When O.J. Did SNL
If O.J. Simpson’s contributions to American life began and ended with his success as a Heisman Trophy-winning, record-shattering football legend, then his legacy would still be extraordinary.
For initially better and later much, much worse, Simpson’s gifts to pop culture transcended sports. The Buffalo Bills superstar wasn’t just a superstar athlete who segued smoothly into announcing after retirement, along with the requisite endorsements and iconic commercials.
Simpson’s striking good looks, powerful body, and killer charm made him a natural for movies despite not being much of an actor. I do not care for David Zucker’s politics, but I am amused by his observation in my friend Will Harris’ Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! that “O.J. Simpson’s acting remained a lot like his murdering—he got away with it, but no one really believed him.”
In the mid-1970s, one of the perks of O.J-level superstardom was the chance to host Saturday Night Live in its radiant, coke-fueled prime. Sure enough, on February 25th, 1978, Orenthal James Simpson became the fourth African American and second athlete to host Lorne Michaels’ comic institution.
Richard Pryor, Julian Bond, and Ray Charles hosted Saturday Night Live before the Juice got his chance in the third season. Only Fran Tarkenton preceded O.J. on the athlete front, meanwhile.
From the vantage point of 2024, Simpson’s time at 30 Rock is notable less for its creative or comic content than for what it says about how O.J. was seen at the height of his fame, how he wanted to be seen, and how he saw himself.
A gum-snapping, seemingly cocaine-fueled Simpson bounds onto the stage sporting a conehead that is never commented upon.
The audience is excited to see Simpson because he is famous and successful, but they also dig the blatant pandering.
Simpson cynically wins over the crowd without saying a word through prop comedy, fan service, and an unsubtle nod to some of the show’s breakout characters.
Saturday Night Live apparently felt that the visual gag of O.J. Simpson with a conehead was so inherently funny that his monologue didn’t require jokes.
The band will occasionally add a musical sting to Simpson’s story, but otherwise, the opening monologue barely bothers to even attempt comedy.
Saturday Night Live treated Simpson the way it treated sexy actresses like Raquel Welch: as a remarkable physical specimen famous for their beauty rather than their comic chops.
The monologue that Simpson delivers is largely devoid of humor but full of canned uplift and the kind of inspiration business groups pay good money for.
Simpson’s monologue, which he races through with galloping cocaine rhythms, consequently feels better suited to a meeting of the Ford Dealers of the Southwest than a hip comedy show.
In what remarkably doesn’t qualify as one of the show’s five dodgiest racial moments, O.J. talks about how he grew up near Chinatown in San Francisco. What O.J. refers to as “Orientals” are small and, consequently, not good football players.
This blatant exercise in stereotype-mongering has a bookend at the end of the show when Simpson (as himself) and Garrett Morris (as Leon Spinks) compete against white women Sandy Duncan (Laraine Newman) and Marie Osmond (Gilda Radner) in a battle of the sexes AND races.
Since Sandy and Marie are tiny little white women rather than professional athletes, they are absolutely destroyed by the powerful black men they are competing against. It’s not too much of a stretch, however, to think that the show is establishing, none too subtly, that it thinks that black men are powerful and strong and great at sports while white women are not.
In one of the episode’s many dicey moments, announcer Bill Murray says that Simpson and Spinks have dominated special competitions.
“The black men ran away with the spear-chucking competition” are words that Saturday Night Live, Bill Murray, and O.J. Simpson felt were acceptable to say on a national television comedy program in 1978.
As host Simpson presumably signed off on all of the evening’s sketches, and he apparently did not have a problem with spear-chucker jokes on his live comedy television debut.
Simpson’s strange week at 30 Rock consequently represents a bizarre conflict between O.J. Simpson, the role model/hero/inspirational figure, and O.J. Simpson, the debauched hedonist.
This episode depicts Simpson as an inspiration to children of color all over the world but also a hyper-sexualized stud with a skillful, foot-long penis. This bizarre episode wants the audience to root for Simpson as a black kid from humble origins who made good in a way that made the whole world sit up and take notice. Yet it seems equally intent on making audiences think repeatedly about the late athlete, murderer, and prank special host’s outsized genitalia.
In that respect, the episode accidentally captures the violently bifurcated nature of O.J. ’s persona as someone who has been, at various points in his life, one of the most respected men in American life as well as one of the most hated.
O.J. ’s monologue delivers his heroic origin story straight without feeling the need to leaven it with jokes or self-deprecation. Who needs comic self-deprecation when you can have sincere self-aggrandizement?
Simpson starts off by saying that he’s a little nervous because of how long he’s been waiting to host Saturday Night Live and how all his life he’s gotten everything that he’s ever wanted.
Growing up, Simpson wanted to be a professional football player, but because he lived in an Asian neighborhood and played on a losing team, major colleges did not aggressively scout him.
He was faced with a choice: he could join the military and become a hero like role model Audie Murphy, or he could go to Junior College. He was a record-breaking standout who was aggressively recruited by major colleges but he only ever wanted to be a USC Trojan.
Simpson isn’t delivering a comic monologue; he’s telling his life story. Saturday Night Live seems more interested in making audiences like Simpson than laugh at or with him.
