When Hosting Saturday Night Live, Martin Lawrence Had a Lot to Say About Female Genital Hygiene, and it Wasn't All Appropriate Or Germane — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

There’s a Key & Peel sketch inspired by the viral moment when President Obama very stiffly, formerly and properly shook a white USA basketball official’s hand and then exuberantly embraced black basketball star Kevin Durant like he was a beloved cousin at a family reunion.

The show’s parody has Obama finish a speech and then greet an interracial aggregation of admirers. With caucasians he is the very image of stiff propriety but he doesn’t just shake the hands of the African-Americans in the crowd; he gives them each individualized embraces overflowing with intimacy, rhythm and tenderness.

It’s an example of what is known as code-switching. That’s when people consciously or unconsciously alter their behavior, speech and body language based on their audience.

Lord, please bless me with a memorable episode of *Saturday Night Live,* one people will be talking and writing about decades later, and not in a Monkey’s Paw kind of way either.

Martin Lawrence’s famously disastrous 1994 episode of Saturday Night Live represents a historic failure at code-switching, a legendary instance of a performer failing to read the room.

When he got the hosting gig Lawrence was red-hot in multiple mediums. He was one of the hottest stand-up comedians alive thanks to the zeitgeist-capturing HBO hit Def Comedy Jam and his 1994 concert film You So Crazy.

Lawrence was just a year away from his cinematic breakthrough in 1995’s Bad Boys and was already a few years into the lengthy run of his eponymous hit television show.

Def Comedy Jam wasn’t just a show that appealed to an overwhelmingly African-American audience. Its title quickly became synonymous with a style of black comedy that was bawdy and bold, outrageous and filled with profanity and sexual content.

Things were going very well for Lawrence professionally but personally he was falling apart. The pressure was getting to him. In the years ahead Lawrence would be as notorious for run-ins with the law, psychological problems and scary outbursts, at least one of which involved waving around a gun and yelling at random passerby to fight the power, as he would be for his comedy.

Lawrence’s appearance on Saturday Night Live cannot be understood outside of that context. Lawrence had everything. Superstardom seemed imminent. It seemed inevitable that he would reach the rarified heights of peers and costars like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith.

or he could end up doing this, one or the other.

Only one thing could stop Martin Lawrence: Martin Lawrence. Martin Lawrence’s genius for self-destruction was the only force in the universe powerful enough to destroy his seemingly charmed career.

Lawrence’s stint as host also cannot be understood outside of the context of mental illness and substance abuse. I know from personal experience that those can lead people to make bad choices that negatively affect their lives.

The future star of Big Momma’s House’s time with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players was full of terrible choices, most of them localized around his infamous monologue.

But before Lawrence can mortify Lorne Michaels with his potty mouth we get off to a lackluster start with a sketch that feels like it was haphazardly assembled, Madlibs-style, by throwing together two easy topical references, in this case with Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding incident and the Clinton Healthcare Reform Bill.

The cold opener takes the form of Harding criminal associate and all-around creep Jeff Gilooly (Rob Schneider, with a painted-on child molester mustache) talking to the audience about the Clinton Health Care Reform Bill from the unique and very specific perspective of someone who has orchestrated a physical attack on his girlfriend’s Olympics rival and then went to prison for the crime. It’s a low-energy, low-ambition, laugh-deficient way to start an absolute shit-show of an episode.

Then Lawrence bounds onto the stage filled with energy and excitement and quite possibly some manner of powerful stimulant. He begins preening proudly, like a peacock that has just ingested an enormous amount of cocaine.

Lawrence’s first words are, tellingly, “Man oh man. Look at all these white people! I guess this ain’t the Def Jam, right? I guess I better be cool.”

He then proceeds to deliver a performance tailor-made to offend and insult the show’s white audience. Despite that worthwhile aspiration, the result was still egregiously awful.

Lawrence says that hosting Saturday Night Live is a dream come true. Incidentally, I think the show’s writers are so lazy and narcissistic that they write that into every monologue, even if the host is someone like Buzz Aldrin or Ralph Nader.

Lawrence complains about the censors being all over his “damn” ass.

“How am I going to talk about the WORLD?” Lawrence indignantly inquires, if he is forced by “The Man” to tone down his act and soft-sell his explosive satirical truths?

