Of all the sketch comedy shows out there (past and present), none has more moments that have aged poorly than Saturday Night Live. These moments suck the humor right out of the joke faster than excessive meme-forcing ever could. Examples:
Season 3
- They don't come much grimmer than the short film Don't Look Back in Anger, in which an aged John Belushi visits the graves of his fellow cast members.Yeah.. they all thought I'd be the first one to go. I was one of those "Live Fast, Die Young, Leave A Good-Looking Corpse" types, you know?
Season 4
- Carrie Fisher, when she hosted in 1978, played Linda Blair as Tom Snyder's guest on Tomorrow. After discussing cocaine use she offers this prediction for her future, which eerily foreshadowed what would end up happening to Fisher herself."Well, Tom, you know, I'm still real young and, well, I've got LOTS to look forward to, you know? Unhappy marriages, household accidents... maybe even a nervous breakdown! You know, I'm really entitled to one!"
Season 6
- At the end of the first episode, the host Elliott Gould introduces the cast again and tells the audience, "We're gonna be around forever!" Eleven episodes later, all but Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were fired after the F-bomb debacle on the episode hosted by Charlene Tilton, and most of the cast members from that season haven't really been in the spotlight since then (with the possible exceptions of vastly-underused cast member at the time Gilbert Gottfried, Eddie Murphy (despite the career slump), and Gail Matthius, who did voice acting in a lot of 1980s and 1990s cartoons before becoming an improv and theater teacher), but it also counts as Heartwarming in Hindsight and Hilarious in Hindsight since SNL is still the longest running sketch show on NBC.
- The "Who Shot C.R.?" running joke. Charles Rocket took his own life in 2005 (even worse is the fact that Charles Rocket in the sketch got shot in the neck and wore a bloodied bandage during the infamous "Goodnight" part; in Real Life, he slashed his throat with a pair of box cutters).
Season 15
- Episode 14 has Fred Savage as a kid playing with a gun he took from his dad, who just happened to be played by Phil Hartman. During the skit, Fred holds the gun to Phil and threatens to shoot him. Later on at the end, Kevin Nealon comes in to talk about gun safety. And, he startles Phil. Leading Phil to retort "Don't spook me like that. I almost blew your head off!" Phil Hartman was later shot to death by his wife.
Season 16
- The "Chippendales" sketch, where Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley both perform stripteases, with the joke being that Farley's weight made his dance moves look ridiculous. It's one of Farley's most well-known sketches, but the humor at the expense of his body becomes less funny upon learning of Farley's low self-esteem in the years leading up to his overdose. Chris Rock cited the sketch as one of the things that "killed" Farley. Making it sadder is that Swayze himself tried to help Farley shortly before he died
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Season 17
- In a skit from the Kirstie Alley episode, Al Franken played Senator Paul Simon during the Anita Hill hearings, lampooning the allegations against Clarence Thomas. Franken himself would later be the subject of sexual harassment allegations and step down from the Senate in 2018.
Season 18
- Chris Farley's most famous character was motivational speaker Matt Foley, who made his SNL debut during this season, and would introduce himself saying "I'm 35 years old, I'm thrice divorced, and I live in a van down by the river!". Sadly, he wouldn't live to be that old, dying in December 1997 at age 33. To make things worse, Chris's father, Tom, passed away in 1999, at a point when Chris would have been 35.
Season 19
- In a sketch titled "Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol", Phil Hartman portrayed Bill Clinton, showing then Arkansas governor Clinton being driven around in patrol cars so that he could mess around with young, hot ladies. The sketch ends with a parody of COPS where different police officers answer a call for a domestic disturbance at the Clinton household, caused by Hillary Clinton (portrayed by Jan Hooks), drunk and physically assaulting her husband for his philandering. Hartman would be murdered five years later through multiple gunshots by his wife Brynn Omdahl, a woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and who physically attacked her husband on at least one known occasion. Driving the point home, one of the officers (played by Kevin Nealon) warns "Clinton" that if he doesn't press charges, his wife will continue her abuse, and "one of these days she's gonna kill you".
Season 22
- When Phil Hartman came back to host for the second time, he says in his monologue that he bought his family's affection with the money he makes from being on NewsRadio and The Simpsons. Apparently, it didn't work, when you consider what happened to Hartman less than two years after he hosted.
