Yes, the show really went downhill after the incursion.
The SNL incursion began with a coup in the tiny island nation of St. Clare in the fall of 1979. The leaders of the coup were unable to maintain civil order, and the capital of Assisi Town soon descended into chaos. The Carter Administration was paralyzed by the Iran Hostage Crisis and resisted involvement, the UN was unable to pass a resolution, and for three days images of riots and looting led the nightly news. One of those watching the news was TV executive Lorne Michaels, who had been reading Kissinger’s memoirs while taking huge amounts of absinthe. Michaels imagined that his cast of zany comedians would be able to restore order by holding free improv performances for the peasants of St. Clare, not coincidentally providing much-needed press coverage for his show. When the junta’s leaders declined his offer, Michaels went into a rage.
Buying weapons on the black market, Michaels armed his cast and prepared to bring comedy to the island by force. They would be accompanied by a camera crew, which would provide footage for a plabbed TV “special.” The Not Ready for Zero Hour Players waded ashore in predawn darkness on January 10th and moved quickly to the center of Assisi Town to set up a stage. By 9 am, the members of the cast went looking for an audience. The cameras recorded Bill Murray and Chevy Chase going house to house asking peasants to come to the town center for the show. The villagers, however were confused: St. Clare is a French-speaking island, and they did not understand what the Americans wanted. Even Murray’s promises of a Larraine Newman striptease did not move the populace.
By noon, the junta’s leaders had surrounded the Americans and began to demand to know why they had come. As they attempted to explain their presence, John Belushi rummaged through the prop box looking for something to make their comedic goals plain. It was a mistake.
When Belushi pulled out a Samurai sword to recreate a popular skit from the show, the junta leaders interpreted it as a threat. What happened next is still unclear, but Michaels and his cast insist they were placed in mortal danger. Footage of the confrontation shows Belushi stabbing an armed St. Clare militiaman through with the sword and Gilda Radner picking up his AK-47. A gunfight ensued, in which one militiaman was killed, two others wounded. SNL writer Al Franken was also wounded, taking a bullet in the thigh. Cameras continued to roll, showing some cast members hiding from gunfire, some returning fire, and musical director Paul Shaffer wildly firing an M-60 machine gun in the air, laughing and screaming “Die, die, you agrarian bastards.”
The junta leaders eventually fell back, and the SNL cast returned to the beach and left the island after dark. NBC did their best to quash reporting on the botched incursion; they dismissed stories of a fat white man with a sword as local legend. Since the residents of St. Clare did not speak English, American reporters were never able to learn the real story. The camera footage was permanantly buried in NBC vaults (though a small portion of the Shaffer footage was once aired on the David Letterman program). Nonetheless, months later, Michaels and the entire cast were fired from the show. It was not until much later that the full story was told, by Garrett Morris in his 1991 self-published autobiography, “Where Am I Now?”
To this day, many are not even aware that the incursion ever took place; it is a mere footnote in the long chronicle of US misadventures in the Caribbean, and the return of hostages in Iran soon after ended all interest in St. Clare. Nor has the fiasco apparently affected the careers of the members of the show who ventured onto St. Clare in the predawn hours that January morning in 1980. But there can be no doubt that the incursion changed the show forever. Stripped of its talent, it began a long period that came to be called “the unfunny years.”
