All right I hope you all are ready for some gifs because I've gotten up to
The Sinéad O'Connor Incident.
This is possibly the most notorious moment in the history of Saturday Night Live. If I were some softball SNL historian, this would be the part where I mention something about how "wow, when a show is live, anything can happen! :D" But SNL clearly made some deliberate choices after the incident and those choices sure are something, let me tell you.
So, what
exactly happened? The incident occurred during season 18, episode 2, original airdate of October 3rd, 1992. Tim Robbins hosts. For this post, I do want to mention a couple of relevant skits leading up to the performance, and by "relevant" I mean "SNL being just kind of weird about politics". You'll get what I mean, but I promise I'm going somewhere with these. Maybe not anywhere interesting, but still!
Tim Robbins starts his monologue. He does a stupid joke about General Electric while wearing a goofy grin, and is immediately called backstage. Lorne Michaels tells Robbins to not call out GE because they pay the bills, and there's a gag about the show being cancelled because Robbins refuses to stay silent.
You see, the joke here is that Robbins was very politically outspoken, so we're all having a cute little giggle at his expense. But that's the thing; this is all very pre-written and pre-approved, and the big smiles and stilted delivery serve as our signal that nobody's actually mad. Oh sure, we can
joke about the guy refusing to back down on live TV, but don't worry! He didn't
really dare do anything to make the boss uncomfortable! It's all in good fun, everyone! My word, he wouldn't
actually stray off-script just to make a point! Who would even do such a thing?
Next I want to talk about Founding Fathers. This is a bit about George Washington (Kevin Nealon), Thomas Jefferson (Tim Robbins), and Benjamin Franklin (Phil Hartman) traveling through time to save modern America. They hold a press conference and try to lay out a roadmap to reform the nation, starting with reducing the deficit.
... but then we get to the... I guess punchline? Reporters keep asking questions about how these men held slaves. The questions annoy the founding fathers because hey, they just want to discuss the deficit! But the reporters refuse to stop so the guys leave and that's it, the end. It's a short sketch but the tone ping-pongs between "it was definitely bad that they owned slaves" and "... but why is everyone obsessed with that when we could be improving our great nation?" It's such a strange mish-mash that doesn't say much, but does lean more towards "why do you care about what these guys did, since it was a different time?"
Maybe I'm just looking too far into it, but it's a little wild to me how several points in this particular episode feel like we're just mocking the idea of caring about anything. Or at the very least, caring enough about anything to take any sort of action. Even though I was a kid back then, in my experience this was just the attitude of the times; if you cared enough to disrupt anything that was going on around you, you were seen as whiny, annoying, inconsiderate, selfish, immature, and disconnected from reality.
So you can imagine the reaction when The Thing Finally Happened!
O'Connor performed War, with some of the words changed to reference child abuse. No band, no anything, just this. And then...
She pulls out the photo of the pope, tears it up, says "fight the real enemy" and tosses the scraps. She then silently walked away with no applause, as the applause sign was purposefully left off. Keep her expression in mind, because it's going to come up later.
As a kid I didn't really get it. I knew who she was and knew who the pope was, and knew she was clearly mad about
something. I mean the whole show was Wacky Silly Pants Fun Times up until this point, so it was obvious that this was serious. But I also knew that there was a lot going on in the world that I didn't understand, therefore I simply assumed that the pope was involved in... something... and I was ignorant of the details. I shrugged it off and figured I'd understand some day.
People were infuriated at the time. I'm not entirely certain, but this might have been one of my first brushes with society's obsession with decorum over almost anything else? I seem to recall a teacher telling me that it didn't matter how mad O'Connor was about anything, whatever it was didn't call for
tearing up a photo. I'm not saying I was a genius child wise beyond my years, but in my mind it was
just a photo and didn't feel like a big deal. My kid logic was hey, you can always print new photos ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, on to THE AFTERMATH!
SNL got over 4,000 angry calls. This was not the first time the show was in the papers, though. As with the controversial Andrew Dice Clay episode (can write about that sometime if anyone wants), the show decided to just make fun of the situation but take no particular stance.
Well... kind of.
So remember when I said Joe Pesci had to reschedule his appearance because he was busy? Well that was
because I completely forgot that's why he hosted the very next episode.
