The One Note NBC Censors Had for ‘SNL’s ‘Sushi Glory Hole’ Digital Short

Thanks to Andy Samberg’s election season gig (playing Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff), Saturday Night Live recently aired its first “SNL Digital Short” in six years. The Lonely Island reunion (minus Jorma Taccone) found Samberg and Akiva Schaffer as chain-smoking ‘80s businessmen pitching a “Sushi Glory Hole” to a panel of confused/disgusted executives.

Where did the idea of using a public restroom’s anonymous sex cavity to deliver upscale Japanese seafood come from? On the most recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Samberg and Schaffer took a break from delving into their back catalog of sketches in order to unpack the recent music video. 

According to Samberg, Schaffer randomly said “Sushi Glory Hole” one day, and then just “kept saying it.” So they tried recording a version of the song with a different beat, but it didn’t end up working. Since they liked some of the lines, they tried it again with an entirely new beat, adding in the “hear me out” refrain which “just happened organically.” 

While they liked the revised version of the song, they didn’t want to pay for an “expensive” music video, which is what prompted Samberg to bring up the idea of SNL producing another “Digital Short,” since he was hanging around playing “Doug” every week anyway.

The sketch is obviously pretty racy, even for SNL. Despite the fact that the inventors of the Sushi Glory Hole have strict rules prohibiting “dicks” and “sex,” this is still a sketch in which cast members repeatedly crouch next to glory holes with their mouths wide open. And as Meyers pointed out, when the first piece of sushi emerges from the glory hole, it looks “just enough like it might be a penis” at first.

So did “Sushi Glory Hole” get any pushback from the censors? Schaffer revealed that NBC standards executive Betzy Torres was “delightful, honestly” but had one major issue with the sketch. In the version that aired, James Austin Johnson’s character orders a sake on his phone, prompting a hand holding a cup to poke through the hole.

But originally, the plan was to have the sake “shooting through (the hole) with a water gun” but this ended up making it look like “someone was pissing through the hole into his mouth.” So NBC nixed that idea, with Torres pointing out that SNL “airs in primetime on the West Coast now,” which Schaffer admitted was a “big difference.”

It wasn’t until 2017, after the Lonely Island guys had all left the show, that SNL began airing live on the West Coast. Previously, the taped live show aired in a later time slot. The network argued that the change would mean that audiences would be “in on the joke at the same time.”

But apparently they don’t want those jokes to include Super Soaker jets of fluid hitting someone’s gaping mouth in a bathroom stall.

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