When Adrien Brody Introduced Sean Paul in Rastafarian Garb on a Notorious Episode of Saturday Night Live, the World Sat Up and Asked, "What is that Dude Smoking?"
Saturday Night Live has played such a central role in my life that if I had a time machine, I would use it to keep Andy Dick from introducing Brynn Hartman to cocaine. Then, if I had time, I would go back and kill Hitler.
I’d want to prevent the Holocaust, of course, but I’d also want to ensure many more decades of Phil Hartman hilarity. Hey, we all have our priorities.
For as long as I can remember Saturday Night Live has occupied a place of supreme importance for me and my generation. I grew up on Saturday Night Live. It played a huge role in shaping my comic sensibility and how I see myself and the world.
Yet, for all my love for Saturday Night Live at its best, no single moment has gotten under my skin and penetrated my psyche like that exquisitely uncomfortable nadir when, on May 10, 2003, host Adrien Brody hijacked the show to introduce musical guest Sean Paul in character as an amped-up rude boy with a clumsily improvised blur of mostly incomprehensible patois.
In a dreadlock wig and dirty undershirt, Brody comes bounding onto the stage, a hurricane of nervous energy. Even before he opens his mouth it’s clear that something is terribly wrong.
The wig is a giveaway, as is the expression on the Academy Award–winning actor’s face. It’s the terrified, excited look of someone who is about to take a HUGE chance, on live TV, where there are no second takes and everything he does will go down in comedy history.
Before he starts nervously sputtering vaguely Rastafarian-sounding gibberish, Brody has the look of a man who does not know whether the pool he is about to dive into is empty or not.
Brody doesn’t just risk looking foolish or not getting laughs: he risks dying. He risks obliterating himself on live television in a way that people will talk about for decades to come.
But Brody can’t go back. He’s too far gone. Sure, he could limit the shtick to a wig and an unintelligible accent, but he’s onstage on Saturday Night Live with an opportunity to do his comedy his way, so he goes for it.
Besides, what are they going to do? Have a security guard tackle him? Send Lorne onstage to give him a public scolding? By the time anyone even figures out what he’s doing it’ll be over, and the focus will be on Sean Paul.
Brody’s fidgety body language and facial expressions betray no small amount of existential terror. Powered by a potent combination of arrogance and fear, Brody talks so quickly that it’s difficult to understand him.
“Ya mon,” Brody slurs repeatedly as the crowd hoots and hollers, egging him on the same way a class of unruly students would encourage the misbehavior of the class clown.
The audience knows instantly that Brody will get into a lot of trouble for breaking the rules of this most rigid and rule-bound of comedy institutions. They fucking love it.
“We got original rude boy Sean Paul here, ya know?” Brody eventually gets around to sputtering.
Having exhausted the comic possibilities of saying “ya mon” in a matter of seconds, Brody then turns his attention to the word “respect” and starts riffing manically on it, mumbling, “Me respect, me neck spect, me uncle spect, me auntie spect.”
Brody mistakenly seems to think that the audience is hooting and hollering because they think he’s funny. He doesn’t realize that the studio audience is cheering for the same reason NASCAR fans root for crashes: because it’s a fascinating shit show they can’t take their eyes off—a five-car pileup commemorated for posterity on live TV.
Every second seems to last an eternity as Brody continues to toss out every Jamaican-sounding phrase he can think of, from “big up Jamaican massive” to “big up Kingston massive” before returning to his beloved “ya mons” and promising that the whole family was in the house.
The whole routine is over in about forty seconds, but it seems much longer, for it is that rarest of wonders: a genuinely spontaneous moment on Saturday Night Live.
There is a system in place specifically to ensure that moments like Brody’s outburst do not happen. There is an awful, terrible magic to the moment, a cringe-inducing fascination, a level of miscalculation that is nothing less than mesmerizing.
To call Brody’s Rastafarian-spoofing antics satire would be obscenely generous. Even categorizing it as humor seems a stretch. There’s no target, no point of view, no satirical thesis, only a childish conviction that the way that those reggae guys talk is funny, and that there are big healing laughs to be won from someone outside the culture cartoonishly imitating them.
Brody might have thought that he was honoring Sean Paul by giving him an in-character introduction.
Instead, Brody upstaged Sean Paul. Brody’s introduction ensured that audiences would spend the entirety of Sean Paul’s second song wondering what just happened and whether it’s possible for Lorne Michaels to fire someone who doesn’t actually work for him.
After breaking Michaels’ iron-clad rule against improvisation and ad-libbing, Brody instantly made the list of people banned from Saturday Night Live.
In his early roles, Brody consistently illustrated taste, intelligence, and solid judgment. That taste, intelligence, and judgment abandons him, however, when he indulges an unfortunate weakness for broad comedy.
Roughly a decade after Brody became the youngest man ever to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, he lent his time, energy, and name to the 2013 sketch comedy film InAPPropriate Comedy.
When Brody decided to use his artistry to breathe life into the character of flamboyantly gay Dirty Harry parody Flirty Harry, he was not an unknown. He wasn’t a teenager. He wasn’t a kid.
By that point Brody had won an Academy Award. He’d been directed by Spike Lee, Terence Malick, Roman Polanski, Steven Soderbergh, Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, Peter Jackson, and Wes Anderson, with whom he would collaborate repeatedly.
The voice inside Brody that insisted that the world MUST meet his wacky white Rastafarian character angrily demanded that he choose to be associated with inAPPropriate Comedy.
inAPPropriate Comedy is so convinced that gay equals funny that it doesn’t bother with jokes. Or logic. Instead of “Go ahead, make my day,” Flirty Harry instead substitutes, “Go ahead, make me gay,” when he’s already so cartoonishly gay that his in-your-face sexuality reduces the movie to giggle fits.
For six endless minutes Brody rasps lascivious dialogue like,
“I told you before, I am not gonna wait around for a bunch of other dicks. Not when I have an opening to take those guys from the rear.”
“Yeah. I don’t think you understand. Those boys were packing heat. I mean, as soon as I came, those assholes opened up. Yeah, opened up and started spraying everywhere.”
“So I went in. Yeah, I went in deep, balls to the wall, but I unloaded into both of those assholes. And it felt good.”
While Flirty Harry talks dirty his fellow cops look on with visceral disgust, as if the mere idea of gay sex makes them want to projectile vomit in horror.
The most embarrassing aspect of Brody’s role in inAPPropriate Comedy is that he’s given an additional dialogue credit for it. That means that Brody didn’t just play Flirty Harry; he helped create the character as well, using the same improvisational muscles that once gave birth to his Rastafarian character on Saturday Night Live.
There’s something fascinatingly personal about Brody’s ill-fated Saturday Night Live improvisation and performance as Flirty Harry. Watching Brody die a horrible death onscreen I feel like I’m seeing something weird within him that should be repressed at all costs.
Watching Brody in both of these roles, I felt as though I was seeing the real Adrien Brody, one whose desire to make people laugh is as poignant as it is innately doomed.
Michaels had ample reason to be apoplectic over Brody’s shenanigans. It’s not that Brody’s Rasta routine was too racist and unfunny to make it onto the show. Instead, Brody was unlucky in that his brand of Caribbean minstrelsy was racist in a manner that Lorne Michaels did not condone.
But if Michaels had ample reason to rue the day he ever agreed to book Brody as a host, he has reason to be grateful as well.
Since Brody so clearly went rogue with his Sean Paul introduction no one could blame the dreadfulness of his shtick on the man in charge.
For perhaps the final time, audiences found themselves appreciating the relative racial sensitivity and quality control Michaels brings to the show.
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