Lawrence presents himself as a man who must unburden himself, as someone who needs to talk with an audience about things that matter.

The controversial comedian finally has one of the premiere stages in all of comedy. It’s his time. He wants to make the most of it. He’s waited his turn. It’s all led up to this. This is his moment.

So what does Lawrence have to say?

"The Ladies in the nineties have license to cut off the pilly-packers!” Lawrence insists. “They got license to cut your thing off!”

What’s remarkable, in hindsight, about Lawrence’s exhausted gags about John Wayne Bobbitt’s severed penis, arguably the most hack joke subject of the 1990s, is that it represents the classy part of the monologue, the acceptable part, the part that Lorne Michaels presumably held his nose and signed off on because the kids seemed to like this Martin Lawrence fellow and he was obviously going to work a little blue. This was the part that wasn’t cut from all subsequent airings.

This is as droll and witty as Bob Newhart doing his King Kong telephone routine compared to what’s to come.

Lawrence then ambles up to the topic of his next block of jokes by insisting, “Something else concerns me and it hurts. See, I’m single. I’m a single man and I don’t have nobody. I’m looking for somebody but I’m meeting a lot of women out there and you got some beautiful women and you got some out there and uh…I gotta say something…um…”

Then come the nine words that would get Lawrence uninvited from Saturday Night Live for eternity and land him a place of shame on lists of all-time worst hosts: “Some of you are not washing your ass properly!”

Lawrence is concerned that the women of the nineties—as he repeatedly and hilariously refers to them, in order to separate them, I suppose, from the men of nineteen twenties—are being insufficiently vigilant in washing their anuses and vaginas.

This shameful lack of proper vaginal and anal hygiene vexes Lawrence to the point that he feels the need to comment on it publicly.

Lest every woman in the audience assume that Lawrence was personally attacking them for their foul-smelling genital regions the funnyman clarifies that he’s not attacking EVERY woman, just the ones who are not washing as diligently as he would like, insisting, “Don’t get me wrong! Not all! Some of you! You know what I’m saying? I’m sorry. Listen, I don’t know what a woman gotta do to keep up the hygiene on the body. I’m watching douche commercials on television and I’m wondering if some of you aren’t reading the instructions. I don’t think so.”

Judging by his words Lawrence does not seem to understand how the female body works, particularly the bathing suit areas. Yet that somehow has not kept Lawrence from trying to mansplain to women how their own bodies work and how they should take care of them so as to not displease his delicate sensibilities with malodorous scents.

Lawrence’s interest in female genital hygiene is more than academic. Being a randy bachelor with an eye for the ladies, he would love to be able to perform oral sex on his sexual partners indiscriminately but he’s concerned that he’ll be very unpleasantly surprised by foul smells.

“I’m getting with the ladies, smelling odors and thinking, ‘Wait a minute! Girl, smell yourself!” Lawrence shouts before vigorously pretending to rub his own anus. “This you!”

The Bad Boys star continues, “I tell a woman in a minute, douche! Douche! Some women don’t like when you tell them that, when you’re straightforward with them.”

Lawrence then imagines that he is talking to an angry woman who responds poorly to his insistence that she douche properly, following the instructions to the letter, and also wash her ass in a manner that meets his exacting standards for cleanliness.

He then gets very angry at this phantom woman for her indolence.

He imagines her responding to his advice by snapping, “Douche? Forget you! You cannot douche all the time! You’re going to wash all the natural juices out the body!”
This further enrages the comedian, who responds to his imaginary hater by snapping, “I don’t care what you do! Put a Tic Tac up ya ass! Put a Cert up ya ass!”

Then, with sour aggression he tells his theoretical adversary, “This looks like a perfect place to put a stick up ya damn ass.”

I understandably assumed that Lawrence’s monologue would end at this point, or, at the very least, it wouldn’t get even more disgusting.

I was wrong! Oh good lord was I wrong. That’s because Lawrence then segues from verbally attacking and threatening a non-existent woman mad at his harsh truths about feminine hygiene and enters the Yeast Infection section of his monologue.

“I’m sorry, y’all. You got to wash properly! I’m a man. I like to kiss on women. I like to kiss all over their bodies.

But if you’re not clean in your proper areas I can’t…kiss all over the places I want to kiss, with some women, you know, going down knowing they got a Yeast Infection. I’m sorry. Come up with dough all over ya damn lip. Got a bagel and a croissant on your lip. Anybody got any butter? I like jelly on mine.” are Lawrence’s exact words.

