Toward the end of Saturday Night Live’s 50^th Anniversary special, Tom Hanks introduces a compilation skit titled “In Memoriam.” Under the guise of honoring “countless members of the SNL family taken from us too soon,” Hanks describes the “characters, accents, and . . . ethnic wigs that have aged horribly.” Despite them being, he says, “unquestionably in poor taste,” he does not finally place blame wholly on SNL or its players. After all, he intones, “you,” indicating the audience, “laughed at them.”  

The compilation taxonomizes the skits it features, separating them into categories ranging from “ethnic stereotypes,” “sexual harassment,” and “ableism” to “problematic guests,” “animal cruelty,” and “gay panic.” The skits range from the egregiously problematic to the potentially subversive, from Adrien Brody’s racist pantomime of a Jamaican man to Norm MacDonald’s quip about SNL not hiring women writers. Notably, certain obvious skits are omitted: no Buckwheat, for example, and none that feature controversy-embroiled stars who happened to be in the audience (most conspicuously, Blake Lively in “Virginiaca Shops for a Beaded Skirt” [2009]). The compilation skit, buried as it is in a celebration of SNL’s longevity and a mild lament for its changed cultural relevance, is not meant to challenge or offend but to explain away. It nods at changed social mores while seeming to wink ironically at current race manners. After all, such a skit suggests, these too will soon pass away.

The compilation skit ends with “Word Association (1975),” which features Chevy Chase (Interviewer) opposite Richard Pryor (Mr. Wilson). Chase plays a racist hiring manager and Pryor a Black man who prizes his dignity as much as he does a paycheck. The two exchange increasingly offensive racial epithets that culminates in Chase calling Pryor’s character the N-word. Pryor’s courage to fire back “dead honky” remains a groundbreaking moment for network TV. Pryor biographer Scott Saul describes it like this: “[Pryor] turns the tables not by coming up with more stinging epithets for white people but by refusing to play by the rules dictated to him” (378). The sketch, which has become one of Saturday Night Live’s most famous, is hardly one that should or can be retired. “In Memoriam” returns us to an impasse that has long dogged scholars of Black mainstream comedic performance: the question of whether subversion is possible within such a determining frame. The inclusion of “Word Association” in “In Memoriam” seems to deny it its subversive power, to make it nothing other than a high-octane performance at the edge of polite society. But even here, we might be able to give Richard Pryor the last laugh, for his entire appearance on SNL was about exposing the different ways that Blacks and whites perceive and value the world around them.

Saul, Scott. Becoming Richard Pryor. Harper Perennial, 2014.