The spirit of Uncle Roy was alive and well in a 1994 sketch featuring “Saturday Night Live” host Alec Baldwin and Adam Sandler as Canteen Boy, a naive assistant scoutmaster. Canteen Boy had made several prior appearances on the show, but this sketch has remained the most memorable for its deeply uncomfortable undertones. In the sketch, Baldwin plays an older scoutmaster who makes sexual advances toward the clueless Canteen Boy, becoming increasingly less subtle. “Whoops, my shirt fell off,” Baldwin’s character blurts out after ripping off his shirt to expose his bare chest.
Many viewers were appalled. At the time, reported The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper wrote that he’d received calls from several viewers who stopped watching partway through the sketch. Baldwin returned to host later that year and addressed the controversy in his monologue. “Now, even though the character of Canteen Boy is a grown man, a perfectly intelligent 27-year-old, not a child, some people got the wrong idea and, frankly, all hell broke loose,” he said, then offering the wildly exaggerated claim that NBC had received 300,000 complaints, and lost seven affiliates, because of the sketch.
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According to the Post, whenever that sketch is rerun, a title card is shown informing viewers that “Canteen Boy is a highly intelligent though quite eccentric 27-year-old who still lives with his mother, and who, despite his age, remains active in scouting.”
