Over the last 50 years, Saturday Night Live has been no stranger to controversy. Sometimes, the late night show courts it, like in the case of Chevy Chase, who purposely said the N-word live on air during SNL’s debut season. Other times, a backlash may spring up without warning. For example, Sinead O’Connor’s infamous protest against the Catholic Church took even the show’s creator Lorne Michaels, who notoriously hates surprises, off guard. As you’ll see, musicians have a way of stirring up trouble when they perform live from New York.
The most controversial moments in SNL history are those that get a rise out of people, even if they seem a bit quaint by today’s scandal standards. Believe us, Ashlee Simpson’s lip-sync disaster caused quite a stir at the time. But other moments, like Alec Baldwin upsetting the Boy Scouts of America or Wayne’s World mocking then First Daughter Chelsea Clinton, still feel as if they would, for better or worse, spark a lively debate in our social media age.
For this list, arranged in chronological order, the only rule was that the controversy had to have a connection to something that happened on air. So no, Shane Gillis being hired and then fired in 2019 before ever taking the Studio 8H stage didn’t make the cut, but Adrien Brody’s bizarre dreadlocks definitely did.
Below, the 22 most controversial moments in SNL history.
Chevy Chase says the N-word (1975)
“Word Association” may be the most controversial sketch in the show’s history. It’s also considered by many to be one of the show’s best. The first season sketch begins with a seemingly mild-mannered manager, played by Chevy Chase, conducting a job interview with a new applicant (the night’s host Richard Pryor). The final step of the process involves a game of word association in which Chase starts by saying the word “dog” to which Pryor responds with “tree.” As the two go back and forth, Chase’s words become more and more racist, until he says the N-word. It’s shocking to hear him say it, which was the intention. Comedian Paul Mooney, who was hired to work on Pryor’s episode at the host’s insistence, said the sketch was inspired by his own experience being interviewed by the NBC execs. But even more shocking might be how Pryor, without missing a beat, puts his soon-to-be new boss in his place with help from a few choice words of his own.
The Claudine Longet Invitational (1976)
After the show poked fun at Claudine Longet, the French pop singer and ex-wife of Andy Williams who was arrested for shooting and killing her lover, pro skier Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, earlier that same year, Longet’s lawyers sent the show a cease-and-desist letter. The threat of legal action against the sketch, which featured Longet accidentally shooting several contestants of a men’s freestyling skiing competition, led to SNL’s first on-air apology. The following week, announcer Don Pardo let the audience know that the show wanted to “correct any misunderstanding that a suggestion was made that, in fact, a crime had been committed. The satire was fictitious and its intent only humorous. This is a statement of apology if the material was misinterpreted.” As for Longet, after a conviction of criminally negligent homicide, she spent 30 days in jail.
Elvis Costello bucks the system (1977)
When Elvis Costello made his SNL debut on December 17, 1977 with his band The Attractions, he decided at the very last minute to change his setlist much to Lorne Michaels’ chagrin.
Costello was set to perform his song “Less Than Zero” at his record label’s behest. But, a few bars in, he abruptly switched to “Radio Radio,” a track that criticized the commercialization of broadcasting, telling the crowd, “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but there’s no reason to do this song here.” Michaels was reportedly so furious at Costello for not running the change by him that he stood offstage giving the musician the middle finger until the song was through.
Costello has said his public act of defiance was an homage to Jimi Hendrix and, more recently, told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe it was a way to get his band noticed. Whatever the reason, the stunt would result in Costello being banned from the show until 1989. Yet, Costello seemed to get the last laugh on this one. In 1999, he spoofed the infamous moment during SNL’s 25th anniversary special, interrupting the Beastie Boys’s performance of “Sabotage” in order to play “Radio Radio” with the trio as his backup band.
Fear wreaks all-out havoc (1981)
On that year’s Halloween episode, hosted by none other than Halloween actor Donald Pleasance, the L.A. hardcore band Fear took the stage and totally destroyed it. For those who wonder how an anti-establishment punk band ended up on major broadcast television, it’s all thanks to former cast member John Belushi. He encouraged SNL to give them a shot, even going so far as to threaten not to show up for his scheduled cameo that week if they weren’t the musical guest.
