5 ‘SNL’ Sketches that Never Saw the Light of Day
Censors are played for comic relief in Saturday Night, the new movie detailing SNL’s early days. Hey, how was she supposed to know what “golden shower” meant?
But while the show’s writers snuck a lot of questionable content past the gatekeepers, they weren’t always successful. Here are five sketches that were rehearsed but never aired — mostly because good taste prevailed…
Jesus of Nashville
When NBC produced a 1970s mini-series called Jesus of Nazareth, SNL writers came up with their version: Jesus of Nashville. In the SNL script compilation book Saturday Night Live, a scribble indicates it was written by J.D. and J.B. — James Downey and… John Belushi?
The book version of the script features a CENSORED stamp with a large red cross “crossing out” the offending words. If the fake promo had run, Dan Aykroyd would have played the eponymous savior, singing this ditty:
I got a tiger by the tail it’s plain to see
I won’t be much when you get through with me
Well, I’m a losin’ weight and a turnin’ mighty pale
Looks like I got a tiger by the tail
Cue Don Pardo: “Tomorrow night, a unique television event: Jesus of Nashville.”
Placenta Helper
“Placenta Helper,” a commercial spoof that allowed busy housewives to stretch the family budget by turning afterbirth into a delicious dinner, has stayed fresh in the mind of writer Al Franken. When I interviewed him last year, he was able to recite the bit from memory, extolling the virtues of Placenta Romanoff — “a zesty blend of cheeses makes for the zingy sauce that Russian czars commanded at palace feasts.”
The Last 10 Days in Silverman’s Bunker
Writer Michael O’Donoghue was responsible for many of SNL’s most outrageous sketches, as well as several others that never saw the light of day. The one that got him fired was a sketch that portrayed beleaguered NBC head Fred Silverman as Hitler hiding in his bunker. After the bit was scrapped from the show, he complained to the press about “what a bunch of morons everybody was up there, how they couldn’t see the brilliance of this piece,” according to SNL writer Eliot Wald.
NBC fired O’Donoghue for writing the sketch, although Wald argues it was O’Donoghue’s way of submitting his resignation letter.
Stunt Puppy
In the early days of SNL, the show aired a sketch called “Stunt Baby.” Bill Murray played a movie director, calling in Stunt Baby to endure acts of physical violence:
“Okay, all right baby, in this scene, you’re crying, okay? It’s driving Howard crazy. Now Howard’s gonna slug you three or four times, okay? Now he’s gonna hit you — he’s gonna really hit you, okay? Yeah, there’s nothin’ faker than a bogus punch, all right?”
Oof. “I heard they got more mail protesting ‘Stunt Baby’ than anything else they’d done up to that time,” host Buck Henry, who played the abusive Howard, has explained. “I asked them to do ‘Stunt Puppy,” which was equally rude.”
Understandably, the censors said no.
The Giving Tree
When Donald Trump hosted in 2016, a sketch based on The Giving Tree made it to dress rehearsal before getting cut. The tree was giving its fruit to a boy and a second tree, played by Trump, berated his neighbor: “You’re a sucker, you’re getting played, you should not be giving things to these people.”
“Trump had to stand in a tree with his face looking out of the hole of this tree, and he did not like that,” SNL writer Bryan Tucker told The Huffington Post. “I don’t think he enjoyed looking like a tree. He was not into it and it showed, and it did not get a lot of laughs.