The ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch Robin Williams was banned from starring in: “I was afraid of it”
A ridiculous number of Hollywood’s most successful comedians passed through the doors of Saturday Night Live before setting their sights on the big screen, but Robin Williams didn’t need to cut his teeth on a sketch series to explode in popularity and become an era-defining great.
He wouldn’t have been a good fit for the show anyway, seeing as the long-running weekly staple is under strict time constraints and rehearsed thoroughly before the cameras start rolling, and Williams was always too fond of off-the-cuff improvisation to be restricted by such trivialities as scheduling and running times.
The Academy Award winner did host SNL three times in 1984, 1986, and 1989, though, in addition to making several unexpected cameo appearances from the early 1980s to his final outing in 2010. He was also friends with many past, present, and future cast members, which didn’t work out as planned when self-preservation ruled him out of the sketch he specifically requested to appear in.
After making his SNL debut in 1986, Dana Carvey quickly became one of the show’s most popular performers. In the season 12 premiere, he introduced the Church Lady, who anchored the recurring ‘Church Chat’ segment, which saw the character welcome guests to her couch to grill them on their sins.
It was arguably Carvey’s signature skit during his seven-year tenure, but when Williams called him up and asked to be a part of it, he was shut down. “He was a really good friend, but he really wanted to do ‘Church Chat,'” the comic recounted on his Fly on the Wall podcast. “In the early days, this was my golden ticket, and I was very careful. I thought if Robin got so excited… I was just afraid of it.”
Carvey was still relatively new to SNL, and he knew ‘Church Chat’ was one of the most potent weapons in his arsenal, and he was equally aware he could easily be blown off the screen by a tour-de-force like Williams. “He even called me Saturday morning at like 10am,” he continued. “‘Oh, I’d really like to play.'”
He was so protective of Church Lady and using the character to further his own career on SNL that going toe-to-toe with someone like Williams as a fairly inexperienced performer by comparison had the potential to overshadow him and make him second fiddle in his own sketch, which meant that Carvey had to put his foot down and tell his pal that it wasn’t going to happen.
“It was heartbreaking, but you know, we got past it,” he explained. “But in those days, your thing was very precious. I wanted to keep it quasi-real, in a sense.” It doesn’t sound as if Williams was too upset, but it takes a strong constitution to take a phone call from one of the most famous comedians on the planet and tell them that there’s no chance they’re appearing in the one skit they desperately wanted to be in.
SNL might be a collaborative effort, but Carvey knew where his bread was buttered, and there was no way Church Lady was going to be caught up in the maelstrom of Williams’ frenetic energy.