For the performance, SNL, with Belushi’s help, recruited real fans to stand in the crowd, including Fugazi and Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye. Those underground punks went so hard that NBC was bombarded with complaints in real time, leading the network to cut away from the performance to a pre-recorded sketch. The next day it was reported that the band and their slam dancing fans cost the show somewhere between $10,000 and $200,000 in damages. While many have debated those numbers, fans in attendance have claimed that they were chased out of the building after someone threw a pumpkin into the audience, allegedly hitting SNL producer Dick Ebersol. This debauchery led to Fear being banned from SNL, which singer Lee Ving has always considered to be a real honor. “They swore that night they’d never rebroadcast our footage,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “As a result, I have become one of the esteemed members of the permanently banned.”
Andy Kaufman gets voted off SNL (1982)
By the time the eccentric comedian Andy Kaufman showed up to Studio 8H in November 1982, he had become an SNL staple, appearing live from New York 10 times between 1977 and 1979 to lip sync along to the “Mighty Mouse” theme song or to perform his controversial “intergender” wrestling bit. But on this date, Kaufman helped pull a prank that would end up backfiring on him.
At the urging of then-executive producer Dick Ebersol, who was reportedly fed up with Kaufman’s antics, the audience was asked to call in and vote on whether or not Kaufman should be officially banned from the show. During the episode hosted by seven-year-old Drew Barrymore, cast members came out to share the call-in numbers to keep or dump Kaufman.
Eddie Murphy went so far as to threaten the crowd if they didn’t vote to keep him, while Mary Gross read the “Dump Andy” number comically fast in hopes the audience wouldn’t be able to catch it. At the end of the episode, it was revealed that 195,544 people had called in to vote Kaufman off the show, while 169,186 people voted to keep him.
In Jan. 1983, Kaufman returned to the show via a pre-taped segment in which he pleaded with viewers to let him back on the show. Kaufman died the following year without ever being asked back.
Matthew Broderick visits a nude beach (1988)
Matthew Broderick’s hosting debut included a boundary-pushing sketch written by Robert Smigel and Conan O’Brien in which he plays a guy hanging out at a nude beach for the first time. No surprise, he’s self-conscious about being naked in front of so many people, but his friend, played by Dana Carvey, assures him that he’ll forget about it in no time. The only problem is, every guy they meet only wants to talk about theirs and everyone else’s genitalia.
The word “penis” is uttered more than 40 times in the four-minute sketch, which they barely got past the censors. “They just said, ‘There’s no way you can do this,’” O’Brien said on his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in 2024, “and we were arguing that it’s part of the anatomy. You should be able to say penis.”
They were eventually able to convince the NBC censors that the word was not crude but clinical. Unfortunately, not everyone agreed, including Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association, who urged his followers to write to NBC with their complaints. The networks received 46,000 angry letters and lost advertisers. “We lost Toyota. We lost two, three big sponsors,” Lorne Michaels said on the Fly on the Wall podcast in 2022. “Because people would say, whoever has the dealership in Mississippi is calling central headquarters going, ‘There’s people outside here protesting. Why are you sponsoring that show?’”
Andrew Dice Clay causes a boycott (1990)
When it was announced that Andrew Dice Clay, the stand-up known for making crude jokes, was going to make his hosting debut in May 1990, cast member Nora Dunn declared that she was boycotting the episode. “I don’t want to be part of providing an arena for him to make himself legitimate because I don’t think he is,” she told the Associated Press at the time. After that week’s scheduled musical guest Sinead O’Connor similarly chose not to appear, Michaels found himself having to publicly defend his decision to have Clay host, telling the Los Angeles Times, “We’re not asking [O’Connor] to endorse Andrew Dice Clay—we were merely asking her to sing two songs. What gets lost in all of this is that this is a comedian we’re talking about.” (He also told the Associated Press, “We’re proud of Nora Dunn’s statement and her stand on this. But the show will go on.”)
In the end, SNL was able to tame the Diceman, whose only controversial moment came at the top of the show when he uttered an anti-gay retort in response to hecklers who were removed for chanting, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Clay go away!” during his monologue. Still, the episode earned SNL its highest ratings of the season proving once again that there is no such thing as bad press.
