as (at various times) a very wet chair in the shape of a tongue, a chair made of hair, a chair made of toast, and a chair that never stops slowly spinning. They act like it's normal furniture, and are often baffled by observers' confusion at it. If a visitor asks to use the bathroom, he or she usually encounters another oddity. On one occasion, a visitor was directed to use a bathroom that had glass walls and was visually exposed to the living room. A writer for Architectural Digest was handed a funnel connected to a suction hose while the Schoeners donned privacy glasses.

Nuni and Nooni speak with accents, but their place of origin has never been identified. Also, the Schoeners act as though having roughly the same name is very normal; they try to emphasize a difference between the names' pronunciations that is not evident to the visitor or the audience. Mrs. Schoener once told visitors that they must "spread [their] buttcheeks" when they say her name. The Schoeners also have a son and daughter, both named Nuni, and played by Will Ferrell and Natalie Portman, respectively; each has appeared once. When their various visitors (including neighbors, art professionals, or the new significant other of one of their children) meet them, they can't pronounce the Schoeners' names correctly. The visitors usually have common American names such as Jeff or Susan, which the Schoeners are terribly unable to pronounce correctly, spouting random attempts at pronunciation that sound nothing like the actual names. They once misinterpreted "Pamela" as "Baronon" and "Harpelo", at another time, they attempted to pronounce "Jeff" as "Gwarf", or "Doyland", and at yet another time, they mispronounced "Susan" as "Suizu" and "Shoeshine."

The sketches often feature Tato bringing them what might seem like normal food but in very odd ways of eating it or preparing it; such as rice ground up into a paste, a "meat" capsule, or melted blueberry ice-cream that was fed by Tato to the Nunis via a tube that Tato would suck the ice-cream into, and then blow out into the Nuni's mouths, with little success. The new servant once appeared to feed cotton candy to the Schoeners and their visitors, but the cotton candy was placed on his person in place of his hair, both on top of his head and on his body.

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