Dave Mackey (who has a fine weblog devoted to animation here) writes of the Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Andrew Dice Clay…
I believe the cold open and monologue were taken for the west coast feed and subsequent repeats from the dress show. I have the air show on tape somewhere and remember there were differences.
You know, I seem to recall hearing something of the sort back then. I just did a search on the web didn't find anything about that, but I did locate a news story that ran a day or two after the broadcast. Here are some excerpts from it…
Foulmouthed comedian Andrew Dice Clay has apparently lifted Saturday Night Live to its highest ratings all season. The show, which was boycotted by cast member Nora Dunn and singer Sinead O'Connor because of Clay's brand of humor, averaged a rating of 11.6 and got a 31-percent share of the audience in the 24-city overnight Nielsens, NBC said. That was 8 points higher than the Feb. 24 Saturday Night Live with Fred Savage of ABC's The Wonder Years as host, NBC said.
NBC's New York and Burbank, Calif., offices got 1,764 calls against Clay and 198 in his favor in what was probably the highest number of pre-show protests in the program's 15-year history, NBC spokesman Curt Block said. Clay's appearance, broadcast with a five-second delay to allow bleeps, drew heavy advance publicity because of the boycotts. Clay's act has been branded racist and offensive to women and homosexuals.
Security was heavy for the show, NBC said. Guards with metal detectors checked out guests entering both the dress rehearsal and the live broadcast. The only incident in the studio occurred during Clay's opening monologue, when a couple began shouting "Clay, Clay, go away!" They were ejected.
The five-second delay — which NBC also has used during earlier appearances on the show by comics Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison — enabled the network to edit out two potentially offensive words repeatedly used by Clay and other cast members during one sketch, entitled, "Daddy, What's Sex?"
Let's see if the re-airing this Saturday night includes those people heckling Clay's monologue. That might have been a reason to substitute the monologue from dress rehearsal. In the meantime, Tom Collins corrects me about the other episode we're discussing here. In rehearsals, Sinead O'Connor displayed (but did not rip up) a photo of a child. Now that Tom mentions it, I realize he's right.
Her on-air shredding of the Pope's photo brought on a torrent of criticism that some say harmed her career and led to her curtailing her performing. When it occurred, I thought it was a very childish action on her part — one of those too-frequent cases where someone makes what might be a valid, if controversial, statement but does so in a way that does their cause more harm than good. But back then, I also thought she was making a rather vague-but-nasty slam against Catholicism. Since then, I've had her message of the evening explained to me. Apparently — and this was not covered much at the time — Ms. O'Connor was a tireless crusader for raising awareness of child abuse, having once been victimized herself. The tune she performed that evening which culminated in the photo-ripping was "War," a song by Bob Marley that had once been pulled from radio and some record shops because some people felt it was an incitement to violence. In her on-air performance of it, she changed a line about "racial injustice" to "sexual abuse." If that was mentioned in the torrent of press coverage back then, I sure managed to miss it — which was probably as much O'Connor's fault, for not making her point clearer, as it was the fault of reporters. In light of the recent revelations about the Catholic church covering up so many molestations, her actions that evening seem a little less frivolous. I still think it was a sloppy way to make a point, and a nasty trick to play on Saturday Night Live. But at least she seems to have been trying to make a much more valid, important statement than it seemed at the time…even if no one understood it.
Researching this a little on the Internet by the way, I find several reports that say that the F.C.C. fined NBC in the amount of $2.5 million for the incident. This sounds fishy to me. Ripping up a photo of John Paul II while proclaiming, "Fight the enemy!" may be a great way to get everyone pissed off at you but I find it hard to believe there's an F.C.C. rule against it.