Nirvana’s censored makeout sesh (1992)
Nirvana’s SNL debut featured performances of Nevermind tracks “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Territorial Pissings,” which ended with them breaking all their instruments on stage. (The incident led producers to insist they use cheap equipment when they returned to the show the following year.) But most notably, it was a closing credits makeout session that got some viewers all riled up.
Those who stuck around until the very end of the show witnessed drummer Kris Novoselic share passionate kisses with his bandmates Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl during the curtain call. Those brief smooches were meant to, as the band would state later, “piss off the rednecks and homophobes”—and boy, did they. NBC edited the kisses out of all later broadcasts, replacing the night’s final goodbye with an alternate kiss-free closing.
Sinead O’Connor rips a photo of the Pope (1992)
The most infamous moment in SNL history might be the one in which the late Sinead O’Connor protested against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
In the final moments of her second performance, an acapella cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” the outspoken Irish singer ripped up a picture of then-Pope John Paul II and declared, “Fight the real enemy.” The backlash against her was incredibly swift. In her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, O’Connor explained that the moment she finished the song was met with an eerie silence, thanks in no small part to the show’s director Davey Wilson, who insisted that the “applause” sign not be lit. “When I walk backstage, literally not a human being is in sight,” she wrote in her book. “All doors have closed. Everyone has vanished. Including my own manager, who locks himself in his room for three days and unplugs his phone.” (In the 2002 SNL oral history, Live From New York, it’s explained that O’Connor always intended to speak out against child abuse, but had used a different photo during rehearsal. The bait and switch was what allegedly upset some members of the cast and crew.)
O’Connor was banned from SNL for life and was met with criticism from not only the religious right, but fellow celebrities, including Joe Pesci, who called her out the following week during his SNL monologue. On a later episode of SNL, Madonna mocked O’Connor by ripping up a photo of then-tabloid fixture Joey Buttafuoco. O’Connor’s career took a hit, but she never regretted her decision to speak out. “Everyone wants a pop star, see?,” she wrote in her memoir. “But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest.”
Wayne’s World mocks Chelsea Clinton (1992)
A joke about the then-First Daughter Chelsea Clinton resulted in Mike Myers having to apologize. The December episode’s cold open featured Wayne (Myers) and his buddy Garth (Dana Carvey) talking about the top ten things they love most about then-President elect Bill Clinton. In it, they make mention of his plan for universal healthcare, short running shorts, and his then-12-year-old daughter being a “future fox” and a “babe-in-waiting.” The joke was called out by many, including the President and First Lady Hillary Clinton, for being inappropriate and out of line. The jabs at the tween were quickly edited out of the sketch with Myers writing a letter of apology to Chelsea and her family. “We felt, upon reflection, that if it was in any way hurtful, it wasn’t worth it,” Lorne Michaels later said in a statement. “She’s a kid, a kid who didn’t choose to be in public life.”
Alec Baldwin upsets the Boy Scouts of America (1994)
In the sketch, “Canteen Boy and the Scoutmaster,” Adam Sandler’s recurring character, a naive aging Boy Scout, is propositioned by his scoutmaster Mr. Armstrong, played by that week’s host Alec Baldwin. The sketch angered viewers, including the Boy Scouts of America, who felt it made light of pedophilia. Baldwin later claimed that NBC received over 300,000 angry phone calls that night alone and lost seven affiliates. A disclaimer was soon added to the top of the sketch, which clarified that Canteen Boy was not a child, but was in fact just a naive 27-year-old “who, despite his age, remains active in scouting.”
Martin Lawrence is not safe for late night (1994)
Martin Lawrence’s first time hosting the show would become his last thanks to a monologue that ended with him talking about feminine hygiene. No surprise, the censors were not happy. It didn’t help that this happened the week after they received ire for Baldwin’s aforementioned “Canteen Boy” sketch. On the rebroadcast of the episode, SNL replaced Lawrence’s NSFW mentions of female anatomy with a voiceover and title card that explained, “Although we at Saturday Night Live take no stand on this issue one way or another, network policy prevents us from rebroadcasting this portion of his remarks.” It was rumored that the monologue led to Lawrence’s banning from the show. But Lawrence claims this is no longer true. “I’m not banned from SNL,” he told The Breakfast Club in 2020. “They banned me from NBC at the time for a minute. But then they realized the way it went down wasn’t what they thought and then they sent me an apology letter.”
