Banned means a formal,
documented ban. Possible
shadowban means never invited back after an incident, with no
record of a formal ban. The word
“possible” carries the speculation, so the entries below stick to
what the sources say happened. Whether someone came back, as host or
musical guest, is checked against the site’s episode list, and a later cameo is not a return,
although an entry says so when there was one.
Each account of what happened links to its source: the oral history
Live From New York by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller,
Susan Morrison’s 2025 biography Lorne, news coverage from the
time, or an interview with someone who was there. Counts, and whether
someone came back, come from the site’s own episode records and link
to how this site counts. A story that could
not be sourced is not here.
Lasser, then the star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
“behaved erratically all week when she hosted,”
Morrison writes, and a few months earlier she had been arrested in
Los Angeles with cocaine in her purse. On the day of the show,
according to Live From New York,
she said she would not go on unless a certain sketch was cut, the
staff prepared to do the show without her, and Michaels told her
agent he would make sure everyone knew if she walked out. She
locked herself in her dressing room,
and the episode, Morrison writes, “has never been rerun.”
The show went on,
“shakily”,
Morrison writes, with Lasser as host. She has
not hosted or been musical guest since.
What the sources record is the episode being kept out of reruns,
not a ban on Lasser herself.
Susan Morrison, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live (Random House, 2025),
pp. 253–254
Zappa had been musical guest once before, on December 11, 1976, and
on October 21, 1978 he was both host and musical guest. “The Frank
Zappa show was like one of the worst ever,” Don Novello says in
Live From New York.
He describes a terrible dress rehearsal, after which Zappa, without
telling anybody, “turned into Dean Martin”: he read the cue cards
and made a point of being seen to read them. “Lorne was really upset,”
Novello says.
“I had resisted having Berle on, but Jean Doumanian talked me into
it,” Lorne Michaels says in
Live From New York.
“I knew we were heading for disaster from minute one.” Berle, Morrison
writes, “tried to take over”,
and his monologue “was a string of jokes that even viewers in 1979
found offensive.” According to
Live From New York,
he ran the night as if it were his old Texaco Star Theater,
and Michaels disliked the result so much that the episode had not
been seen anywhere since. When Berle sang “September Song”, Michaels
recalls, ten people stood up in the balcony, “which was the number
of seats he had,” and Michaels was “quite clear in the booth about
not cutting to it.”
Berle never hosted again.
The sources here record the episode being withheld, not a ban on
Berle.
Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, Live From New York,
ebook section PT147 (Rick Ludwin, NBC vice president for late night) and
PT148 (Lorne Michaels)
Susan Morrison, Lorne (Random House, 2025),
p. 254
The protest started before the show. Cast member Nora Dunn
announced she would not appear
that week, in protest at Clay’s act, and two days later Sinéad
O’Connor pulled out as the booked musical guest, saying she did not
want to be on the same program as Clay. Michaels told the
Los Angeles Times that “we’re not asking her to endorse
Andrew Dice Clay — we were merely asking her to sing two songs.”
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation applauded the
boycott, and NBC said only that
“this Saturday’s program is no exception”
to its broadcast standards. Julee Cruise and the Spanic Boys
took the musical slot.
On the night, hecklers shouting “Go away!” interrupted Clay’s
monologue and were escorted out by NBC security. NBC
logged 234 negative phone calls
during the broadcast, and its affiliate WETM-TV in Elmira, New York,
did not air the show.
Tim Meadows, David Spade and Julia Sweeney describe the week in
Live From New York.
“He just wasn’t funny and he was very critical of the cast and the
writing staff,” says Tim Meadows. “He didn’t realize that you can’t
tell somebody they’re stupid on Wednesday and expect them to
continue writing for you on Saturday.” David Spade says Seagal did
not want to go along with the week’s plan, and that it was the
first week he heard talk of replacing the host and doing a cast
show. Julia Sweeney says Seagal pitched sketch ideas of his own that
were “so heinous, but so hilariously awful, it was like we were on
Candid Camera.”
Lawrence’s monologue
made light of oral sex and offered women hygiene tips,
and NBC said he had drifted into unscripted and unapproved material.
It went out live on the East Coast and was heavily edited for the
West, and NBC received almost 200 complaints. Michaels’s statement
afterwards was that “sometimes live television is full of
surprises.”
The ban was NBC’s, and it was reported at the time as temporary.
In March 1994 the Los Angeles Times reported that Lawrence had been
“barred from NBC programming for the time being”, and that his
booking on The Tonight Show had been cancelled over Jay
Leno’s objections. In 2020 Lawrence
said on The Breakfast Club:
“I’m not banned from SNL. They banned me from NBC at the time for a
minute. But then they realized the way it went down wasn’t what they
thought and then they sent me an apology letter.”
Chuck Crisafulli, “Martin Lawrence: Dr. Dirt or Mr. Clean? : Barred by NBC, He’s Generally Blue on Stage but Not on TV,”
Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1994
This entry is about Chase as host. He was in the
original cast, and he
hosted eight times between
1978 and 1997. Will Ferrell says in
Live From New York:
“The worst host was Chevy Chase. He was here the first year that we
were here, and then he came back the next year and that was the
kicker.” It started, he says, “right from
the Monday pitch; you could just tell something was up,” and “I’ve
never seen Lorne more embarrassed and red.”
Brody hosted the year he won his Oscar, and
introduced musical guest Sean Paul
wearing a dreadlocked wig and putting on a Jamaican accent. He had
done the bit in dress rehearsal. “I think Lorne wasn’t happy with me
embellishing a bit, but they allowed me to,” he told Vulture
in 2024. There were rumours he had been banned from the show, which
as far as he knows is not true. “But I also have never been invited
back on,” he said.