11 Old SNL Characters That Wouldn’t Fly Today

“Weekend Update” is an oft-used avenue for cast members to portray SNL characters who don’t work as well within the parameters of sketches. It’s one of the places Gilda Radner most thrived.

Like Radner, Garrett Morris was an original SNL cast member. One of his biggest characters was Chico Escuela, a Dominican baseball player spoke with a broad Latin accent and had a limited grasp of English.

And… that was the joke. He’s one of the most beloved SNL characters for early fans of the show, but we can’t imagine him popping up now.

Before Christopher Walken or Alec Baldwin, there was Buck Henry. Though he was best known as a writer (an Oscar-winning one at that), Henry did a bit of acting, and between 1976 and 1980 he hosted Saturday Night Live a whopping 10 times. Henry was around so much, he even had some recurring SNL characters.

One of them was Uncle Roy. He definitely feels born out of the National Lampoon style of anything-goes comedy, and indeed one of the writers who contributed to Uncle Roy was Anne Beatts, a graduate of the magazine. The Lampoon ethos was that nothing was too dark.

All that is to say that the entire “game” of the Uncle Roy sketches is that he is a pedophile babysitter. The sketches were on the line even then, but today’s more sensitive audiences likely wouldn’t go for the Uncle Roy jokes. Nor would the safer SNL writers of today.

“The Bel-Airabs” only recurred once, in part because all the cast members involved left after the 1979-80 season, which is when both sketches aired. It was a parody of The Beverly Hillbillies, which the core audience for SNL had likely either watched as kids or seen in reruns. There’s a reason why all those old sitcoms were turned into arch, meta movies in the 1990s.

The premise of “The Bel-Airabs” is that the fish-out-of-water California transplants are Arabic — they’re described as “paranoid” Arabs. And they’re broadly played by non-Arabs Don Novello, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner.

After many movies that portrayed Arabic people are terrorists, people are much more thoughtful today in their portrayals. Which would make “The Bel-Airabs” a tough sell today as SNL characters go.

Havnagootiim may not be distinctively remembered, but he actually appeared nine times total. They just happened to be spread across only the eighth and ninth seasons of the show. The name is some sweaty “Indian-ified” version of the phrase “Having a good time, wish you were here” and his look was something in the vein of Gandhi, or a Hare Krishna perhaps. That is to say, a broad caricature.

The SNL character would appear as an “enlightened master” of Hindu philosophy and would answer questions about life, the universe, and everything. It was just a “first thought, best thought” sketch with some nod to Indian mysticism. And, yes, Havnagootiim was played by a white guy, specifically Tim Kazurinsky.

If we were putting together an all-time SNL cast, Dana Carvey would be in the mix. He excelled at the form. Wayne wouldn’t be half as good of a character without Garth. The Church Lady is an iconic SNL character. His Bush is perhaps the best (by which we mean funniest, not most accurate) presidential impression the show has ever had. No cast member bats 1.000, though, and that brings us to Ching Chang.

If you are not familiar with Ching Chang, but that name has you worried, yeah, it’s what you think. Ching Chang is one of the worst characters in SNL history. Carvey plays an Asian man in cringe-inducing makeup with a brutal accent as well. The sketches are mostly about Ching Chang’s love for his chickens, and how he wants them on Broadway.

You could have extracted some of the absurdist meat out of these sketches and turned them into something. But… we don’t see this one flying today.

Credit where it is due: The comedic conceit of the Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein sketches is funny. Tonto and Tarzan are two characters who speak succinctly and infrequently, whereas Frankenstein can barely speak at all, and mostly just growls and yells. Pairing these three laconic characters with idiosyncratic speech patterns together and having them appear as a singing group or on a soap opera was funny.

Phil Hartman was fun as Frankenstein, and there are no issues there. Kevin Nealon would play Tarzan, who is a wild man raised in the jungle by apes. He’s, you know, fully fictional in concept. Tonto, though, is an American Indian character. Saturday Night Live was accurately depicting how Tonto was depicted on The Lone Ranger, so maybe that could fly. But Jon Lovitz playing Tonto probably wouldn’t.

In two 1990s sketches, Rob Schneider plays a clothes-averse gentleman who doesn’t see the problem, whether at home or at the ballpark. It’s kind of whatever, but the way the sketches were filmed would almost assuredly not be replicated. Schneider was, purportedly, actually undressed while filming these sketches.

Maybe he had something covering him, but his backside was clearly visible a couple of times. Plus, in these days of intimacy coordinators, it would be awkward to ask cast members or hosts to do a live sketch with someone not wearing anything.

The premise of the Vinny Vedecci sketches is very funny: Bill Hader plays an old-school Italian talk show host whose team perpetually books guests — like Robert De Niro — whom they erroneously assume can speak Italian. Chaos ensues.

So what’s the problem? Look, we’re not saying Vinny Vedecci is an SNL character who wouldn’t fly today — Bill Hader is saying that.

He has said an Italian woman told him that she disliked the character because he sounded like a gibberish version of her father, which made him lose his taste for playing him.

Many are squeamish about comedic portrayals of Adolf Hitler — it’s hard to find anything funny about a genocidal maniac who killed millions, and who many misguided souls still praise.

Though many greats, like Mel Brooks, a Jewish American who fought in World War II, have made great Hitler jokes, Chris Kattan’s take may not justify the shock value. He playsed Hitler as a Paul Lynde-esque gay man, and it’s mostly just broad mugging.

The modern SNL would like not consider the potential laughs worth the potential backlash.

Chris Parnell is an underrated Saturday Night Live cast member — in some ways an understated heir apparent to Phil Hartman. He was a utility player who didn’t do a ton of broad, one-note characters, and often would play deadpan to everybody else’s chaos.

But Parnell did get a couple recurring sketches, though. One of those is Merv the Perv. The Merv sketches were basically a clearing house for any raunchy, bad puns the writers could think of. Merv the Perv would show up to some place with a lot of women, deliver a series of puns to no avail, and then in the end rip his pants off to a chorus of “Oh, Merv!” from the ladies.

Merv debuted in 2002, over 20 years ago. It feels like, these days, a pitch for a character called “Merv the Perv” who says lewd things to women and then takes his pants off would probably be nixed the first time it was pitched.

Why Pat wouldn’t get the green light now is probably obvious. In a New York Times interview, Julia Sweeney recounted that her own daughter has told her, “It really feels like that character is just about making fun of someone where you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman.”

Sweeney has wrestled with the portrayal of her most popular SNL character, including in her 2019 one-woman show Julia Sweeney: Older and Wider.

“I didn’t do that character to make anyone feel bad,” Sweeney told the Times. “On the other hand, I created a character and then people happened to look like that character. I’m not responsible if they take it negatively, either. So that’s a complicated situation.”

You may also enjoy these lists of the Best SNL Sketches and the Best SNL Characters.

Think we missed any SNL characters that wouldn’t fly today? Or disagree with us? Let us know in the comments.

Editor’s Note: Corrects main image.