‘Saturday Night Live’s Most Tasteless Sketch Featured Footage of Real-Life Corpses
Warning: This article contains descriptions of self-harm.
Saturday Night Live has undoubtedly aired a number of sketches that verged on tastelessness, up to and including the time Oscar-winner Tom Hanks laid down a groovy track about how he doesn’t want anyone to mutilate his junk. Or the sketch in which Prince Charles gets transmogrified into a tampon. And the less said about “Canteen Boy” the better.
Far surpassing those sketches in terms of questionable taste, SNL arguably crossed a big line back in 1997 during an episode hosted by Rob Lowe, with musical guests The Spice Girls.
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Normally, an episode featuring the villain from Wayne’s World and the girl group who gave us “Wannabe” would be a decidedly lighthearted affair. But right from the jump, the show decided to wade into controversial waters, with a cold open focused on the Heaven’s Gate death cult.
Just two weeks before the episode aired, cult leader Marshall Applewhite and his 39 followers participated in a mass suicide ritual, drinking “a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka.” Why? Because he promised them that an “an extraterrestrial spacecraft” would take them to the “kingdom of heaven” in the form of an alien planet he called “The Next Level.”
So SNL kicked the show off with a sketch in which Ted Koppel (Darrell Hammond) speaks with Applewhite via satellite. It turns out that the cult leader, played by Will Ferrell, was totally right, and he and all of his followers were happily living it up on an alien ship. Although he did admit to one regret: “the castration thing.”
Again, the Heaven’s Gate incident was unquestionably an abject tragedy. The premise might be darkly humorous in theory, but it’s wild that SNL decided to air a sketch in which recent suicide victims are seen partying with an alien named “Zantar.” At one point, Koppell even tells Applewhite, “This whole killing yourself thing has really turned out to be a home run for you.”
While that sketch was iffy at best, it somehow wasn’t the most horrifying Heaven’s Gate-themed sketch of the show.
After Lowe’s monologue, audiences were treated to a commercial parody, but instead of a wacky fake product like “Oops! I Crapped My Pants” or “Colon Blow,” we got footage of the real Marshall Applewhite, and what certainly appeared to be genuine photographs of the bodies of the Heaven’s Gate victims, who were famously all wearing Nike sneakers at the time of their deaths.
The punchline? It’s an ad for Keds, “shoes worn by level-headed Christians on their journey into their next life.”
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In retrospect, it’s pretty galling that SNL put actual images of real-life corpses on TV, sandwiched between the star of St. Elmo’s Fire making Michael Dukakis jokes and Jim Breuer doing his Joe Pesci impression.
While the photographs may have been very familiar to viewers at the time, seeing as they were featured prominently on news programs, repurposing them for a comedy show after only 14 days feels both gross and exploitative.
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