Rage Against the Machine get the boot (1996)
Rage Against the Machine’s attempt to protest the night’s host, billionaire publisher and former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, resulted in them getting banned from SNL.
The politically vocal band hung upside down flags on their amps, which is usually a sign of distress, only to have them removed before they took the stage for fear it would upset the advertisers. “America’s expression is inverted when you’re free to say anything you want to say until it upsets a corporate sponsor,” Morello said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times following the incident, adding, “SNL censored Rage, period.”
The gesture, which no one at home was privy to, was enough for the show to insist the band not perform their second song. Upset with the decision, bassist Tim Commerford ripped up one of the flags, stormed into Forbes’ dressing room and proceeded to throw the cloth pieces at the politician’s entourage. The band was kicked out of the building and has not returned to SNL since. Not that the members seem to care. “It would have been another thing if that show had been really funny,” drummer Brad Wilk reportedly said later. “But I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup with orange juice and s–t out better skits than I saw that night.”
Norm Macdonald gets fired (1998)
As the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor from 1994 to 1997, Norm Macdonald made light work of the biggest newsmakers of the day. This included O.J. Simpson, who he continued to make jokes about even after he was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1995. (“Well, it is finally official,” Macdonald said on “Weekend Update” after Simpson’s acquittal. “Murder is legal in the state of California.”) This reportedly upset producer Don Ohlmeyer, the then-president of NBC’s west coast division and a close friend to the former football star. So when Macdonald was let go midseason from “Weekend Update” in January 1998, just before the first show of the new year, many believed it was because of those jokes. (Macdonald would officially leave the show at the end of that same season.) However, shortly after the news of his “Weekend Update” canning was made public, Macdonald told The Late Show with David Letterman, that in a call with Ohlmeyer, the exec told him that the reason he was being let go from the position was because he just wasn’t funny. “It’s just a matter of opinion,” Macdonald told Letterman. “He also thinks that O.J. is innocent.”
Jimmy Fallon impersonates Chris Rock in blackface (2000)
In 2020, a clip resurfaced of a Season 25 sketch in which Jimmy Fallon wore blackface to play Chris Rock. After facing backlash on social media, the late night host quickly released a statement to apologize. “In 2000, while on SNL, I made a terrible decision to do an impersonation of Chris Rock while in blackface,” he wrote. “There is no excuse for this. I am very sorry for making this unquestionably offensive decision, and thank all of you for holding me accountable.” Rock also addressed the clip, telling the New York Times that he was friends with Fallon and didn’t believe the impression was done with malice. “A lot of people want to say intention doesn’t matter, but it does,” Rock said. “And I don’t think Jimmy Fallon intended to hurt me. And he didn’t.”
Adrien Brody dons dreadlocks, goes off script (2003)
For some reason, during his hosting debut, Adrien Brody decided to introduce musical guest Sean Paul while wearing fake dreadlocks and using a Jamaican accent. For the last two decades, it was rumored that the culturally insensitive impression led to Brody being banned from the show. Last year, the actor attempted to set the record straight about the cringey moment, telling Vulture that the idea was his from the start. “They were all literally agape from me pitching,” he explained. “I think Lorne [Michaels] wasn’t happy with me embellishing a bit, but they allowed me to. I thought that was a safe space to do that, weirdly.” To his recollection, he added, he wasn’t formally banned from the show. “But I also have never been invited back on,” he said. “So I don’t know what to tell you.”
Ashlee Simpson’s lip-sync fail (2004)
Ashlee Simpson’s SNL “scandal” seems rather silly now. The singer took the stage to perform her song, “Autobiography,” her second of the night, only to find herself lip-synching to the wrong track. What played was the pre-recorded track for her first song of the night, “Pieces of Me.” She did a little jig to try and ease the tension before walking off stage just as the show went to commercial. Last year, Simpson told the Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen podcast that the reason she wasn’t singing live that night was because she had lost her voice the day of the show. It was her label who insisted that the show must go on, something she now wishes she would have pushed back against. “It was a humbling moment for me. I had the No. 1 song and everything was about to go somewhere. And then it was just like, whoa,” Simpson told the podcast. “The humility of not even understanding what grown-ass people would say about you, grown-ass men, awful awful things. It was so hard to learn how to tune that out, to find my strength, to get up and go again.” But she did; she returned to SNL the next year to perform live without a hitch.
