5 Ways Men Have Become the SNL Caveman Lawyer

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Omigods!

5 min readDec 24, 2019

In the early 1990s, Phil Hartman lit up SNL with his Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer skit.

The shtick was that scientists discovered “Keyrock” in a sheet of ice, thawed him out, and introduced him to American society.

Keyrock wasn’t content to just ride around in cars and eat fast food, though.

Nope!

Mr. Shag Hair went off and became a gol’ darn lawyer … and hilarity ensued.

Week after week, Keyrock would present his clients’ cases, couched in his own feigned misunderstandings of this strange new world that frightened and confused him.

We laughed.

We laughed at the people Keyrock was jobbing.

We laughed at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Then we went about our lives, confident in our own modernity and sophistication.

But … truth is … time catches up to all of us. Especially men — we can be sort of obtuse.

Here, then, are five ways modern men have become the SNL caveman lawyer.

Cro-Magnon

A funny thing happens to men as we get older.

Yes, fat.

And, yes, hair — gone from there, added to there.

But funnier than all that is our collective forehead.

We’re riding along in the car one day when we look in our rear-view mirror to fix our remaining wisps of hair, and … BAM! … sunlight flashes off a big, bony ridge over our eyes.

Hey, wasn’t that smooth before? Where did that speed bump come from?

More than one woman has pointed out my own Cro-Magnon, and I really, really appreciate it.

Hadn’t noticed. So, thanks.

We’d Kill for the Hair

And speaking of hair, remember how ridiculous Keyrock’s locks seemed back in the 1990s?

What sort of neanderthal would walk around with that shaggy, spiky mess? And what sort of woman would date a dude with that sort of mop?

Yeah, well, it’s all looking pretty good these days, huh?

I mean, you offer me a full head of hair, and I’ll say yes before you can scratch the first follicle.

I don’t care if it’s yarn or shag carpet or Astroturf … as long as it grows out of my head and I can cut it, I’m in.

So, yeah, I’ll take the Huey Lewis caveman do all day long.

Magic Voices

Right, I get it.

You’re reading this on a computer or a tablet or a phone

We’re modern men, so we get all this tech stuff.

But, c’mon … who you trying to fool?

It’s pretty freaky that you can carry around the entirety of the world’s knowledge in your pocket, right?

And it’s completely disheartening when you sit back and realize that about 95% of that knowledge consists of what something called a PewDiePie has been up to in the last, oh, hour or so.

Worst of the lot, all the people who have the most potential and desire to harass you are there in your pocket, too. And lord help you if you don’t answer or take more than 30 seconds to return a text.

Yes, my friend, there are magic voices all around you these days, and they’re mostly of the black magic variety.

Tech Jobs

And dammit if most of us haven’t found our way into jobs that require even more connection to those magic voice devices.

We write emails and sit through video-conferenced phone calls and run software that do jobs our mothers or fathers or teachers did a couple of generations ago.

If we’re lucky, the tech won’t eat us up while we fumble to get our display to show on the projector screen at that big meeting.

“I’m just a simple caveman,” you explain.

The lady at the head of the table rolls her eyes.

Your boss frowns. It’s the burritos he ate for breakfast, but he knows you’re floundering.

And the magic voices chirp in your ears, because they know you’re …