Pesci's entire monologue was about how mad he was about the O'Connor thing. He said that he felt it was wrong for her to rip up the picture so he had someone glue it back together, which got cheers from the audience. But what really got the crowd going was the next line, where he says she was lucky she didn't do it when he was hosting, as he would have given her "such a smack".
Look, I know it's a comedy show, and I assume Pesci would not have had the guts to even threaten that if he really was hosting at the time. This is just Movie Star Man buying his own hype because he played murdery dudes before. HOWEVER, I mean... come on. Just come on. The guy just said he would have hit a tiny 20-something girl. And it was most certainly pre-approved and signed off on by everyone in charge of the show. And people cheered. It just really kills the mood for the rest of the episode, you know? The skits themselves are mostly pretty solid, but how am I supposed to enjoy them when the opener is "I want you to take me seriously when I say I'd have hit that lady"?
Again, I was a kid. Kids would say "I'll kill you!" regularly on the playground so I didn't think much of it at the time. But now? Yeah, gives me the creeps, what can I say. Pesci could have been told "nooo, no no no, don't talk like that, don't even bring it up. Don't talk about hitting her, too many people are going to genuinely agree with that. Stop." But he wasn't!
Oh but don't worry, the show wasn't done yet! In the very next episode of SNL, they do a bit called "It's the Sinead O'Connor Goodtime Happy Jamboree," where Jan Hooks plays O'Connor doing a cartoonishly Irish... I dunno, variety show? Musical? But gets booed so hard she flips out and runs away sobbing. This was a reference to her being booed and leaving the stage during a Bob Dylan tribute concert.
Later in the episode she tries again on the main SNL stage, again more booing. This time she asks what people want from her, to which Adam Sandler (playing a random audience member) gives her a teary-eyed plea for her to love, not to hate.
So she says sure and then this dance party happens.
Other shows jumped into the fray. In Living Color did a bit where Jay Leno (Jim Carrey) had O'Connor (Kelly Coffield Park) on his show. Park tore up several photos, including the prime minister of Norway for allowing the country to kill "thousands of whales"* and Steve Urkel for being "really irritating". Carrey makes a bunch of jokes about... ah, well you see... this is pretty complex, refined humor so I'll have to break it down. See, women are typically expected to have, like, long hair, right? Well Sinéad O'Connor did
not have long hair. In fact she was shaved bald. And see, like, being bald? That's more associated with men. Some people might even call it a "man's hairstyle". But she wasn't a man. So it's, you know. Funny. Hilarious enough to merit several jokes in one sketch, even.
Saturday Night Live really wasn't going to let it go, by the way. All the way in episode 11 of that season, Madonna decided to throw her hat in the ring even though this stuff happened weeks and weeks prior, and once again SNL said "yeah sure, approved why not". That's a photo of Joey Buttafuoco by the way, which was just one of the big news stories at the time, doesn't even have anything to do with anything. If this happened today, she would have been tearing up a picture of, god I don't know, the numbers 6 7 or something.
So there's something in these reactive sketches: Watch the gifs from both the Jan Hooks bit and the Kelly Coffield Park bit. Watch the actresses' portrayals. Pouting, fussy, like a toddler. In the SNL sketch she's rolling her eyes back and clownishly bawling. In the In Living Color sketch she's storming off with her arms swinging, again like a kid. Madonna scrunches her face up in a comical way and then stomps on the scraps.
And again, yeah, these are comedy shows. But the things they're making fun of her for are simply not the things she did. You can directly compare the images in this very post! In the real performance she's very focused and determined. She's serious. She's not throwing a tantrum here. But SNL allowed the version of events wherein she whimpered and sobbed and pouted and stomped to enter the public consciousness. And that certainly is a choice that goes well beyond "oh jeepers,
anything can happen during a live show!"
This was all pretty dry but hey, at least you all got that founding fathers time warp gif out of it! That'll probably be useful to someone out of context.
* Nowhere else to really put this, but whining out "save the whaaaales~" was a common way to belittle anyone who cared about environmentalism, or really any cause at the time. The joke was that if you cared about some random animal that lived all the way in the ocean in other parts of the world, you were a wimpy dork who was paralyzed by your own nonstop tears. The other big one was "save the spotted owl," because some folks were super offended that the spotted owl's habitat was protected from logging. I personally got hassled for caring about this stuff growing up. Just a sidebar worth mentioning considering the eeeeeverything that's going on in the world today.