This Sunday, the biggest event of the year for the WWE, Wrestlemania 31, takes place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. A lot of wrestling writers and fans are predicting a lackluster event this year, with a main event no one wants — WWE champion Brock Lesnar versus Roman Reigns — to matches involving wrestling relics The Undertaker and Sting.
The night before, some 2500 miles to the east of Santa Clara, a former WWE champ and star of the upcoming Furious 7, Dwayne Johnson, will make his fourth appearance as host of Saturday Night Live. The histories of SNL and professional wrestling crossed paths long before Dwayne Johnson became The Rock, and then went back to being Dwayne Johnson.
In fact, professional wrestling first made an appearance during the 13th episode of the very first season of SNL. In the sketch, “All-Pro Wrestling,” host Peter Boyle and John Belushi are The Bees — not The Killer Bees of 1980’s tag team wrestling fame — who compete in a tag team match against The WASPs (Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase). The match and sketch end when a cow drops into the ring.
While “All-Pro Wrestling” was the first sketch to contain professional wrestling, it’s probably not the most well-known. Here are five other great professional wrestling moments from Saturday Night Live:
Andy Kaufman
Kaufman’s ninth appearance on SNL in October 1979 is the beginning of possibly the strangest, most involved joke in comedy history. While Kaufman had been wrestling women for months as a part of his act, this appearance marked the first time he did so in front of a national television audience. Over the course of the next few years, Kaufman would wrestle and defeat over 400 women before ultimately starting a feud with Jerry “The King” Lawler.
His feud with Lawler would last until 1982 when the two finally met in the squared circle in Memphis. While Kaufman actually did hurt his neck during this match after a piledriver from Lawler, the two played up the severity of the injury during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman.
The whole Lawler/Kaufman feud wasn’t revealed to be fake until 1995 — 11 years after Kaufman’s death — when it was disclosed during a Kaufman documentary, and subsequently Lawler has stated that both men improvised during their match and Letterman appearance.
Mr. T and Hulk Hogan Hosting
On the eve of the very first Wrestlemania at Madison Square Garden in 1985, SNL was hosted by Mr. T and Hulk Hogan, who were scheduled to wrestle “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper the next day in the main event.
Oddly enough, Hogan and T were replacement hosts after actor Steve Landesberg became ill. Landesberg, who was three years removed from his Emmy-nominated role as Arthur Dietrich on Barney Miller, actually does a stand-up set during this episode.
Hogan and T were not great hosts, and appear sparingly throughout the episode, possibly because material was originally written with Landesberg in mind. This appearance though had to have been a huge coup for Vince McMahon and the WWF, who according to writer David Shoemaker in The Squared Circle, would have gone out of business if the first Wrestlemania was a flop.
Saturday Night’s Main Event
While Saturday Night’s Main Event technically has nothing to do with SNL, no history of SNL and professional wrestling would be complete without at least mentioning this sometime SNL replacement. In 1985, NBC executive and SNL producer Dick Ebersol signed an agreement for Vince McMahon to produce Main Event, and just two months after the first Wrestlemania in May 1985, the first episode of Main Event aired on NBC.
The show would last on NBC until 1991 before moving to FOX, and eventually being canceled entirely a year later. For fans of the WWF who couldn’t afford the pay-per-view events, it was one of the only places to see stars like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant wrestle, and a March 1987 show still holds the highest ratings ever (11.6) for the Saturday 11:30 p.m. time slot.
Chris Farley
Built like a less hairy George “The Animal” Steele, Chris Farley had two memorable appearances as wrestlers on SNL. The first time was during a cold open in 1993 when President Clinton (Phil Hartman) is in a reception line meeting 800 wrestlers. Farley as one of these wrestlers calls the president “Bill Chicken” because he stood behind a “woman’s skirt” during the campaign before shaking the president’s hand.
The other sketch, “Weather Scope,” aired during his lone hosting appearance in 1997. In one of Farley’s all-time great SNL moments, he appears as the climate changing El Nino, and is eventually subdued by meteorologist Ric Flair (Jim Breuer). Sadly, neither of these sketches are available in their entirety online.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
Johnson hosted SNL for the first time in March 2000, less than a month before appearing in the main event against Triple H, Mick Foley, and Big Show at Wrestlemania 2000. The Rock’s three Wrestlemania opponents interrupted his monologue with Triple H even breaking character to wish the host good luck.
Over the course of his three appearances as host, Johnson has become a fan favorite, and even has his own recurring character, The Rock Obama. The biggest crossover star in the history of the WWE likely has many more SNL appearances ahead of him.
With their long television histories, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that SNL and professional wrestling have crossed paths more than a few times over the past 40 years. Both have large fan bases, who are not afraid to critique the direction that either is heading, but also remain loyal, almost to a fault. As television outsiders who have weathered downtimes, and defeated numerous rivals to their ratings crowns, SNL and the WWE continue to be the places comedians and wrestlers aspire to reach.
