On “SNL,” Jesse Jackson proved he knew punchlines have power

You will not find Jesse Jackson’s funniest “Saturday Night Live” sketch on Peacock.

“The Question Is Moot,” a fake game show featured in the 1984 episode that Jackson hosted, shows him torturing contestants played by Gary Kroeger, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mary Gross, by teasing them with seemingly simple trivia questions they were never meant to answer.

When longtime announcer Don Pardo asks Kroeger’s milquetoast contender, “When is the next reappearance of Halley’s Comet scheduled?” a buzzer instantly cuts him off.

“It doesn’t matter. The question is moot,” Jackson intones, before launching into a miniature stump speech. “The White House is locked behind cement barricades. The president confesses he’s afraid to go to church because terrorists are after him. The nuclear holocaust machinery is moving into place . . . So we probably won’t even live to see Halley’s Comet come again. Next question!”

“What president is on the $100 bill?” Pardo asks. BUZZ. “Sorry, the question is moot,” Jackson interjects. “In the last four years of the Reagan administration, very few people got to see a $100 bill.”

“Excuse me, Rev. Jackson,” peeps Gross, “Are we ever going to get to answer a question here?” BUZZ. “The question is moot!” he booms. “Under the Reagan administration, answering questions is no longer a priority. One-liners, smiles, styles and profiles. Issues like education, health care and social programs have to take a back seat to a trillion-dollar military buildup and a $700 billion tax cut for the rich.”

Like many of the oldest “Saturday Night Live” episodes available through NBCUniversal’s streamer, Jackson’s single hosting gig exists only as a version edited from the standard 90 minutes to a syndication-friendly 37 and a half. As for why some material was excised, the reasons vary. There could be issues with guest star clearances or music licensing. For instance, that episode’s music guests, Andrae Crouch and Wintley Phipps, are mentioned but not heard.

Subject matter that has aged poorly also has a way of vanishing, like this episode’s original cold open featuring Billy Crystal impersonating Sammy Davis Jr. in full blackface.

But Jackson’s absent game show spoof was a true highlight of a history-making installment that, in time, would be overshadowed by his 1991 reading of a Dr. Seuss book to commemorate the death of children’s author Theodor Geisel.

Jackson’s playfully sermonized delivery of “Green Eggs and Ham” on “Weekend Update” made the rounds shortly after he died on Tuesday at age 84, as did a clip of his 1972 “Sesame Street” appearance, where he leads a group of children in reciting his poem “I Am – Somebody.” Each evokes the tenderhearted nostalgia held by millions who have never known a version of modern life without Jackson’s presence.

Over the last five decades, new coverage of racial injustice or Black politics almost inevitably included a quote from Jackson. With a finger on history’s pulse informing his head for politics, he eventually was tapped to host CNN’s public affairs series, “Both Sides with Jesse Jackson,” between 1992 and 2000.

Jackson’s way with words was always redoubtable, as was his comedic timing. That was never in question, since great preachers, the ones who make the gospel’s message stick, also know how to make their congregations laugh.

But Jackson’s October 1984 episode was above all a political act — “this last shot at America’s mind,” he calls it in a monologue that’s part victory lap, part wake-up call.

“Sometimes I communicate from pulpits, sometimes from bar stools, sometimes from public parks,” he says. “Sometimes I use examples, sometimes political satire. Tonight’s going to be full of satire. As I look around, we’ve got a long way to go. We just get people where we can find them.”

From there, he defends a campaign the press dismissed as chaotic by praising it as creative.

Then he calls attention to the fact that in the same week as that broadcast, the Nobel committee awarded South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu the Peace Prize while then-President Ronald Reagan increased America’s ties to that country’s apartheid government, strengthening the Krugerrand.

Then the pastor made good on his promise to deliver satire with a bit where, in response to a burst of irritating feedback, he heads to the control room. Its all-white staff hastily dashes out, quickly replaced by Black stand-ins, with Jackson pretending to be none the wiser. “My NBC soul brothers are taking care of it, so I can relax,” he assures his audience.

Jackson’s is the third episode of the 10th season — the one following Eddie Murphy’s departure, but preceding the season that introduced Danitra Vance and, for a short time, Damon Wayans. He was the only “soul brother” in that studio, in other words, and he knew it. Hence, an episode interwoven with his anti-war, anti-nuke and anti-corporate profiteering planks also enabled him to criticize broadcast media’s lack of inclusion.