Oh, and then, for no discernible reason, Martin Lawrence starts taking off his clothes.

funny, he doesn’t LOOK crazed or out of control!

It’s honestly a little strange and off-putting.

Then, seemingly six or seven years after it began, the opening monologue finally ends.

The long national nightmare of Martin Lawrence giving unsolicited, unwanted advice to the women of the nineties on how to properly care for their vaginas is finally over and the hilarity can begin.

By going off-script with the raunchiest, grossest monologue in Saturday Night Live history Lawrence was ensuring that the following eighty minutes or so, which would, of course, be broadcast live, would be filled with tension and weird vibes.

The cast would have to perform alongside a man who had just gone rogue in a way that betrayed his contempt for the show, its writers and its cast.

Then Lawrence pops up alongside Phil Hartman in Thugs, a one-joke Cops parody that finds them playing career criminals going about their illegal endeavors with a camera crew documenting their every move.

It’s not funny but it doesn’t make you viscerally uncomfortable the way his monologue and the next sketch do.

Featured player Al Franken returns as Stuart Smalley with Lawrence as “Martin L”, an African-American comedian who takes an instant dislike to the public access host.

When Smalley asks his guest for a hug he scoffs and insists, “I ain’t hugging no ho-mo!” He then repeats that slur and calls Smalley a “fairy queen” and an “ass pirate”, which was apparently an ad-lib Lawrence threw in especially for the live broadcast.

The turn is that underneath Lawrence’s homophobic bluster he’s hurting on the inside and could use a friend like Stuart Smalley but that doesn’t make anywhere near as strong an impression as hearing a dude rattle off a series of homophobic slurs.

The free-floating nastiness extends to “Weekend Update”, where Norm MacDonald delivers a deadpan spiel about Michael Jackson being sued for plagiarism and how wrong that is when he’s not a plagiarist: he’s a child molester.

MacDonald refers to Jackson’s “seducing” and “having sex” with children as opposed to raping and sexually assaulting them. In another context it might be funny but as with Lawrence calling Stuart Smalley an ass pirate, the ugliness defeats the comedy. Then David Spade smirks his way through an insufferable series of snide one-liners like “What’s eating Gilbert Grape? I’m not sure but I know what’s not seeing Gilbert Grape: America!”

Take that, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? About time someone knocked that movie off its pedestal.

Lawrence plays another outsized caricature of a psychotic career criminal in a Scared Straight parody that turns out to be a vehicle for Chris Farley’s Matt Foley of living in a van by the river fame.

As with pretty much everything that precedes it, the profane nastiness of a sketch that calls upon the show’s guest host to threaten to rape young boys for a pack of cigarettes defeats the comedy.

There’s a malevolent energy to the whole evening that feels like an extension of Lawrence’s infamous deviation from the script during his monologue.

Even if Lawrence had nailed the monologue and dazzled the censors and audiences alike with his wit and sophistication this episode would still be a dud. Nothing works. The sketches are feeble and drag on interminably. The cast is huge and doesn’t cohere.

Mike Meyers is a non-entity except for a half-assedly surreal bike messenger sketch that’s twee and cloying and brutally unfunny in a different way than the rest of the show.

Myers was clearly biding his time until he could leave and Hartman is wasted. Something is seriously wrong when sketch writers can’t come up with anything for Phil Hartman to do.

There is one big laugh in the episode, however, and it’s one that was not on the original broadcast, AKA the Dirty Version.

Instead of showing the portion of Lawrence’s monologue devoted to policing feminine vaginal cleaning its contents are summarized by an offscreen narrator with the perfect note of bone dry sarcasm: “At this point in his monologue, Martin begins a commentary on what he considers the decline in standards of feminine hygiene in this country. Although we at Saturday Night Live take no stand on this issue one way or the other, network policy prevents us from re-broadcasting this portion of his remarks. In summary, Martin feels, or felt at the time, that the failure of many young women to bathe thoroughly is a serious problem that demands our attention. He explores this problem, citing numerous examples from his personal experience, and ends by proposing several imaginative solutions. It was a frank and lively presentation, and nearly cost us all our jobs. We now return to the conclusion of Martin’s monologue.”