The host SNL instantly regretted hiring: “I didn’t realise just how misogynistic his act was”
Saturday Night Live has had no shortage of controversial moments, but over its long and storied history, there’s one host who sent producers spiralling out of control.
Get a group of the world’s top comedians together to do a live show, and there’s likely going to be some chaos. SNL has been a minor miracle since its inception, considering how often co-stars like Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and John Belushi would irritate one another.
Even after half a century of being on air, moments like when Chase uttered a racial epithet, when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II in protest of the church’s perpetrating sexual abuse, when Adrien Brody unexpectedly donned dreadlocks, when Louis CK joked about paedophilia, or when Jimmy Fallon wore blackface to impersonate Chris Rock are some that live in forever infamy. In fact, there have even been some hosts whose involvement was itself considered to be controversial, including Elon Musk, George Steinbrenner, Shane Gillis, and future President Donald Trump.
SNL may have had to adjust to the constraints of working with temperamental live performances, but NBC Vice President for Late Night Rick Ludwin said it was “a professional mistake” to enlist Andrew Dice Clay in an interview for Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, which is saying something considering the above instances. Although he admitted to not being entirely aware of who Clay was, other than that he was popular, Ludwin quickly realised it would be a nightmare for the show’s censors.
“I didn’t realise just how misogynistic his act was and is,” he recalled, “On the night of the show, the network broadcast standards people insisted that Saturday Night Live be put on a delay so that if Andrew Dice Clay said something or did something that needed to be cut, it could be cut via seven-second delay or whatever it needed to be.”
Clay hosted in 1990, when censorship wasn’t quite as automatic as it would become in the digital era, and hence, removing any offensive language proved to be a laborious process, which caused delays in the broadcast. While he had been the first to suggest Clay as a means of sparking audience interest, Ludwin said that Michaels vowed that “he would never allow that sort of tape delay on Saturday Night Live”.
Dealing with censorship was only part of the issue with Clay, whose act offended many of the show’s female staffers, where Nora Dunn, one of the show’s most popular cast members, announced that she would boycott the show through a statement to the Associated Press. Although it resulted in a strenuous situation in which Dunn briefly believed that she had been fired, she said that standing up for herself “was a really, really good thing”.
“Andrew Dice Clay hosting was the pinnacle of everything that upset me about the show,” Dunn said, “I still feel that it’s a black mark that they endorsed him and let him walk through that door.”
His defenders would claim that his sexist, homophobic schtick was part of a ‘character’ that he had created, but the laughs rarely came from those who viewed him with irony. Although it was hard to deny the ratings boost that adding the popular comedian garnered them, SNL has been wrestling with the same debate ever since: Does platforming an offensive voice mean that the show is endorsing, or at least tolerating, what they’re saying?
In actuality, most of the wildest moments of the show have happened unexpectedly, such as Woody Harrelson’s off-the-cuff remarks on Covid-19 conspiracies, or Kristen Stewart’s accidental use of the f-word, but with Clay, SNL should have known what they were getting into.