- Towards the end of the monologue, Hartmann says he’d be nothing without his "lovely wife, Brynn". Said lovely wife eventually murdered him in their home before turning the gun on herself.
- When Kevin Spacey first hosted in 1997, there was a monologue where, while he's singing "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning", there are a series of captions revealing that this monologue was done under duress and that Kevin Spacey is "...a very sick individual with severe emotional problems" and plays psychos in his movies because he is one in real life. About twenty years after that episode, it feels more like a Cassandra Truth than an actual joke.
Season 23
- Chris Farley's last appearance on SNL, hosting the October 25, 1997 episode, just two months before his death, is disheartening to watch. Despite his attempts at humor and both Chris Rock and Tim Meadows's support, his poor health and exhaustion are evident.
- When Matthew Perry hosted SNL on October 4, 1997, he took part in a "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketch where he played Michael Keaton, who would answer every question with "I'm Batman.". In the days leading to Perry's sudden passing in October 2023, he was riffing on Batman, ending his social media posts with "I'm Mattman", including his last post which showed him sitting in the hot tub where he was found dead.
Season 26
- The cold open on 12/16/2000 had Will Farrell’s George W. Bush muse “Maybe I should start a war! Wars are like executions supersized!” Less than a year later, the real G.W Bush would do just that.
- Similarly, the Weekend Update segment on 3/17/01 had a joke (starting at 5:10 of this clip) based on the Army announcing that it was changing its black berets to tan berets, and the Army Rangers and Paratroopers each releasing statements about the color berets they'd be wearing. Tina Fey's punchline was, "In a related story, these guys need a war." That same year, they'd get one...
Season 29
- The Jessica Simpson & Nick Lachey/G-Unit episode features a phony commercial for MTV Future, a channel comprised of MTV shows from the year 2054. This includes a "golden anniversary season" of Newlyweds Nick And Jessica, featuring the duo as an elderly couple. The couple's marriage dissolved at the end of 2005.
- In the Colin Firth/Norah Jones episode, Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton remarks that John Edwards is like a "boring version" of himself, stating, "This guy might have sex in the Oval Office, but he’d probably do it in the missionary position - with his wife." Thanks to the Rielle Hunter affair and the sex tape scandal, that line rings hollow.
Season 30
- Lindsay Lohan hosted the show in 2005 during the height of her career, and in her monologue appeared with Amy Poehler who portrayed the "Ghost of Lindsay Future"note who warned her to stay away from drinking and partying. She tells her past self, "We did, like, eight Lifetime movies, and now we host a Cinemax show called Night Passions... introducing porn". This wasn't much of a stretch from how Lohan's career actually progressed. After several film flops and gaining a reputation for frequently being late or absent due to hard partying, her high-profile film roles dried up and she starred in the widely-panned Lifetime movie Liz & Dick, and later posed nude for Playboy and appeared in the Skinemax-quality film The Canyons. At least she didn't end up marrying Tommy Lee.
Season 34
- On the Seth Rogen/Phoenix episode, Seth Meyers (the Weekend Update anchor) did a report on how during Michael Jackson's summer world tour, he would bring his son onstage, who would be accompanied by a police officer who would have Michael Jackson arrested. Unfortunately, the concert (and the punchline to the joke) would never come to pass due to Jackson's death two months after the episode originally aired.
Season 35
- The episode hosted by Blake Lively had a Weekend Update segment where Abby Elliott plays a looped-out Brittany Murphy who thinks she's hosting SNL with musical guest blink-182 (Quick note: Brittany Murphy actually did host SNL during its 28th season in 2002, only the musical guest was Nelly, not blink-182). The Blake Lively episode aired on December 5th, 2009, fifteen days before the real Brittany Murphy would suddenly die of cardiac arrest. Because of this, Hulu.com pulled the video of this segment and the NBC TV rerun of this episode does not include this part.
- A March 2010 sketch had host Alec Baldwin playing a drill sergeant teaching recruits how to shoot as a sniper, with hilarity ensuing. In October 2021, Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a cinematographer and injured the director with a prop gun on set, and was later charged with accidental manslaughter.
