Adam Sandler, David Spade and Chris Farley Wanted to ‘Beat the F*ck’ Out of a Reporter Who Trashed ‘SNL’

Saturday Night Live hasn’t always gotten the best reviews. Heck, the very first episode of the show was branded as a “tedious failure” by Variety. But while that judgment came and went with little fanfare, a later SNL write-up was so unflinchingly scathing that several cast members briefly considered physically attacking the guy who wrote it. 

On the most recent episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast, Dana Carvey and David Spade let slip that SNL’s upcoming 50th anniversary celebration will include a photo shoot for New York Magazine featuring the show’s alumni. And even though it’s nearly been 30 years, the subject of New York Magazine still brought up some unpleasant memories for Spade. “Who is the one we know we famously had the fight with back in the old days, we wanted to beat the guy up? Was that The New York Observer, or was it New York Magazine?” Spade questioned. “They came and stayed with us for a week, and we buddied up with a guy, and then he wrote a horrible article about it.”

It was indeed New York Magazine. In March 1995, they published “Comedy Isn’t Funny,” a notoriously brutal piece by writer Chris Smith that absolutely annihilated SNL’s already beleaguered 20th season. Smith had been granted “unfettered access to Studio 8H for weeks” but didn’t feel the need to play nice in his article, noting that the show that “once broke all the rules is now obsessed with maintaining its internal pecking order,” and claiming that writers “phone their agents regularly, begging to escape.”

He likened the state of SNL to “late-period Elvis — embarrassing and poignant.” He also spoke to bitter ex-cast members, one of whom anonymously argued that Lorne Michaels uses the “same techniques cults use — they keep you up for hours, they never let you know that you’re okay, and they always make you think that your spot could be taken at any moment by someone else.”

One of the tensest scenes in the article is a prolonged recap of an argument between Chris Farley and head writer Jim Downey over the comedic integrity of fart jokes. The squabble became so heated that Downey even slipped in a reference to recent allegations that Farley groped a female extra. 

Much of the article was pretty fair in retrospect; it criticized Michaels’ mind games, held the show accountable for wasting Janeane Garofalo in “dull, secondary wife and girlfriend roles,” spotlighted the problematic lack of diversity and blasted lazy homophobic sketches like “Gay Stripper Theater.”

But some folks at SNL were pissed, especially after spending so much time behind the scenes with Smith. And Farley had particular reason to be aggrieved considering that he posed for a photograph for the magazine’s cover. As the biography The Chris Farley Show suggested, it made Farley “the poster boy for the death of Saturday Night Live.”

In 2023, Spade told The Washington Post that Smith “wrote a shitty piece to get himself notoriety.” But Smith defended his reporting, telling the outlet that SNL “was not a happy place at the time.”

Now Spade has revealed that people were so upset, they openly discussed confronting, and even assaulting, the reporter — kind of like that one episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

“There was Adam and Farley and everyone was like, ‘Let’s go down there, let’s beat the fuck out of this (guy),’” Spade recalled. Meanwhile, Michaels allegedly responded: “No — if so, I’m looking the other way.” 

Thankfully, they never followed through on this plan, thus ensuring that the remainder of the season wouldn’t have to be broadcast live from a prison cell.