In a mid-show segment, Jackson, recalling the control room bit, holds then-producer Dick Ebersol responsible for that season’s all-white cast and homogenous writers’ room. (More than a decade later, Jackson expanded that accusation to include all of Hollywood; it would take 20 more years for the groundswell of pressure related to the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag to make any headway in that battle.)

That night, Jackson also uses “Weekend Update” to skewer Reagan’s hypocritical courtship of white Evangelicals while never attending church. Then, he satirizes conservatives’ discomfort with his Blackness by sitting silently as Martin Short, playing a nervous young Republican delivering a hackneyed diatribe, shudders in his presence before scampering offstage to fall apart.

Jackson’s political life was born on TV the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, when, for good or ill, he appeared before cameras with a shirt he claimed was stained with King’s blood. King was Jackson’s mentor, but this act rankled the civil rights leader’s more senior allies, who viewed it as rank self-promotion. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, declined to endorse Jackson’s ‘84 presidential bid, officially out of fear that he couldn’t win the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Still, this may be the earliest evidence of Jackson using the medium to efficiently impress his message on the broadest spectrum of hearts and minds. The young Jackson was telegenic and handsome, with a talent for simplifying social justice slogans and policy positions into epigrams. Rhyming phrases such as “Up with hope, down with dope” made him easily quotable – and, to establishment media and political figures, mockable.

”We’re not choosing a preacher, we’re choosing a president,” said Tennessee’s Sen. Al Gore, in the heat of Jackson’s second run for president in 1988. But Jackson was more famous. Gore went on to earn fewer than half of Jackson’s primary votes, placing third behind that preacher and eventual frontrunner Michael Dukakis.

If Americans thought of Jackson as a political punchline, though, “SNL” played a significant role in cementing that impression. As far as I know, there is no handy accounting of how many times his name was invoked in bits over the years; let’s call it a lot. According to SNLfandom.com, between 1983 and 2008, when he was most active in politics, Jackson was impersonated at least 19 times by action star Carl Weathers, Joe Piscopo, Darrell Hammond and, it probably goes without saying, Eddie Murphy.

In fact, in an episode that aired earlier that year, Murphy lampooned the political error that would follow Jackson for the rest of his life. Not long after a reporter overheard him using an antisemitic slur to refer to New York, Murphy portrayed Jackson pleading for forgiveness as the lead singer of a doo-wop band.

Months later, Jackson had redeemed himself with the Jewish voting bloc and the Democratic party, having abandoned his first run for president after a respectable third-place showing behind Colorado Sen. Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale.

He was the second Democratic presidential contender to host “Saturday Night Live” that year: George McGovern, who dropped out shortly after the primaries, fronted the April 14 episode. This is important context, since McGovern went to that July’s Democratic National Convention in San Francisco and earned four delegates to Jackson’s 465. That convention was also where Jackson forever secured his place within the party’s center with his rousing speech urging its old guard to embrace a broader multicultural spectrum, including the queer community.

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

“Words come easily to Jackson,” remarked British journalist Gary Younge in a 1999 profile for The Guardian. “He has an ability to reduce political discourse to one powerful, lyrical, narrative that both entertains and inspires. Words to him are like clay to a skilled potter; raw material which he effortlessly and deftly manipulates to mould, shape and define something of aesthetic as well as practical value.”

Television provided the best platform for Jackson’s craft, including on the show that often made him the butt of the joke. But on that Saturday night in Studio 8H, Jackson hit the right notes to suit the nation’s post-campaign, pre-election mood, setting the bar for all politicians who followed in this wake. He never breaks once, certainly not as he’s hammering his faux contestants with facts illustrating the many ways America’s government is failing its people.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that more than 40 years later, we’re still contending with all the problems Jackson preached about during that “SNL” episode. The difference is that now, a fake game show host is our real president.

America could have gone a different way in 1984, as Jackson gently let us know that night. But from decades’ worth of distance, we can still appreciate the way he tried to use laughter to unite us, as we’d hope all leaders would strive to do.

“Saturday Night Live” streams on Peacock.

The post On “SNL,” Jesse Jackson proved he knew punchlines have power appeared first on Salon.com.