In the Epic History of Unfunny Saturday Night Live Hosts, None Was Less Funny than Steven Seagal

One of my friends co-wrote The Onion Movie, the satirical institution’s ill-fated foray into the world of feature films. As you probably are not aware Steven Seagal contributed a cameo as Cockpuncher, an action hero whose signature move involves hitting dudes in their dongs. 

Seagal took himself very seriously and insisted that my friend be on set so that he could consult with him. Seagal told the screenwriter that his movies all had important social or political messages in them and wanted to know what the moral of Cockpuncher was.

I don’t remember whether the comedy writer made up a bullshit message on the spot or told him that there was no message to Cockpuncher: he was just a man who punched people in the cock. 

It’s not just that Seagal was uniquely terrible at comedy; he also didn’t seem to understand it. Comedy was a language he did not speak, a form of calculus that he could not compute. 

Seagal’s experiences with The Onion Movie help explain why Lorne Michaels considers him the single worst host in the show’s forty-eight year history. 

What’s remarkable about Seagal’s week as the host of Saturday Night Live is that it is largely devoid of the egregious fuck-ups that characterize so many disastrous stints. 

Unlike Milton Berle, Seagal wasn’t going to try to cram twenty minutes of Borscht Belt stand-up into a five minute monologue. Unlike Frank Zappa he did not try to subvert and undermine the show from within. He did not work blue like Martin Lawrence or Andrew “Dice” Clay. He did not appear to be having a nervous breakdown like Louise Lasser and he most assuredly wasn’t soused the way Kris Kristofferson was when he hosted. 

What made Seagal so terrible? Why was he so egregiously awful as a host? 

That X factor that made Seagal not just a bad host but someone considered the worst is arrogance. As evidenced by his time shooting The Onion Movie, Seagal is astonishingly pretentious for a pony-tailed dude who pretends to beat up other men for a living. 

Seagal isn’t willing to look foolish or silly or be the butt of jokes. He wanted to look cool, and hip, and tough, and popular. He didn’t seem to understand that people laugh at the class clown, not the class bully or the most popular kid in class. 

In a cold open that was edited out of the version of the show that airs on Peacock (but not the full-length episode I found on the Internet Archive) Dana Carvey’s Hans and Franz are posing and primping and denigrating all of their cousin Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rivals. 

This includes Steven Seagal, who wanders into the frame and shuts down these steroid-addled buffoons through a combination of coolness and devastating martial arts prowess. Seagal only needs his little finger to show those teutonic doofuses who’s boss. 

I can only imagine how excited Chris Rock and Tim Meadows must have been to be singing back-up for Steven Seagal.

Seagal’s signatures as a sketch comedy performer are speaking in a barely comprehensible whisper-mumble and eye-fucking the cue cards so intensely that he might as well hold them in his hands.

The jackass’ moody whisper isn’t a problem in action movies where sound engineers can use technological wizardry to make it possible for audiences to hear what Seagal is saying. 

Also, you need to be able to hear what someone is saying in order to laugh at it and Seagal most assuredly is not a physical comedian. Or a comedian of any sort. He’s closer to being the antithesis of a comedian—again, the class bully who beat up the class clown—than he is to being a funnyman. 

Seagal’s monologue consists largely of pausing for applause when he talks about how successful his movies are before boasting pretentiously, “My movies are more than just action. I like to try to explore the mythical poet and the warrior that has all but vanished in modern society, the relationship between man and god (and) the struggle of the common man against politically corrupt systems.” 

This leads to him performing a cover of the moderately racist 1970s novelty hit “Kung Fu Fighting.” “Kung Fu Fighting” became a hit because it’s a fun, goofy, high energy ear worm with a killer hook. 

That’s not Seagal’s take on it, however. Though Seagal has put out albums as a musician he talk-sings his way through a bizarrely low-energy performance executed at half-speed. 

Seagal’s final signature as a sketch performer is that he does not care. Seagal broadcasts his apathy and indifference. It’s as if the episode was a Speed knockoff and a maniac was holding Seagal’s wife hostage and promised to kill her if Seagal expressed even a single emotion over the course of the 90 minute show.  

In Seagal’s next sketch he’s the hot-headed, maverick cop he plays in pretty much all his movies. He’s unorthodox but he gets results. Unfortunately, a captain played by Phil Hartman doesn’t like his attitude and grounds him. 

