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Saturday Night Live has never been afraid to tell controversial jokes about pop culture, politics, or really anything; however, there have been times throughout the show's nearly 50 seasons when some of those sketches or punchlines landed flat. Sometimes, something on the show would be so offensive, thousands of viewers would send in complaints.
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Saturday Night Live has never been afraid to be controversial
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In fact, since the very beginning, controversy has been a big part of the show's brand
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But over the nearly 50 years they've been on the air, some of those controversies have become bigger
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than the show intended, resulting in pulled sketches, public apologies, and permanent guest bans
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So, today we're taking a look at the biggest controversies in the history of Saturday Night Live
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This may be pre-recorded, but you can pretend it's live if you'd like
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You couldn't ask for a better last musical guest of the 1970s than David Bowie
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Viewers were psyched, but behind the scenes, Bowie was annoyed by NBC's decision to censor
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a verse in his song, Boys Keep Swinging, which says, When you're a boy, other boys check you out
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Not being the kind of guy who enjoyed faceless TV executives meddling with his art, Bowie
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took action. While performing the song, he wore what can only be described as a giant marionette suit
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over the front of his body. At the end of the song, what appeared to be a giant, uh, member, but was actually just a rolled up party blower, emerged from the marionette's pants and began flailing around
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We imagine at that point, NBC wished it had just left well enough alone
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Led by Lee Ving, the guy who played Mr. Body in Clue, the punk band Fear was famous for their wild live shows where they would attack their own audience with sexist and homophobic slurs
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John Belushi was a big fan, and he pulled some strings to make them the musical guests for the Halloween episode of 1981
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Ving took the opportunity to taunt the New York crowd by saying, It's great to be in New Jersey, and later chanting, New York sucks
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The band's set was cut short after a mosh pit on stage got out of control, but the real damage came after the cameras shut off
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when Fear and their fans reportedly caused $200,000 worth of damage to the studio
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Surprising no one, the band was permanently banned from SNL. It may seem silly now, but on October 15th, 1988, SNL's Nude Beach skit, written by then-SNL writer Conan O'Brien and featuring host Matthew Broderick, was hella controversial
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Why? Well, the skit found Broderick visiting his first nude beach with a friend
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After meeting some fellow beachgoers, the men comment on the size of Broderick's member, ultimately using the word penis over 40 times in the four-minute sketch, an average of more than once every six seconds
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That's a lot of wang. The skit generated thousands of written complaints at the time it aired
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However, unlike some of the other segments in this episode, the sketch is still easy to find online
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NBC apparently didn feel the need to hide this nude beach from the public Back in the 1990s standup comic Andrew Dice Clay was white and at the top of his fame But his material was controversial
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Clay portrayed a misogynistic, homophobic jerk on stage. But his critics argued it was difficult to tell whether he was truly playing a character
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or just engaging in hate speech. The fact that he was hosting SNL on May 12, 1990
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created a backlash even before the episode aired. Cast member Nora Dunn decided she didn't want to engage with Clay's comedy
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whether it was a character or not, and she refused to appear in the episode. Dunn's decision was met with both support and derision
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but NBC at least partly shared her concerns. The network required a rare five- to seven-second delay on the live program
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just in case the Dice Man went off script. But to his credit, Dice was a game host
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and he performed without incident, poking fun at both his image and the controversy
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Easily the biggest controversy to ever befall SNL came on October 3, 1992
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Sinead O'Connor was the musical guest, and at the last moment, before dress rehearsal
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she announced that rather than her originally planned set, she instead wanted to sing an a cappella version of Bob Marley's War
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Her goal, she said, was to bring attention to child abuse, so she asked that a camera zoom in on her hands at the end of the performance
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to show a photograph of children. Dress rehearsal went smoothly, and the ending photo packed an emotional punch
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When the time came for the live show, the crew followed the same routine
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But this time, O'Connor didn't have a photo of children. This time, she held a photo of Pope John Paul II
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She then tore up the photo while saying, fight the real enemy. No one applauded, and even backstage, O'Connor later recounted that everyone
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including her manager, had fled in order to avoid her. On December 5th, 1992, during the popular Wayne's World sketch
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Mike Myers and Dana Carvey presented a list of the most exciting things about Bill Clinton winning the presidential election
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Among those was the president's 12-year-old daughter, Chelsea, whom they described as a babe in waiting
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It was weird. The backlash was swift, and the inappropriate joke was edited out of the show's rebroadcasts
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Even today, the clip of the joke is currently unavailable in NBC's vault of SNL footage
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As a comic who wasn't afraid to push the limits of good taste
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Martin Lawrence wasn't the guy you really wanted going off script. That, however, didn't stop him from deciding to try out some new jokes
