BLACKFACE an ongoing issue
Saturday Night Live has long been condemned for its lack of diversity
Last year, amid controversy over a decades-old photo of a man in blackface on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page, Saturday Night Live lampooned the rinse-wash-repeat cycle of prominent figures apologizing for having worn blackface. In a sketch titled State Meeting, Kenan Thompson played an ethics committee chairman hoping to get ahead of any potential scandals by asking a group of fictional Virginia lawmakers whether they had ever worn blackface.
“What if the blackface was just part of your costume of a Black person?” one lawmaker asked.
Blackface “was never funny or cool,” chided Thompson’s character, who ultimately concluded his colleagues were beyond help.
Saturday Night Live has its own history with blackface — a history that spans most of the show’s 45year existence and garnered renewed attention after social media users called out Jimmy Fallon for wearing blackface during a 2000 sketch. Jimmy Kimmel apologized recently for doing the same while impersonating NBA player Karl Malone on Comedy Central’s The Man Show in the early aughts, and several years-old episodes from shows including 30 Rock and W/ Bob & David were pulled from streaming services because they feature blackface. But as a long-standing institution, SNL provides a window into a culture that has continued to passively embrace an inherently racist tradition meant to demean and mock Black people.
Billy Crystal wore blackface while impersonating Sammy Davis Jr., even while acting opposite civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who hosted the show in 1984. National moments of reckoning — such as Ted Danson’s widely ridiculed appearance in blackface at the 1993 roast for his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg — did little to deter the show. Darrell Hammond, who was on SNL from 1995 to 2009, darkened his skin to play Jackson on a recurring basis.
Fallon came under fire in late May after clips from the sketch show in which he is wearing blackface while impersonating former SNL cast member Chris Rock recirculated online. “I am very sorry for making this unquestionably offensive decision and thank all of you for holding me accountable,” Fallon tweeted.
Even when SNL has employed racial stereotypes as subversive commentary, past efforts often fell flat because of the show’s lack of diversity on- and off-screen. When Oprah Winfrey hosted in 1986, the cold open centred on her pointed refusal to dress up as Aunt Jemima. But the same sketch featured Danitra Vance, then the only Black comedian on the show, serving coffee to executive producer Lorne Michaels, whom she called Mr. Lorne, while dressed like Celie from The Color Purple. Michaels asks Vance what he should do to get Winfrey to play Aunt Jemima. “Beat her,” Vance replies. (In the end, it’s Winfrey who doles out a faux beating.)
In an ironic twist nearly 30 years later, SNL was urged to hire a Black female comedian after Thompson said he would no longer dress up as a woman to play prominent Black women. The show — which hadn’t featured a Black woman in its cast since Maya Rudolph’s departure in 2007 — controversially featured host Kerry Washington as Michelle Obama, with cast members poking fun at how they hadn’t seen the first lady “in a while.”
But even after a concerted effort — following criticism — to add Black cast members and writers, the show has yet to publicly grapple with its long history of blackface. The result is an uneven legacy that juxtaposes the show’s occasionally sharp racial humour with recurring missteps around representation and sketches that perpetuate racial stereotypes. At worst, the show undermines the brilliance of sketches such as Black Jeopardy, which is elevated by the insight of SNL’S Black staffers, including Thompson, the show’s longest-running cast member, and Michael Che, the first Black comedian named a head writer on the show.
Michaels, who produced 30 Rock, defended his show’s use of blackface as recently as 2008, when Fred Armisen, who is not Black, donned conspicuously darker makeup to impersonate President Barack Obama. Michaels told The Washington Post the show had auditioned several Black comedians — including Thompson, then the show’s lone Black cast member — to play Obama but Armisen had the “best take.”
Eventually, Jay Pharoah, who’s Black, took on the role of Obama after joining the show in 2010. After leaving the show in 2016, Pharoah recalled nearly losing his job after saying, in an interview with thegrio, that SNL needed to pay more attention to Black female comedians. He told Ebro in the Morning he felt too often reduced to doing impersonations of famous Black men.
He noted the show had yet to name his successor in impersonating Obama, a position it never ended up filling.
“Honest to God, no disrespect to them, but I kind of feel like they gave up.”
The Washington Post