14 great Bob Odenkirk-centric ‘Mr. Show’ sketches

Long before Saul Goodman was even a speck in “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan’s eye, Bob Odenkirk was already a TV god. Along with fellow struggling comic David Cross, he launched, in 1995, the sketch comedy program “Mr. Show with Bob and David.” Despite low ratings and air times that were sometimes in the middle of the night, HBO kept it on the air for four seasons, as they sometimes do. But little by little the show’s cult fame grew, influencing the likes of “Tim and Eric,” while much of its cast (including Sarah Silverman, Jack Black, Paul F. Tompkins, Brian Posehn and SpongeBob Squarepants voice Tom Kenny, as well as Odenkirk and Cross themselves) went on to even bigger things.

Now that everyone knows him as a shyster lawyer — albeit a nicer, younger version of himself on the new “Better Call Saul” — it’s worth remembering that Bob Odenkirk is a sketch comedy chameleon. Want to surprise “Breaking Bad” heads with a clip of him as the laidback hype man of fake-’90s R&B duo Three Times One Minus One? And who does a better Robert Evans impersonation (as seen in “God’s Book-on-Tape,” towards the bottom)? No one. Here is a mere selection of some of the best Odenkirk-heavy “Mr. Show” sketches (warning: these are most of them, to some degree, NSFW):

Toenapper (Season 4, Episode 2):