There are a few moments on Saturday Night Live that make the audience gasp. Sinead O’Connor tearing a picture of the Pope was one. Fortunately, most of those get cut before they go live. Still, Saturday Night Live records the dress rehearsals and some of those sketches have appeared since. Longtime SNL Head Writer Jim Downey remembers a Norm Macdonald Weekend Update joke that was so shocking, they used the sound of the audience gasping in live shows later.
Downey was a guest on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast on May 11. Reminiscing about the good old days of Saturday Night Live, Downey shared the Macdonald joke that never made it to air, but the reaction to which lived on.
Norm Macdonald went too far with this ‘Saturday Night Live’ Weekend Update joke
Macdonald never shied away from pushing boundaries. He repeatedly referred to O.J. Simpson as a double murderer. Downey described one joke that was truly too much.
“He had this joke where it was, ‘Well, Woody Allen is dating again’ and it was the image of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the road after the napalm attack, the famous old photo,” Downey said on Fly on the Wall. “So my only reaction to that was like, ‘Norm, come on. You can’t.’ He goes, ‘No, no, come on. It’s funny.’ And I go, ‘Norm, please, no. If you do that joke in front of an audience, A, you’re going to take down the next three shows. You cannot do that. You can’t. It’ll take the temperature in the studio down 30 degrees. There’ll be ice on people’s beards. You can’t do that.’”
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The sound of the audience reacting to that joke
Macdonald got support from another Saturday Night Live writer, so he got to try the joke. The audience reaction ensured it would be dropped from the live show.
“Frank was backing him on it, Frank Sebastiano, the best Update writer ever,” Downey said. “I would look over at Frank and Frank wasn’t winking. So we tried it at dress and it had precisely the effect I thought it would, although who knows about future shows. It was this collective giant gasp. After that, Norm was willing to give it up and we didn’t do it on air obviously.”
The Weekend Update gasp appeared on ‘Saturday Night Live’ later
It was at least a decade later that Downey found another use for the reaction to Macdonald’s joke. Macdonald would leave Saturday Night Live in 1998.
Steve Higgins, who’s the current producer of the show, comes up to me and says, ‘We’re looking for a sound effect of an audience being horrified, offended.’ I go, ‘I got it, I got it.’ I directed them to that Update. The other thing, it will be uncorrupted by any laughter so you’ll get a nice clean take of gasping and horror. I didn’t remember which show it was from so they had to plow through a lot of dress rehearsals. A few hours later, Higgins said, ‘Oh my God, we got it and it is everything you said.’ They use it and to this day, I’m pretty sure they have it on a cart so whenever they need the sound effect of something not just not getting a response, but getting active hate, it was that moment.
Jim Downey, Fly on the Wall podcast, 5/11/22
So next time you’re watching Saturday Night Live and they play the sound of gasping, there’s a good chance that it is a ‘90s audience gasping at Macdonald’s inappropriate joke.
