The most tone-deaf opening monologue in ‘Saturday Night Live’ history: “Will they even remember it?”
For the last half a century, the opening monologue that precedes every episode of Saturday Night Live has become one of the show’s signatures and staples, but it doesn’t always hit the mark.
Whether it’s the writing not being up to scratch, the audience not feeling the jokes, or the guest host instantly outlining that they’re not necessarily up to the task of fronting the weekly staple, there are any number of reasons why the introductory spiel can miss one or many of its intended targets.
Sometimes, though, it’s just weird. For instance, if somebody’s promising Hollywood career took a significant hit if they happened to become caught up in a sex tape scandal involving a 16-year-old, would it be a wise idea to hope the furore had died down enough to joke about it in front of millions? Apparently, it was a risk that Rob Lowe was willing to take.
In 1988, the then-24-year-old ‘Brat Pack’ member was at the centre of a media frenzy when footage of him having sex with a 22-year-old and their 16-year-old friend was leaked. While the age of consent in Georgia at the time was 14, which is queasy in itself, 18 was the legal limit to be recorded in the act.
In retrospect, and as strange as it sounds, Lowe called it one of the greatest things that ever happened to him: the outcry convinced him to confront his alcohol issues, and he’s been happily sober and married since the early 1990s, suggesting that he didn’t think “any of that happens without going through the scandal.”
However, he was still on the comeback trail and trying to rehabilitate his image when he hosted SNL for the first time on March 17th, 1990. The episode began with Lowe and Lorne Michaels engaged in conversation, with the former saying, “This is the first time I’ve been in front of an audience since, you know, the thing.”
“What if I go out there and the people resent me?” he queries, to which Michaels responds, “Will they even remember it?” He wonders if the crowd will think he’s “some sort of, I don’t know, sleaze, or a low-life,” and when he delivers his lines in front of the live audience, it’s played for awkward laughs since they’ve clearly been instructed to remain silent.
Well, apart from that one guy/plant who shouts, “You’ve got a lot of nerve! I have a daughter!” Referring to “the incident,” Lowe explains that it’s been a difficult time for him, but the one thing that helped him get through to the other side was the value and loyalty of his friends, which is certainly a choice in confronting the fact that a grown man was videotaped having sex with a teenager.
Sure, you can write it off to being a product of its time, but watching through a modern lens, an SNL host using a sex scandal that involved a 16-year-old, mining it for laughs, and ignoring the outcry in favour of celebrating how important their friends were in helping through such a difficult time is questionable at the very least, and remarkably tone-deaf, even for the ’90s.
