The 5 Biggest Live Mistakes in ‘SNL’ History
If you’re Jimmy Fallon or Horatio Sanz, Saturday Night Live screwups are a dime a dozen. But forget not being able to keep a straight face. When you’re doing live television, other things can — and do — go wrong, from uncontrollable animals to high-flying theatrics gone haywire.
Here are five times that SNL sketches went sideways — and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it…
Massive Head Wound Harry
When W.C. Fields said, “Never work with children or animals,” he was somehow predicting Massive Head Wound Harry, a sketch in which a dog decides to take comedy into its own paws.
The plan was always for the pooch to lick Harry’s unfortunate wound, but it wasn’t supposed to devour Dana Carvey’s head. The dog was so ravenous for the fake injury that Carvey got into a tug-of-war to keep it attached to his noggin. “They put more of the Gerber’s meat baby food on the prosthetic, and they didn’t feed the dog for dinner,” Carvey told Rachel Dratch on the Fly on the Wall podcast. The reason? Blame Rob Schneider, who really wanted the dog to go crazy on the air.
Mission accomplished, Rob.
Inside the Beltway
Aidy Bryant was the straight man in this sketch, “not a punchline in the bunch,” she told Jimmy Fallon. But she got the biggest laugh when a crew member appeared in the sketch mid-scene. “Basically, we were doing this sketch where it was like flashbacks to old clips,” she said. “But instead of playing actual clips, we would do it live. So they would play a little package. We would change our jackets, change our hair as fast as we could, and our dressers would come in and change us.”
The sketch got rewritten between dress rehearsal and the actual show so it’s hard to point fingers when Aidy’s dresser “walked in while the camera was on me. And I was looking in the monitor being like, ‘That’s Audrey.’” (Check out the mishap at the 4:40 mark.)
Bennett Brauer
Chris Farley’s character was a semi-regular on Weekend Update, calling attention to his own “faults” through an “extensive” use of “air-quotes.”
The big payoff on this March 1994 installment was supposed to be Brauer soaring above the stage like Peter Pan. “I’m flying, I’m flying,” exclaimed Brauer. But “I’m hovering, I’m hovering” would have been more accurate dialogue — Farley’s wires got tangled in the lighting rig.
Kevin Nealon rushed to the rescue, working to untangle the wires that left Farley dangling on live television. Several pairs of hands appear on the edge of the Weekend Update backdrop, frantically trying to free Farley as he ad-libbed a frustrated “I have a weight problem, Kevin!”
It took a village, but Farley finally took off into the wild blue yonder with an ecstatic “What the hell!”
Once the audience finished applauding, Nealon used his own air-quotes to observe, “Maybe the cables ‘didn’t clear the lights,’ ladies and gentlemen.”
Extremely Stupid
While Candice Bergen broke character during this sketch with Gilda Radner, it wasn’t because it was so funny. It was because she forgot who she was, calling Gilda “Fern” even though that was the name of her own character. She finally called Radner “whatever your name was supposed to be.” The irony: Bergen, the alleged smart one in the sketch, was accusing “Fern” of not being too bright.
“Gilda, of course, handled it beautifully,” Bergen says in SNL oral history Live From New York.
In fact, Radner made a meal of Bergen’s mistake. “You know,” Gilda ad-libbed with a wicked grin, “we can’t all be brainy like Fern here.” Bergen practically fell off the couch in hysterics.
Samurai Stockbroker
Swing a samurai sword on live television? Better be prepared for blood. “In ‘Samurai Stockbroker,’ (Belushi) cut my head open,” said host Buck Henry in Live From New York. “But it was really my fault; I leaned in at the wrong time. And I bled all over the set. It was a very amusing moment.”
Henry had to wear a huge bandage on his head for the rest of the show, proof that the show was indeed live. In a show of solidarity, Chevy Chase appeared on Weekend Update with a bandage on his face as well. Meanwhile, Jane Curtin came out with her arm in a sling. “As if the whole show caught a virus,” marveled Henry. “The genius of Saturday Night Live, it seems to me, is encapsulated in that event.”