Jenny Slate says the F-word (2009)
Jenny Slate wasn’t the first SNL cast or crew member to say the F-word on live TV; that honor goes to original house band member Paul Shaffer. But the fact that she said the expletive during her SNL debut made her both famous and infamous.
During the season premiere, Slate starred in a sketch called “Biker Chick Chat” with Kristen Wiig and host Kristen Stewart. In it, Slate has to say the word “freakin” over and over. At one point she slips and says the word “f—ing” instead. The look of utter shock on her face the moment the word comes out of her mouth makes it clear it was an accident that she knew she’d pay for. (Though kudos to Wiig for just continuing on like nothing happened.)
Slate would end up leaving the show after one season, but she has said that it wasn’t because of her flub, as many had believed. “I just didn’t belong there. I didn’t do a good job, I didn’t click,” she told InStyle in 2019. “I have no idea how [SNL creator] Lorne [Michaels] felt about me. All I know is, it didn’t work for me, and I got fired.”
Presidential candidate Donald Trump hosts (2015)
President Donald Trump made his SNL hosting debut in November 2015, five months after he announced his initial run for president. The decision to have Trump host amid a controversial presidential run left many angry, including former SNL cast and crew, who felt his appearance was an endorsement. In the 2025 biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, author Susan Morrison wrote that members of that SNL cast “felt shame and anger. Many of them believed that SNL bore some responsibility for Trump’s win.”
Safelite complains, SNL replaces sketch (2017)
An October episode hosted by Gal Gadot featured a commercial parody for the company Safelite Autoglass, which drew controversy for a moment in which a repairman breaks a customer’s windshield in order to flirt with her underage daughter. Safelite made a public complaint, tweeting, that they were “disappointed” by the sketch. “Although we can take a joke,” the company wrote on Twitter. “This one was a step too far. Our techs are our heroes.” SNL would end up pulling the sketch from future broadcasts replacing it with a cut-for-time video that had Kyle Mooney rapping about something far less controversial: Gadot stealing his last fry.
Pete Davidson mocks Dan Crenshaw (2018)
Pete Davidson found himself in hot water after he made fun of Republican Congressman Lt. Commander Dan Crenshaw’s eye patch. During a “Weekend Update” bit, he joked, “You may be surprised to hear he’s a congressional candidate for Texas and not a hit-man in a porno movie.” Crenshaw lost his eye while serving in Afghanistan in 2012.
Davidson received death threats for the joke and issued an on-air apology to Crenshaw the following week. Crenshaw even showed up to roast Davidson for looking like “a Troll doll with a tapeworm” and “Martin Short in the Santa Clause 3.” Two years later, Davidson claimed that he was “forced to apologize” to Crenshaw. “I didn’t think I did anything wrong,” he said in his 2020 Netflix special, Alive From New York. “It was like words that were twisted so that a guy could be famous.” Crenshaw quickly brushed off the comment, joking on Fox & Friends, “He can’t stop thinking about me. It’s a little sad.”
Dave Chappelle called out for anti-semitic monologue (2022)
When Dave Chappelle hosted the show for the third time in November 2022, he had recently come under fire for making transphobic jokes in his Netflix special, The Closer. His monologue didn’t make mention of that controversy, but began by calling out Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving for their recent anti-semitic remarks. As the monologue unfurled, he reverted to antisemitic tropes, insinuating that West’s claims that Jewish people own the media and Hollywood weren’t entirely wrong. “I’ve been to Hollywood – it’s a lot of Jews,” he said. “Like, a lot.” The joke received backlash from many, including Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League chief executive officer, who tweeted, “We shouldn’t expect @DaveChappelle to serve as society’s moral compass, but disturbing to see @nbcsnl not just normalize but popularize #antisemitism. Why are Jewish sensitivities denied or diminished at almost every turn? Why does our trauma trigger applause?” Chappelle never commented on his monologue, but when he returned to the show for the first time since that monologue in Jan. 2025, he chose not to court controversy and instead kept it sincere, issuing a plea for unity as President Trump begins his second term. The monologue clocked in at 17 minutes, the longest in the show’s history, beating his own record of 16 minutes back in 2020.
