SNL Sketches That Went Too Far

Saturday Night Live is a cultural touchstone. It's hard to imagine a world in which "more cowbell" has no meaning, where "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!" fails to get a laugh, or where no one's ever heard of Debbie Downer. Its weekly live format allows the program a flexibility that keeps it relevant, while its ever-shifting talent pool inspires comic chemistry from performers who often go on to become icons of the stage and screen. 

But sometimes, SNL slips off the razor's edge of comedy into a great big dumpster of foolhardiness. For as often as the show has created legendary comedy, so too has it stumbled onto its face with an ill-timed joke, a badly conceived bit of ribbing, or even outright ignorance. Some of these failures have become nearly as infamous as SNL's greatest successes — yet they tend to be quite a bit harder to track down, as no creator wants to keep their mistakes circulating. Join us as we explore the sketches that crossed over from irreverence into insult, and all the condemnation, uproar, and outright censorship that ensued.

Adam Sandler's Canteen Boy is the sort of character that makes SNL famous. A naive, overgrown Boy Scout with an ever-present canteen slung around his neck, he commands no respect — yet never loses his verve for the great outdoors. Plus, randomly, he can summon snakes with a well-sung bird call. He's just enough like someone you know to be hilarious, yet odd enough to remain entirely his own creation: a singular character pulled off by an actor who would go on to become a pillar of 2000s comedy.

But a 1994 Valentine's Day sketch featuring the character went over like a canteen full of cement. In it, an increasingly uncomfortable Canteen Boy is subjected to sexual overtures from his lascivious scoutmaster (played to the hilt by Alec Baldwin), growing from offers of wine to invitations to share a sleeping bag. Canteen Boy escapes (and has his reptilian revenge) but the damage was done. The Boy Scouts of America registered their dismay, columnist Richard Roeper reported getting a tidal wave of calls from upset readers, and a disclaimer was added to all future airings of the episode, stressing that Canteen Boy was 27 years old. Canteen Boy might get laughs for being an oblivious weirdo, but becoming a genuine victim was just too far.

Sometimes, a sketch manages to land at the worst possible moment. This was the case when a 2017 episode featured a sketch entitled "Safelite AutoGlass," in which a creepy repair guy repeatedly damages a car in order to fix it... and gain access to the teenage girl he's grown fixated on. Naturally, the real Safelite AutoGlass was miffed, tweeting that they were perfectly capable of taking a joke but did not appreciate having their employees insulted. 

But what ended up getting the sketch entirely pulled from further broadcasts was the context in which the joke landed: the apex of the #MeToo moment. It seems likely that SNL realized the sketch wasn't going to land as a light-hearted bit of ribbing, and instead as a sleazy echo of a systemic problem making hourly headlines. The sketch was replaced with a previously unaired one entitled "The Last Fry," and the world's worst windshield repairman was left to molder in the void of SNL's mistakes.

1988 was a different time. Hair was bigger. Technology was clunkier. Comedy was similar in spirit, but different in execution. The American public was a bit more squeamish then, and standards of decency were stricter. Enter 1988's "Nude Beach" sketch, which entered the zeitgeist like a grenade through a window.

In the sketch, a nervous newcomer is welcomed to a nude beach by his enthusiast friend. It's no big deal, he is assured — it's just a beach where everyone happens to be naked! But that becomes pretty clearly not the case when every man to whom he is introduced comments on his genitalia. The denizens of the nude beach, in fact, cannot stop commenting, with an air of utterly casual camaraderie, on every man's most intimate part. The public was shocked — 1988 wasn't exactly filling the airwaves with such frank discussion of body parts — but the sketch remained, and can be streamed today in its full glory, as nakedly uncensored as the characters it features.

Comedy is more art than science, and nothing proves this more thoroughly than SNL and its plethora of sketches that aren't exactly flops, but couldn't be called successes either. Take 2017's "Sexual Harassment Charlie" sketch. In it, the women of a workplace are presented with two men being fired for sexual harassment. One, a power-player prone to making inappropriate comments, apologizes for his misconduct but is met with derision. The other, a front desk attendant named Charlie played by a cheeky Kenan Thompson, is still gleefully obscene — but the women laugh his creepy comments off as lovably eccentric. Ultimately, it is revealed that Charlie is wanted for kidnapping and living under an assumed name.

For many, the joke didn't so much fail as implode. Commentators called it awkward, attempting to parody a double standard that doesn't actually exist, and outright blind to the actual ramifications of harassment. Sometimes you strike gold, as with SNL's similarly-themed "Welcome to Hell" sketch, and sometimes... well, sometimes you get Charlie.

The year was 2013 and the world was watching Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's ode to bloody revenge. SNL, having its finger on the pulse, leapt on the chance to riff off the famed director's take on the antebellum south — by moving it to the era of the Bible. Thus was "Djesus Uncrossed" born, a sketch in which Jesus Christ blows apart Judas Iscariot with a machine gun, Saint Peter demands Roman scalps from the Apostles, and the Prince of Peace himself urges his unlucky foes to say hi to his father. It's as lurid as Tarantino's oeuvre demands, all while targeting figures of devotion for, oh, millions of people worldwide.

Outrage was swift. The Council on American-Islamic Relations decried the sketches' alignment of Jesus, perhaps the world's most famous emissary of peace, with destruction and gore. Sears pulled the ads running alongside the sketch. Uniquely, no one was angry because the sketch mocks Jesus, exactly, but because it portrays him as cool according to standards he, and the faiths he inspired, explicitly reject. Bottom line? Don't expect a sequel sketch entitled Once Upon a Time in Galilee anytime soon.