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during the taping of his SNL monologue on February 19, 1994. The new material was mostly about John Bobbitt
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whose unique assault by his wife Lorena made him common fodder for late hosts at the time The rest of Lawrence routine however was about his opinions on feminine hygiene
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which went over less well. The worst parts of the monologue were edited out of repeats
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and replaced with an on-screen summary of what was said. Lawrence has never been invited back
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In a moment that would live in YouTube infamy forever after, Oscar winner Adrian Brody spontaneously donned fake dreadlocks and attempted to speak Jamaican
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Patois when introducing the musical guest reggae singer Sean Paul on the May 10th 2003 episode of
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SNL. It's what the kids call cringe. Brody said things like respect all respect my auntie respect
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all aspect respect me neck respect me knees big up Jamaica massive big up Kingston massive and no
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I'm not going to do the voice. The cast and crew could only watch in embarrassment
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and Brody, not surprisingly, hasn't been back to host since. Life moves pretty fast
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For example, on October 23, 2004, musical guest Ashley Simpson sang her first song, Pieces of Me
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And it went well. Her second song, however, was a different story. Simpson was set to perform her song, Autobiography
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but instead the music for Pieces of Me came over the speakers once again. Her band tried to recover by quickly shifting to pieces of me
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but then Simpson's pre-recorded voice also came through the speakers, and she obviously wasn't singing
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leaving the audience wondering what in the Milli Vanilli was going on
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Clearly embarrassed, Simpson did a little jig and then walked off stage
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The moment received huge press coverage, and though Simpson insisted a doctor had instructed her not to sing due to a throat issue
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her musical career never fully recovered. Jokes at the expense of people with disabilities used to be fairly common on television
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But by 2007, that had rightly gone out of style, for the most part
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But on February 24th of that year, SNL aired a sketch in which a character played by Bill Hader
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made a bizarre, off-color comment about his father, saying, I remember we had this one great day at the park. We just had so much fun
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He was running in the grass and chasing squirrels. They had this fountain, and we threw pennies in it for hours
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So great. It was the first day that I ever thought to myself, I Have a Dad and not I Have a Dad with Down Syndrome. The audience laughed, but viewers at
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home quickly took offense, and the CEO and chair of the National Down Syndrome Society
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ultimately drafted a letter to producer Lorne Michaels excoriating him for the sketch With the possible exception of a certain Oscar performance it rarely a good idea for white performers to work in blackface
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as the practice has a long history steeped in racism. Nonetheless, on the March 11, 2000 episode of SNL
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Jimmy Fallon donned dark makeup to impersonate his friend and fellow cast member, Chris Rock
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The sketch didn't make any major waves when it aired, but backlash arose in 2020 after the video resurfaced online. Fallon, by then the host
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of The Tonight Show, dedicated an episode of his show to apologizing for the incident
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However, he has yet to apologize for the movie Taxi. When SNL announced Kanye West as their musical guest for the episode of September 29, 2018
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some people assumed that the famously tempestuous star might stir up some controversy. Those people
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were correct. West refused to remove his pro-Trump MAGA hat, even after the crew specifically asked
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him to take it off. Then, after one of his songs and during a commercial break, he remained on
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stage and gave a pro-Trump speech, which drew boos from the audience. He then gave a baffling
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performance dressed as a water bottle. All in all, some pretty strange stuff, even for Kanye
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On the episode of October 7th, SNL decided to poke some fun at a well-known series of
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SafeLight commercials by reimagining the helpful windshield repair technicians as top-shelf creeps
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The sketch featured Beck Bennett as a SafeLight technician, purposefully breaking a customer's windshield in order to hit on her teenage daughter
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Audiences were generally unenthused, and SafeLight was understandably more than a little upset
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NBC did its best to scrub the video from the internet and replace the segment in reruns with a previously unaired sketch
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Making fun of a person's disability isn't a great look for a comedian, but it's doubly bad when the person also happens to be a veteran
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During the Weekend Update segment of November 3rd, 2018, Pete Davidson played a character who was very uninformed about the then-upcoming election
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In response to a photo of the congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw, who wears an eyepatch
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Davidson joked, You may be surprised to hear that he's a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno movie
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I'm sorry, I know he lost his eye in war or whatever. In the comedian's defense, he was playing an ignorant character
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and the joke was meant to be on him. But the lost his eye in war or whatever comment
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was a bridge too far for most viewers because Crenshaw is a Navy veteran
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who lost his eye in an explosion while serving in Afghanistan. It didn't sit well with many
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and SNL quickly ran damage control by inviting Crenshaw on the show the following week
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to poke fun at Davidson and bury the hatchet