‘SNL’ Revisits Its Favorite Racists, Rapists and Murders in Its All-Time Worst Montage
If Saturday Night Live is going to air a montage of the most poorly aged jokes, costumes and celebrity hosts in Saturday Night Live history, they could at least have the guts to do it in TV-MA.
It’s an inevitable rule of comedy that, whenever the worst parts of the internet want to justify laughing at a D-tier racist joke, they always point to early-season SNL humor and its heavy use of stereotypes as evidence that comedy has always punched down, and criticizing contemporary comics for their being bigoted assholes is hypocritical for anyone who laughed at Bill Hader doing gay-face as Stefon on “Weekend Update.”
Yes, comedy from the past that’s viewed outside of its cultural context can come across as small-minded, and societal values change faster than SNL’s archivists can scrub sketches from streaming. But, for the most part, SNL has done a decent job of staying above these lowest-common-denominator discussions about so-called comedy “cancel culture” — until tonight.
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During SNL 50, Tom Hanks took the stage to solemnly declare that, though many past SNL sketches, characters, costumes and hosts look regrettable in retrospect, it is we, the audience, who are canceled — so let’s all laugh with O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake in the most shamelessly censored in memoriam in SNL history:
Look, if SNL wants to prove to the world that it pushes boundaries and doesn’t care who it offends by reminding us that they proudly invited O.J. Simpson to host long before they would fire Norm Macdonald for calling him a murderer, then, sure, the montage won over the comedy fans who miss the time when John Belushi pretending to be a person of a different race was enough of a premise for an SNL sketch. But, really, if you’re going to do a “here’s us at our worst” supercut, at least have the courage to go whole hog instead of censoring every word, wig and regrettably painted face you’re supposed to be rubbing in ours.
And, while SNL had no problem reminding everyone for the nth time tonight that they once made Simpson, Robert Blake, R. Kelly, P. Diddy and Jared Fogle appear funny and charismatic, the show hypocritically omitted its more contemporary controversial hosts from the hall of shame montage. Where were Donald Trump and his co-president Elon Musk in the mashup of monsters?
There’s also the issue of how the montage included the now-infamous “Chippendales Audition” sketch featuring Chris Farley, one which the late SNL giant’s friends have since criticized for how the show encouraged its audience to laugh at Farley instead of with him. Former SNL writer Bob Odenkirk has expressed his sheer hatred for the sketch, saying it was “fucking lame, weak bullshit. I can’t believe anyone liked it enough to put it on the show. Fuck that sketch. He never should have done it.”
Odenkirk claimed that ”Chippendales Audition” was disastrous for Farley’s fraught mental health, saying of his late friend, “He felt ugly, he didn’t feel attractive. He didn’t feel like people really wanted to be around him and that sketch kind of fed into that.”
Tonight, “Chippendales Audition” gave the SNL audience another opportunity to laugh at the late icon as the glib caption “Body Shaming” popped up under a clip of Farley’s furious gyrations, which pretty much sums up the montage. SNL hasn’t learned anything from these sketches, and it has nothing new to say about its relationship to the ever-shifting line in comedy, but, nevertheless, the laughs that were cheap 30 years ago are cheaper today, and, with more than three hours to kill, why not slap a pixelated photo of Jimmy Fallon in blackface on the screen and call it “comedy”?
Hell, it worked the first time.
