On its 50th anniversary special, Saturday Night Live wanted to have its nostalgic cake and eat it, too, owning up to the stereotypes it has perpetuated while also coaxing laughs out of the passage of time.
In a send-up of awards-show “in memoriam” segments, a tuxedoed Tom Hanks soberly took the darkly lit stage during Sunday’s SNL50: The Anniversary Special. “As we celebrate the achievements of the past 50 years,” he intoned, “we must also take a moment to remember those who we’ve lost. Countless members of the SNL family taken from us way too soon. I’m speaking, of course, about SNL characters and sketches that have aged horribly.”
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As the audience chuckled, he went on, “Even though these accents and characters and … let’s just call them ethnic wigs … were unquestionably in poor taste, you all laughed at them. So, if anyone should be canceled, shouldn’t it be you, the audience? Something to think about.”
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He then tossed to a montage of characters with problematic qualities, starting with John Belushi’s samurai and proceeding with a number of cringe-y successors. As in the award-show “in memoriam” sequences, the clips, sometimes in slow motion, were accompanied by on-screen graphics. “Ethnic stereotypes,” one read, and others called out “sexism” and “child molestation.”
The graphics became increasingly pointed, serving as captions to “I-can’t-believe-this-was-on-TV” video clips. Footage from 2003 of Adrien Brody introducing Jamaican musical guest Sean Paul (an infamously improvised bit involving Brody wearing dreadlocks) was simply captioned, “WHOA.”
A scene of Mike Myers in a bathtub with Home Alone-aged Macaulay Culkin joking about “my bum” turned from color to black-and-white, with the text reading, succinctly, “YIKES.”
Other chyrons called out “animal cruelty,” “body shaming” and “gay panic.” As the segment went on, though, the “voice” of the on-screen text grew a little less scolding. A “Gay Hitler” bit from Weekend Update in the early 2000s (pretty much exactly what it sounds like) bore the message, “MAYBE THIS WAS OK? NOT SURE.”
The sequence also confessed to “problematic guests,” among them O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake, R. Kelly, Diddy and Jared Fogel from Subway. (Not making the cut: Donald Trump, who appeared in 2015 en route to the White House.)
RELATED: ‘SNL50’: Decades Of Political Satire & POTUS Mocking Noticeably Absent From Anniversary Special
The reel culminated in a landmark moment from the show’s first season in 1975, an exchange between an employer (Chevy Chase) interviewing a potential employee (Richard Pryor). Their dialogue is allowed to play out at some length, in recognition of the sketch’s role in putting the show on the map, even if it is not necessarily easy on the ears 50 years later.
Watch the full sketch above.