The 10 most controversial sketches in ‘Saturday Night Live’ history
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Credit: YouTube still
Watch Lucy Lawless take on Stevie Nicks during a classic ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit
Saturday Night Live has a long history of tearing musicians apart with sketches, as Stevie Nicks discovered when she became an object of comedic ridicule.
Typically, musicians need to step out of line and end up accruing headlines for the wrong reasons to be satirised on Saturday Night Live. However, Nicks was an innocent party, and the sketch was born out of Lucy Lawless making the SNL castmates laugh in the writer’s room by regularly offering up her impression of the Fleetwood Mac singer.
The New Zealander was guest hosting an episode in 1998, and after writer Hugh Fink discovered her impression, he knew there was a sketch they could build around it. While it was a peculiar person to imitate, Lawless’ repertoire of impressions was quite limited, and they had to work with what was at their disposal.
A common sketch trope for Saturday Night Live is the advert parody they felt was the right vehicle to poke fun at Nicks, who was promoting a tacky Tex-Mex restaurant in Sedona, Arizona, which they claimed she owned in the skit as a side-hustle.
It has garnered a cult fanbase, with many people believing it’s the best sketch in the programme’s history. However, Lawless still doesn’t understand the sketch’s cult following and told The Ringer in 2019: “I tell you what: I didn’t really realise it had a life of its own”.
As Nicks wasn’t particularly culturally relevant in 1998, they had to play up to the cliches of her character to make their younger audience understand her without knowing the singer’s work. The restaurant was supposed to be the antithesis of her public persona, and that’s where Fink found the laughs.
Fink told The Ringer about his thought process behind the sketch and explained: “I wanted this commercial to come off as not a classy, nationally produced ad, but clearly a cheap, locally produced commercial for a shitty restaurant, and that’s why, even in the script, at the time, I put in those cutaways of, like, really unappealing, bad-looking food with the price, and advertising specials.”
He continued: “Comedically, I thought it’d be even funnier if the restaurant was cheap. The research department had to get me photos of the Mexican food, which I would approve. I would tell them, ‘No, I want it to look shittier than that. That looks too good.”
Hilariously, Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup is a real establishment; well, it is according to Restaraunt Guru anyway. The food guide rates the Tex-Mex joint as the 131st best place to eat in Sedona, which is impressive for a fictional restaurant from a two-minute sketch from 1998.