Simpson wins the Heisman Trophy and signs with the Buffalo Bills but doesn’t do much in his first few years in the league.
Then, in his fourth year, Simpson was at Church at a chapel service, and a businessman gave a speech about how he defined “fanatic” as someone who had lost sight of their goals but was doubling down on effort.
The businessman at the church’s words transfixed O.J. He realized that he was exerting furious effort but did not have a concrete goal. At that exact moment, he decided that he wanted to be the best football player in the world.
He succeeded. Money, fame, success, and opportunities followed, but he was left with an empty feeling that could only be filled by hosting Saturday Night Live.
Simpson talks about watching television one night and being overjoyed to see his friend Richard Pryor hosting Saturday Night Live and deciding that that was the next goal he wanted to tackle.
The perversely sincere monologue is all about polishing the host’s brand as an affable icon of assimilation and the personification of the American dream.
This episode will be in We’ve Got a Terrible Show For You Tonight: The 50 Worst and Weirdest Episodes from Fifty Years of Saturday Night Live because I have tweaked the title and focus so that it now concerns the fifty worst and weirdest hosts rather than the worst episodes.
That’s because this episode is pretty funny despite O.J., not because of him. He’s a dead weight whose incandescent rage and jealousy eventually lead to two dead bodies, but he’s surrounded by funny people and funny ideas.
For example, a Saturday Night Fever parody focussed on John Belushi’s Samurai character is a winner because Belushi manages to perfectly combine the essence of one of his signature characters with the deeply imitable cadences of John Travolta in one of his signature roles. It does not hurt that the Blues Brother was a big man with the grace of a dancer.
Simpson plays the disco-dancing samurai’s brother. He’s a priest, but rather than disappoint his parents by abandoning the priesthood, he’s decided to stop being black.
What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure. It’s conceptually and comedically muddled, but considering the hero-turned-villain’s complicated relationship with blackness, it’s notable that O.J. chose to play a character who has chosen not to be black.
Historical irony similarly informs a sketch riffing on the famous story of Babe Ruth promising to hit a home run for a dying child. Simpson races through narration while ostentatiously chewing gum.
Garrett Morris does stellar physical comedy as a dying boy whose health seems to hang on each pitch of the game where Ruth is playing, and Belushi is wonderfully belligerent as the beer-swilling home run king.
Ruth never does hit the promised dinger, but a mere half century or so later, Ruth’s lifetime home run record was beaten by a black man, Hank Aaron. “Don’t ever underestimate the revenge of a black man,” Simpson insists in words that read much differently now than they did in 1978.
In “Weekend Update” Laraine Newman plays a woman excited to be reporting directly from the locker room of an NFL game.
Newman is interviewing an ostensibly naked Simpson, who has the leering smile of someone who has just received oral sex and is still overcome with joy.
Newman asks Simpson how much longer he intends to play. “I plan on having a ten—to twelve-year career,” Simpson insists, leading Newman to smuttily offer, “That’s odd. I would have guessed more like 11 to 12.”
It’s funny because she’s staring at his enormous, erect penis!
For the subtext impaired, she’s talking about the man’s penis and how porn star massive it is. It’s so huge that he’s worried that his knees might go out from the sheer strain of his outsized genitalia.
It gets smuttier, somehow. Newman looks down at what we can only assume is Simpson’s enormous penis and says, “I’m very excited to be here, and from the looks of it, the feeling is mutual.”
Simpson’s sexualization continues with a Mandigo parody that casts him as a plantation stud who gets it on with everybody: black, white, male, female; it’s one big interracial, polysexual fuckfest.
O.J.’s raging libido is all over a Battle of the Sexes parody. It finds the Juice trying to facilitate three-on-one group sex involving himself, Sandy Duncan, Marie Osmond, and Jane Curtin’s Phyllis George.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Phyllis. Why don’t you join Sandy, Marie, and me after the show?” Simpson offers.
When she expresses some skepticism regarding his ability to sexually please three women simultaneously, he brags, “My mouth don’t write no checks my mouth can’t cash.”
In a late-in-the-episode showcase for the fan-favorite team of Al Franken and Tom Davis, Franken plays a funnyman in the late stages of dying from cancer, and Davis plays the concerned friend who implores the audience to laugh at his terrible delivery and jokes out of pity. It’s funny because it’s weird and also because O.J. is not in it.
At the end of his monologue, Simpson implores, “I don’t know if I’m going to be man enough to meet this challenge. I just hope that if I don’t meet it tonight and have to go back to being just a regular superstar athlete/movie star you people will remember me for what I was and not what I may become here tonight.”
Simpson would go on to do much worse than fail to distinguish himself as a Saturday Night Live host. I’m referring specifically to the double murder that he committed.
Simpson’s hosting gig is like Zucker’s quip about his acting in The Naked Gun. He got away with it, but nobody believed him.
O.J would never host again, but a little under two decades later, he would become a fixture of the show, not as a host but rather as a satirical target for both Tim Meadows, who played him, and Norm MacDonald, who eviscerated him with words. Instead of trying to make him look good, the show in the mid-1990s used him as a satirical punching bag.
As with so much else in his life and career, O.J.’s relationship with Saturday Night Live began like a dream fulfilled and ended like a nightmare realized.
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