The Hugh Hefner Episode of Saturday Night Live is Creepy For Reasons Beyond the Host's Enthusiastic Rendition of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"
I am not proud to admit that I fell for the Playboy mystique with my heart, soul, mind, and another body part it’s not polite to talk about in mixed company.
As a boy whose restless, traumatic childhood and adolescence were an endless search for naked boobs, I appreciated the central role that Hefner played in disseminating them far and wide for the masturbatory needs of a grateful world.
Hefner devoted his life to naked boobs. He was rewarded with wealth and fame and the life of a Prince. An extremely horny Prince.
Hef was synonymous with sex for decades. He was an icon of the sexual revolution that the younger me foolishly would have defended to the death as an important, heroic cultural figure and not just a pioneering pervert.
If someone were to dismiss Hefner as a libertine who got rich exploiting the American obsession with large breasts, I would correct this misconception.
I would talk about Hefner’s role in the civil rights movement and how his Playboy Clubs were among the first to regularly and very purposefully highlight black talent like Dick Gregory.
How could Hefner be anything other than a mensch when he was best friends with Bill Cosby, America’s Dad? I don’t think someone with such a stern sense of morality would have tolerated any funny business, so Hef, his mansion, and his grotto must have been on the up and up.
If the unfortunate soul was still not convinced, I would go on and on about how the joke about reading Playboy “for the articles” was, at most, a half-joke because it really was a world-class magazine that published fiction by important writers like my personal favorite, Woody Allen, as well as meaty, substantive interviews with world leaders and top celebrities.
Then, while the person I was lecturing fled my presence, I’d run after them and talk about how Hefner helped fund the pro-choice movement and personally financed movies like 1971’s MacBeth by major auteurs and Hefner’s close personal friend Roman Polanski.
Looking back, there may have been some early signs that Hefner was not the hero I imagined him to be and actually an incredibly problematic and destructive figure.
I am ashamed to admit that I was one of millions of boys who wanted to grow up to be Hugh Hefner because he had the best life and the best lifestyle. His life consisted of hobnobbing with the best and brightest and having sex with thousands of eager and appreciative young women with perfect bodies and perfect faces.
Hef had it all figured out. Like Matthew McConaughey’s charismatic creep in Dazed & Confused, Hefner got older, but the wholesome, barely legal beauties who shared his bed and, if they were very lucky, his life, stayed the same age.
Who could have possibly guessed that a guy famous for disseminating images of naked 18-year-olds for money would turn out to be a creep?
Hefner was posthumously MeTooed and the subject of witheringly negative portrayals like Holly Madison’s Down the Rabbit Hole and the docu-series Secrets of Playboy.
So I cannot fault Saturday Night Live for treating Hefner the way the 12-year-old me would have: with worshipful adoration and no small amount of envy.
Although Hefner may not have been an actor, comedian, or veteran of the sketch comedy world like a traditional host, he wasn’t about to pass up a 90-minute commercial for Playboy, the magazine, brand, and lifestyle on the hippest stage in entertainment.
Instead of finding things to mock about a grown man who perambulates about in PJs and a bathrobe and made a fortune sexualizing busty teenagers, Saturday Night Live treats him with uncharacteristic reverence.
The fluffing begins with a cold open with Laraine Newman in a form-fitting costume as the near-naked minx from Playboy’s Party Jokes feature.
For years, I would go to parties and share goofs and gags from the magazine, and it NEVER got a good response. Many people actually considered it creepy.
Newman’s daffy, airheaded bunny is dwarfed by a giant representation of a page of Playboy. It’s an impressive set, but there are no jokes to the jokes, just the vague misogyny of Newman’s vixen being too stupid to effectively deliver punchlines.
Then Hefner takes the stage in his pajamas and lays on the usual rap about how he was surprised to be asked to host because those are not the kind of opportunities that go to publishers, but that he figured he was at least a little funnier than Ralph Nader.
This gets a tepid laugh. It’s the best he’ll do all night. Then he gives a Cliff’s Notes version of the oft-told tale of Playboy’s founding and rise to glory.
With mock earnestness, Hefner says of his magazine’s success, “It took a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work from some very talented people. And it took something more: a kind of faith, a belief in something greater than oneself. That’s why each time I see a little girl of 5 or 6 or 7, I can’t resist the joyous urge to smile and say”
This leads inevitably, if regrettably, to a man who has done more to expose the naked breasts and butts of teenagers than anyone in American history singing “Thank Heaven For Little Girls,” the official theme song of pedophiles and all-around creeps everywhere.
While Hefner’s monologue delivery was stiff and reserved, he really seemed to enjoy singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” He connected emotionally with the lyrics and the ideas behind them.
I have not been this creeped out by a performance of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” a first-ballot inductee in the Disturbing Songs That Should Be Retired Permanently Hall of Fame since Gerard Depardieu sang it in 1994’s My Father the Hero.
In that film, the audience for Depardieu thinks he’s crooning of his sexual desire for a 14-year-old and is repulsed.
While Hefner really puts his all into “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” words are superimposed over his image reading, “Hef basically is a very religious man. He thanks Heaven for a lot of things besides little girls: Big girls, enormous girls, gigantic girls – just name it, and Hef will thank Heaven for it. You see, if Hef hadn’t become a publisher, he’d probably have been involved with religion in some way. For example, he might have been a Missionary – a position in life he has a lot of respect for.”
This is a good indication of the smutty wordplay and sleazy double entendres we’re in for.
