10 guests who were never invited back on ‘Saturday Night Live’
The clue is in the name. Saturday Night Live is an American comedy program that airs live every Saturday night. The show is celebrating its 50th year on the air in 2025, and over the decades, it has become an American institution, keeping people laughing and launching the careers of the likes of Tina Fey, Andy Samberg, and Pete Davidson.
Despite having a recurring cast every week, one of the things that keeps SNL fresh are the alternating hosts and musical guests. These are usually A-listers who step in to perform songs and sketches alongside the cast. With such a varied amount of celebrities available to them, the show takes a different form every week and remains unpredictable despite 50 years on the air.
This unpredictability is usually a good thing, as viewers are met with something different every week that keeps them laughing. However, there are some instances where the guests step out of line and take advantage of the live format for reasons beyond what the showrunners would like. This could be to look cool, in an act of rebellion or because they were drunk. Regardless of the intention behind the act, a number of people have not been invited back to the show because of them.
Here, we will look at some of the musical and comedic guests who have performed on Saturday Night Live and did something that was deemed outrageous enough never to be invited back on.
‘Saturday Night Live’ guests who were never invited back
Elvis Costello
There has never been any doubt that Saturday Night Live is all filmed live. Usually, we are exposed to this through chuckles throughout sketches as actors fail to hold in their laughs. However, the live nature of the show is often exposed through more negative mediums. That’s exactly what happened when Elvis Costello was asked to play on SNL in 1977.
The show producers and his label both insisted that Costello had to play his biggest, most recent single, ‘Less Than Zero’. Costello wanted to play something else and resented that he was being forced to play a track he wasn’t happy with, so ten seconds into the song, he switched things up and did ‘Radio Radio’. He was banned as a result.
Sinead O’Connor
Sinead O’Connor’s appearance on SNL is often considered one of the most controversial in the show’s history. At the end of her performance, the singer left the onlooking public stunned as she tore up a photo of Pop John Paul II. Her reason for doing so was to draw attention to generations of sexual abuse of children within the Catholic church.
Religious groups were furious, and they took to the streets to destroy Sinead O’Connor’s albums. They also called local radio stations and demanded that O’Connor’s music be banned from the airwaves. SNL agreed with these demands, and they decided to ban her from ever returning to the stage at 30 Rock.
Rage Against the Machine
At what point does the fault lie with SNL? When a TV show books one of the most controversial and politically charged bands to perform on the same night as presidential nominee Steve Forbes, was there ever a world where the show wouldn’t be laced with controversy?
As a subtle protest during their first musical performance, Rage Against The Machine hung American flags upside down on the back of their amplifiers. This was an incredibly controversial move and one that saw them being escorted out of the building before they could play their next track.
Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa is an innovative musical mind, a big personality, and someone widely known for his dry sense of humour. When he was confirmed to host the show, many people thought he would fit in well as a comedic guest, but as the dress rehearsal went poorly, Zappa went out of his way to save his own skin during the live taping at the program’s expense.
He kept reminding the crowd that he was reading from cue cards and generally adopted an attitude that said, “I don’t care; I’m too cool.” This made for incredibly awkward viewing and a poorly rated episode of SNL. Zappa was banned from the show afterwards and never invited back.
Fear
When Fear took to the stage in 1981 for their musical spot on SNL, never has a performance felt quite as chaotic and terrifying. John Belushi, who was hosting that week and wanted the band to play, was keen on making the gig as authentic as possible, which he did by getting a group of hardcore fans in the front row.
The audience was given a glimpse at how insane Fear’s club shows were as they stormed the stage and started a riot throughout the song. The show was completely unhinged, and SNL had to be cut from the air when one fan grabbed a mic and screamed “fuck.” Suffice to say, they were never invited back.
The Replacements
It seems that The Replacements were always adamant about causing carnage the minute they got to 30 Rock Studios. While nudity, excessive drinking, cursing on-air and trashing your hotel room would all be enough to receive a ban from the show, The Replacements managed to do all three.
As a result of their poor behaviour, the duo was asked never to return to SNL; however, they made such a bad name for themselves after appearing on the show that it wasn’t just SNL that banned them, but all of NBC forbade them from screentime for the next 30 years.
Kanye West
Kanye West has always been a man of controversy, but in the last decade or so, that controversy has shifted from one that sees him brag about being the best to one that sprouts hateful opinions and glorifies Hitler. He had already performed on SNL by the time his 2018 appearance came around, but this was the show that saw the studio ban him from appearing on the program again.
He took to the stage wearing a MAGA hat and spent his time rambling about Donald Trump. He walked around the stage, criticising mainstream media to the boos of the crowd. The host at the time, Adam Driver, as well as several SNL cast members, all walked away from West as he delivered his speech.
Cypress Hill
Kanye West wasn’t the only rapper banned from the prime-time Saturday night entertainment show, though. Cypress Hill were banned for the use of drugs, as while they were playing on stage, DJ Muggs lit up a joint and started smoking it. This led to the group being banned from ever performing on SNL again.
Rapper Sen Dog recalled the incident, saying that the band were shown their green room and told they could do whatever they wanted in there but couldn’t do it on stage. It was an act of resilience. “It wasn’t just the ‘Saturday Night Live’ people saying he couldn’t smoke up on air,” said Sen Dog, “It was everyone: our record label, our management, our friends. I felt like, to me, Muggs wanted to make that statement.”
Robert Blake
Working at SNL is a tough job, as the hours are long, and there’s a great deal of pressure on all writers and actors involved. The show knows this and so looks after all its staff; they do this effectively by ensuring guests treat them well, which means that being cruel or rude to any staff on the show is a surefire way to get banned.
Robert Blake found this out when he was the guest. The writer Gary Kroeger handed him a sketch, which he read, crumpled up and threw back at the comic. According to David Sheffield, another writer on the show, Blake said, “I hope you got a tough asshole, pal, cause you’re going to have to wipe your ass with that one.”
Adrien Brody
The first rule of comedy is to make it look easy. People won’t laugh if they don’t feel relaxed, which is why SNLhas such a laid-back and fun feel to it; however, behind the scenes, it’s a well-oiled machine with little room for improvisation or switching around the structure. It was a moment of improvisation that saw Adrien Brody banned from ever appearing on the show again.
The musical guest that week was reggae singer Sean Paul. Rather than the regular introduction that musical guests usually get, Brody dressed up in fake dreadlocks and introduced the singer with a poor Jamaican accent. The show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, wasn’t happy and banned Brody as a result. Maybe if he’d had used AI to make his accent more convincing it wouldn’t have been as controversial.
