We’ve Been Watching a Famous ‘SNL’ Sketch the Wrong Way for Years

Back in the ‘90s, Saturday Night Live served up a number of hugely memorable commercial parodies, from “Big Brawn” to “Oops! I Crapped My Pants.” These fake ads have become so iconic that a prop from the “Colon Blow” ad was appraised at $3,500 by the creeps on Pawn Stars.

Then there was “Schmitts Gay,” a bogus beer commercial in which Adam Sandler and Chris Farley enjoy a couple of cold ones at a fantastical pool party full of well-endowed hot guys. It could be criticized today for scoring laughs from the idea of men sexualizing other men, but the ultimate point, it seems, was to illustrate the hypocrisy of actual beer commercials, which gleefully commodified women’s bodies but never dared to venture outside of the heterosexual male gaze. 

The Advocate noted that the sketch felt “more open-minded than many of its ilk,” and it was nice to see Farley and Sandler play two gay characters as they would straight characters: as “dumb, horny bros.” In fact, Pride.com called it “the best ‘90s television commercial that never actually existed.”

But it turns out that a lot of us may have never seen this ad in the way it was intended — or, rather, we’ve never heard it the way it was intended. 

The sketch’s writer, Robert Smigel, recently shared the video on social media, simply because it had the “original music.”

That’s right, when the sketch first aired back in 1991, the soundtrack consisted of Van Halen’s “Beautiful Girls” (with a little bit of “D.O.A.” at the very beginning). But if you only caught the sketch in reruns, or in compilations like The Best of Adam Sandler, then the Van Halen tunes were replaced with more generic, affordable electric guitar riffs — a change that has caused some SNL fans to question their own sanity. 

Of course, “Schmitt’s Gay” is far from the only SNL segment to be hampered by music rights issues. Even aside from the musical performances, a lot of sketches have been sidelined because the song licensing has lapsed. As composer Marc Shaiman pointed out on Instagram, Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks’ Sweeney Sisters sketches (in which he played piano) never get rerun because of the music rights. 

And the “Roxbury Guys” sketches have been similarly dumped, seemingly because NBC can’t work out a deal with the owners of “What Is Love?” by Haddaway. If you want to see those sketches, you’ll have to watch YouTube videos with a picture quality resembling a bootleg of the Zapruder film shot through a whiskey bottle. 

So at least “Schmitt’s Gay” is available to watch at all. But the addition of Van Halen, icons of ‘80s cock rock, undoubtedly adds a whole other layer of credibility to the fake commercial. 

Couldn’t Lorne Michaels just sell one of his properties and pay to restore these sketches?