The SNL sketch that caused 50,000 complaints: “We knew we’d hear from the public”
There have been moments in Saturday Night Live’s past that have been rightly questioned.
In 1975, a now-famous episode aired a word association sketch with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor. The point of the sketch was ultimately to watch Chase and Pryor escalate their use of racial slurs with each introduction of a new word to a point where it becomes outright offensive and distasteful, lacking any of the nuance fans had come to expect from Pryor in particular.
And there have been plenty more moments like that, too. Take Jimmy Fallon using blackface in 2000 or Martin Lawrence descending into a wildly sexist monologue in 1994. Usually, the live format of the show creates a sense of unpredictable charm, but in these, it was more chaos.
The point is, comedians on the show have always pushed the boundary, and while the above examples have crossed it, for the most part, it’s been a healthy place of artistic experimentation where limits can be respectfully crossed. But it was one, relatively tame and inoffensive sketch, that didn’t even threaten those boundaries, which received the most votes of complaint in SNL’s history.
In 1988, Matthew Broderick, the host of that particular episode, starred in a sketch where he visited a nude beach for the first time. Innocently, he is welcomed by regular nude beach goers played by Kevin Nealon, Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller. Throughout the sketch, they grow comfortable together, in their nudity, where they continually comment on one another’s penis. That literally was all there was to it. Yet somehow, the repeat use of the word penis and the overarching acknowledgement of said penis sparked outrage from the public.
“We knew we’d hear from the public, and did we!” said William Clotworthy, one of the censors for the show. He continued, “The sketch generated 46 thousand letters of complaint. 45,999 were form letters sent to Reverend Donald Wildmon and his American Family Association, the other was from A.S.S., the Association of Stripped Sunbathers, complaining that we hadn’t shown enough flesh! Just kidding.”
Conan O’Brien worked as a writer on the sketch and confirmed Clotworthy’s point that this was a sketch they suspected would cause drama.
He explained, “I worked on that sketch with him and wrote a song at the end, the penis song. Standards came in. I think it was actually the great Rick Ludwin and they just said there’s no way you can do this. And we were arguing that it’s part of the anatomy. You should be able to say penis. Of course now it seems like the most tame thing in the world.”
It truly was a sign of the times that it not only received 46,000 complaints, but that the SNL team suspected it would. Besides the continued reference to the word penis, the sketch barely threatened the line of offence, and as O’Brien rightly points out, it was incredibly tame. Given the controversial episode that took place a decade before, as well as what was to come from Fallon and Lawrence, it’s a fairly sad indictment of American society that this caused the uproar it did.