The Star Trek parody “Planet of the Men vs. Planet of the Women” is nothing but salacious double entendres. The dire exercise in science-fiction smut pits Hefner’s Captain Macho, Dan Aykryod’s Colonel Hardin, and John Belushi’s Lt. Testosterone against Laraine Newman’s Corporal Fellopia, Jane Curtin’s Captain Estrogena, and Gilda Radner’s Lt. Aeriola in an all-out battle of leering innuendo.
See, it’s ostensibly about spaceships in outer space, but it’s really about penises and vaginas and doing it and other adult affairs.
“Circular Bed Sex Research” starts off smutty and then takes a predictable turn towards the fawning. We begin with Hefner in his circular bed “helping” a bubbleheaded co-ed played by Jane Curtin with her sex research.
This coed is overjoyed to be in bed with Hef, but he has more important matters to think about. Though he promised the ditsy young woman his undivided attention, Jimmy Carter flies to the Playboy Mansion so that he can seek advice from Hefner, a renaissance man who knows everything, particularly about sex.
Hefner is the king of sex and the best to ever do it. At least, that’s what this episode would like you to believe.
Dan Aykroyd played Jimmy Carter as the smartest man in the world, but even he defers to Hefner’s wider, sexier knowledge base.
In my experience, the most frustrating episodes of Saturday Night Live are ones that play to the hosts' egos and seem primarily concerned with making them look good.
So it’s frustrating, if patently unsurprisingly, that this episode is more interested in buffing up its host’s already spit-polished image than in making people laugh.
A filmed piece entitled “The Story of H” is little more than a glossy advertisement for Hugh Hefner and Playboy. The feeble joke is that after serving his country in the Army, Hefner just wanted to lead a simple, normal life with a plain Jane wife, but he could not help but stumble into an unspeakably sexy and glamorous life of beautiful women, wealth, privilege, and celebrity, where gorgeous vixens young enough to be his daughter compete madly for his favor.
Hefner shares the Playboy philosophy with ancient Greek philosophers in “The Playboy Philosophy” and appears briefly in a closing sketch with The Farbers, Gilda Radner, and John Belsuhi’s crass middle-class vulgarians overjoyed to be in the wonderland that is The Playboy Club.
A dedicated follower of the Playboy Philosophy, played by Aykroyd, speaks of Hefner as if he were a superhuman folk hero whose life was so big and so enviable that it inspired feverish jealousy in every heterosexual for decades.
That’s how people saw Hefner at the time: as a sexual superhero who heroically freed a grateful nation from the horrors of sexual repression.
Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, that’s how the young boy version of Saturday Night Live’s old boy’s club saw Hefner as well. They weren’t about to do anything that might cost them an invite to the Playboy Mansion, the horny adult’s version of the Happiest Place on Earth.
Because this is vintage Saturday Night Live, it’s full of memorable moments that have nothing to do with the host. Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray roar their way through X-Police, a gonzo parody of cop shows that celebrate lawlessness and excessive force.
Bill Murray has a wonderful showcase as a posthumous prankster in “Magical Eulogy.” The sketch typecasts Murray as one of his trademark smarmy, cornball entertainers.
As its title suggests, in “Magical Eulogy,” a cornball magician played by Murray decided to turn some frowns upside down by favoring the mourners at a funeral with sleight of hand and glib banter.
No one played these kinds of characters better. The funeral magician fits neatly in Murray’s wheelhouse of phonies who are so over the top in their fakeness that they come all the way around to being sincere.
This episode witnessed the triumphant return of Andy Kaufman, who had not performed on Saturday Night Live since a second-season episode hosted by Ralph Nader.
Kaufman’s act remains fundamentally the same. He begins, in guileless man-baby mode, by singing “Oklahoma” with an excess of amateur enthusiasm and zero skill or professionalism.
He absolutely slaughters the standard but with a look of unearned satisfaction on his face that suggests that he’s deluded himself into thinking he’s doing great.
This is followed by an equally amateurish bit of what could very generously be called tap-dancing and, more accurately, shuffling his feet around in a vaguely rhythmic pattern.
He’s playing a character, as always, but you can’t help but get wrapped up in his childlike conception of what entertaining entails.
Then Kaufman turns 30 Rock into a second grader’s birthday party by leading a sing-along to a nursery rhyme. He has the preternatural patience and gentleness of a children’s entertainer with an adult sense of subversion.
Kaufman ends things, inevitably, by transforming from a hapless wannabe to a seasoned pro with his famous Elvis impersonation.
Kaufman kept doing the same damn thing when he guested on Saturday Night Live because it always killed. Lorne Michaels would only indulge in anti-comedy if it got big laughs.
John Belushi gets to show off his slapstick gift for destruction in a sketch where he gets so wrapped up in describing the excitement and ostensible plot and action of a Wagner opera that he begins thrashing about and destroying the room with his unhinged enthusiasm.
But it’s Jane Curtin who gets the single dirtiest joke of the episode. In a “Weekend Update” bit involving Gilda Radner as pint-sized gymnastic legend Nadia Comaneci making the most of her opportunities while she’s still cute and little Curtin makes an allusion to pleasuring one’s self with a piece of gymnastic equipment.
I suspect it made it into the show only because censors didn’t understand just how dirty the reference was.
Hefner would never host again, but the damage was done. An ostensibly countercultural, anti-establishment show spent an hour and a half buffing up the legend of Hugh Hefner, the debonair alpha male of the Western World, rather than taking aim at his deceptive empire of exploitation, sexualization, and subjugation.
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