Cheri Oteri couldn't stop her foot from tapping. The Saturday Night Live cast member was standing on a patio here, overlooking the smog-engulfed San Gabriel Valley, but her thoughts were on Arianna, the Spartan Spirit cheerleader she plays on the show.

As she talked, she began tapping, then stomping on the ground, all 5 feet of her. She moved to the left, then to the right. She swayed. She dipped. She became Arianna for a few moments.

Oteri, who teams with Will Ferrell - Craig in the skit - to form the cheerleader team, has put her stamp on the show, partly because the cheerleaders have become so popular with the audience. But the routine came about almost by happenstance. Two years ago, just before Oteri and Ferrell made their first appearances on the show, she and Ferrell were standing on the show's stage set.

''Will and I were improvising on the SNL stage before we even started the show, and I was just beating my feet on the stage. He started doing it, and we would both be real serious, but we started laughing at each other and said we should write a cheerleader scene,'' she said.

A couple weeks later Ferrell suggested they work on the cheerleader skit. They did but still weren't sure where it was going to go.

''We originally thought, how about this guy who joined the cheerleaders just to throw the girl up and cop a feel. I go, 'That's funny, but I don't know. I'm not comfortable - as much as I love you - copping a feel through the whole skit.' Where was that going to go? Then we just thought of these kids who didn't get on the squad, but they have to cheer,'' she said.

Cheerleaders came naturally to both actors, but for different reasons. Oteri had been a cheerleader in high school, and Ferrell had an odd fascination with them.

''I'd always watched those cheerleading championships on ESPN, which is like, 'The University of Tennessee Vols! Go Vols!' They could break their legs and still be smiling,'' he said. ''We thought it would be funny to spoof that in some way,'' he said.

It's even funnier that Ferrell is 13 inches taller than she is.

Fans come up to him in Spartan cheerleading outfits and ask that he perform the skit every week.

''We say, 'Well, no, we can't, because you'd hate us,' '' he said.

Ferrell had just dyed his hair black because he's started filming the first movie to be spun off a skit done by the current SNL cast. A Night at the Roxbury began filming July 21.

Which skit is that? Remember the two clueless, greasy guys who groove (or try to, anyway) to the song What Is Love? as they try to get into various nightclubs? They're called the Roxbury Guys, and the movie finds Ferrell and Chris Kattan, his partner in the skit, desperate to get into the Roxbury.

''They're very much into the club life. Their single quest in life is to get into the Roxbury. It doesn't turn out as well as they thought, and they blame each other,'' he said. The movie co-stars Chazz Palminteri, Richard Grieco, Dan Hedaya as Ferrell's dad, Loni Anderson as his mom and SNL cast member Molly Shannon as his girlfriend.

Guest hosts who can pull it off - including Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Alec Baldwin and Pamela Anderson Lee - get to become Roxbury Guys for a night.

This skit, too, came about almost by accident. Ferrell, Kattan and some others were in a Santa Monica nightclub when Ferrell noticed someone odd.

''I had seen this guy up against the wall kind of checking out the room, just kind of moving,'' he said, as his head began to bob and his leg began to move to an imaginary beat. ''I said to Chris, 'Hey, watch me.' I stood on one side of the guy and just basically mimicked what he was doing. Then Chris saw that and stood on the other side, and we performed for the group we were out with. The guy never noticed it.''
 
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