At his new office gig filling out paperwork Seagal encounters a gentleman you might be familiar with: Rob Schneider’s Makin’ Copies Guy. 

The Makin’ Copies Guy is iconically incredibly irritating. That’s his whole shtick: he’s the awkward weirdo who is alway trying way too hard to be friendly and have friends. 

Seagal’s gritty cop is having none of it, however, and ends the sketch by dangling the human irritant out of a window until he promises to stop talking to him. 

Sketch endings are notoriously difficult but more than once the writers lazily close things out with, “Steven Seagal beats everybody up because he’s so tough and cool and badass and good at fighting.” 

The thing that’s tricky about this episode is that if you remove the host from the equation it’s actually extremely solid, even inspired. There are at least three laugh out loud sketches 

This was an amazing cast. Phil Hartman is particularly hilarious. Having Hartman and Seagal be in the same sketch is like having a basketball team that features both Michael Jordan and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. One is just a little better than the other. 

He absolutely destroys as the white-haired, deadpan proprietor of a funeral home that promises clients that they will not have sex with their dead loved ones, and if an employee is caught having sex with a corpse then they’ll be discounted a full one thousand dollars. 

He’s equally hilarious and ribald as Charlton Heston in a standout segment as satirical as it is hilarious. The sketch ratchets the performative, sentimental, out of control patriotism of the Desert Storm era to satirical levels by having celebrities salute every single soldier that served in the Iraq War. 

Kevin Nealon’s Tom Selleck and Jan Hooks’ Barbara Mandrell host a gaudy show-business spectacle honoring an anonymous grunt played by Tim Meadows.

Meadows makes for a perfect straight man because he plays the situation seriously. He responds the way his character would if inexplicably treated like a big shot and not a grunt, with appreciation but also confusion because he hasn’t really done anything to deserve such an honor beyond having a military job. 

In a Ken Burns-like development, the show has Charlton Heston read one of the soldier’s letters home. The letter is about how incredibly horny the soldier is, and how he can’t stop masturbating feverishly but that’s okay because everybody else in the desert is also horny and also jerking off constantly in what’s less a conventional war than one giant wankathon.

Hartman and Meadows are in perfect harmony. Hartman’s Heston is proudly, defiantly ribald and Meadows is appropriately and sufficiently mortified. 

Seagal pointedly does not appear in the sketch. He doesn’t appear in the episode’s other great sketch either. It’s an absurdist winner in which Casey Kasem announces a “We Are the World”-like all-star charity single for a very specific and unique cause: Free-range chickens. 

Carvey’s Kasem is dead-on and the sketch nails the melodramatic, wildly excessive nature of charity singles nearly as well as “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Don’t Download This Song.” 

Seagal’s complete and total apathy makes musical guest Michael Bolton’s slick professionalism seem borderline heroic. He’s at least trying and that sets him apart Seagal.

As host, Seagal had to be in at least some of the sketches, unfortunately. He pops back up in a bit devoted to Nat X, Chris Rock’s signature character on the show in a leather jacket and pompadour wig playing Andrew “Dice” Clay. 

Clay has incredibly distinctive, imitable cadences, tics and body language. He should be the easiest impression in the world but it’s beyond Seagal. For starters, he has a cigarette in his mouth that’s not lit and Dice isn’t Dice unless he’s smoking a cigarette expressively and expansively. 

Seagal’s take on Clay is that he was brash and vaguely Italian. In a weird bit of synchronicity Seagal does Clay here, who I just wrote up in the last My World of Flops piece, while in the Dice episode there’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to Frank Zappa, whose episode I wrote up on Tuesday.  

Clay’s apathy makes musical guest Michael Bolton’s slick professionalism seem borderline heroic by comparison. Bolton’s songs are pure schmaltz but at least he’s trying. 

Seagal reappears in the final sketch playing a badass who traded in kicking butts to photographing ecological bad guys for Greenpeace. The gag is that Seagal’s martial arts-adept shutterbug stumbles upon Exxon sleaze bags, led by Phil Hartman, confessing to an endless series of crimes, most egregious. 

Having traded in his old life for a more Zen disposition Seagal lets the white-collar criminals beat him up until he turns the tables on them and beats up all the bad guys. He does that because Steven Seagal is so tough and cool and badass and always wins in the end. 

My World Of FlopsNathan RabinSteven Seagal, Phil Hartman