Season 36
- In the SNL Digital Short on the Gwyneth Paltrow/Cee Lo Green episode, Andy Samberg has a wild, drunken night out with Pee-Wee Herman (the same one who hosted SNL in 1985 during its 11th season). During this night out, they break a chair over Anderson Cooper's head in the street (and Cooper comes back later in the short with a bandaged head, complaining that his blue eyes [which he considers one of America's national treasures] almost got destroyed). Less than three weeks after the sketch aired, Anderson Cooper really was brutalized in the streets during his coverage of Cairo's uprising.
- Scarlett Johansson in her monologue talked about keeping a low profile during offseason between movies, specifically mentioning how you shouldn't make a sex tape because they always leak. Less than a year later, a certain set of nude photos would leak online...
Season 37
- Maya Rudolph would often do an impression of Whitney Houston that showed Houston as a drug-addled loon. In late 2011, Rudolph made a surprise appearance in the Steve Buscemi episode to do the impression once more. Two months later (and just a week before Rudolph was to host the show herself), Houston died of a drug overdose.
Season 40
- In a 2015 Weekend Update sketch during the Dakota Johnson episode, Kate McKinnon as Ruth Bader Ginsburg says that, while she's the oldest Supreme Court Justice, she's not the closest to death, mentioning that Antonin Scalia would go before her. Indeed, in February 2016, Scalia died of a heart attack, and Ginsburg herself passed away in September 2020, making the already contentious 2020 presidential election even more heated.
Season 42
- The sketch featuring Louis C.K. and a teenage girl note flirting in a '50s soda shop is less funny after Louis C.K. was accused of and admitted to sexual misconduct (specifically exposing himself to female colleagues and then forcing them to watch him masturbate), especially the end where the girl says she likes getting attention from old men.
Season 43
- Pete Davidson's bit on Weekend Update about his depression and borderline personality disorder may be this after he spoke more seriously about his mental health and later expressed suicidal thoughts on his Instagram (though he seemed to recover and was able to go on SNL the same night of the post) in late 2018. He also jokes in this bit that giving him more sketches could help his depression, which may be less of a joke than previously thought, given his later interview where he spoke out against how the show always typecast him as a dumb guy.
Season 45
- One digital short from the Jennifer Lopez episode has J-Lo as herself, inadvertently falling for one of the roadies working her concert, Clueless Chick-Magnet Chad (Pete Davidson) - which ends up driving her and real life beau Alex Rodriguez apart. It's not so funny in 2021, now that J-Lo and A-Rod have separated for real.
- The numerous jokes about the COVID-19 virus (such as a sketch where actors try to film a soap opera while avoiding physical contact, or the Weekend Update joke that No Time to Die can only be released in theaters if the "No" in the title is removed) became harsher when SNL, as well as several other shows, had to hold off on production due to the virus' spread increasing the need for social distancing, with multiple COVID-19 cases at 30 Rock where SNL and many other NBC shows are filmed. One case proved fatal for an NBC employee, as was the case for Michael Che's own grandmother later on.
- The Daniel Craig episode on March 7, 2020 had a Debbie Downer sketch where Debbie arrives at a wedding party wearing an oxygen mask because she's worried about getting COVID-19, saying "They said to forego masks, but good luck nabbing one when we’re facing a worldwide pandemic.". The next week, world governments officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, which, as of January 2023, saw over 1 million Americans succumb to the virus, making Debbie seem less pessimistic and more Properly Paranoid. It doesn't help that the Debbie Downer theme song includes the line "Always there to tell you 'bout a new disease...".
Season 46
- Early in the season, Morgan Wallen lost his spot as a musical guest due to attending a party without any COVID protocols, and a couple months later was given a second chance, complete with a sketch where he played himself as future versions of him try to warn him about what the party will cost him. Turns out what they really should have warned him about was the incident just a couple more months later where he was filmed making a profane, racist rant that got him dropped by his label and banned from country radio. A Season 46 Weekend Update made fun of this controversy, with Michael Che suggesting that Wallen learned the N-word from Colin Jost.
Season 47
- A sketch from the January 29th (Willem Dafoe/Katy Perry) episode centered on Biden being briefed on Russian disinformation in Ukraine as troops were being massed at the borders. Near the end of the sketch, Chloe Fineman's character mentions passive-aggressively trolling Vladimir Putin as psychological warfare in order to break him down, specifically claiming that he would lose his mind in three weeks. Just over three weeks later, Putin declared the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine and that Russia would support them, then subsequently ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine a few days later. Ouch.
