‘SNL’ Boss Lorne Michaels Changes Tune on Sinead O’Connor’s Infamous Stunt

Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels has changed his tune about Sinead O’Connor’s pope-trashing stunt on the show—which he once called “selfish” and “dishonest.”

In the new documentary Ladies & Gentleman… 50 Years of SNL Music premiering Jan. 27 on NBC and streaming the next day on Peacock, Michaels shares his new take on O’Connor’s tearing a photo of Pope John Paul II during her Oct. 1992 SNL performance.

“There was a part of me that just admired the bravery of what she’d done, and also the absolute sincerity of it,” he says, but he doesn’t elaborate on his earlier comments about O’Connor in the doc, which had a very different tone.

In an interview for Spin‘s Feb. 1993 SNL takeover issue, Michaels slammed O’Connor’s stunt a few months after it happened.

“I thought [it] was sort of the wrong place for it, I thought her behavior was inappropriate,” Michaels said then. “Because it was difficult to do two comedy sketches after it, and also it was dishonest because she didn’t tell us she was going to do it.”

He also told Spin that he was shocked “the way you would be shocked at a houseguest pissing on a flower arrangement in the dining room.”

O’Connor, who died in July 2023, performed Bob Marley’s “War” as producers expected, but then replaced some of its lyrics with “child abuse” as she sang—that part, unexpected.

She then stared defiantly into the camera and said, “Fight the real enemy,” as she tore the Pope’s photo to pieces.

Adding to Michaels’ feeling of betrayal was that O’Connor had advised the show to ready a closeup on her face. He told Charlie Rose later that same month that his first thought was “Why us?”

Michaels further described what happened on the show behind the scenes immediately afterward in Spin. “The audience reaction, which was complete silence, which I don’t think we’ve ever had here, was more like, sort of, we don’t know what this is so we’re not touching it. Then Al Franken had to come out and do the comedy stylings of Stuart Smalley, and it was just very, very uphill. Maybe [O’Connor] doesn’t know we’re a comedy show, that could well be. But it’s real hard.”

The Irish singer had been protesting the Catholic church on behalf of children who’d accused its officials of sexual abuse—including herself. She says in an archival interview in the doc, “That picture is of [Pope John Paul II] when he did his tour of Ireland. Ireland has the highest instance in Europe of child abuse I experienced it myself, and I found his presence in Ireland, telling the young people of Ireland that he loved them, hilarious.”

Michaels says in the Ladies & Gentleman that “Sirens were going off in the background in the control room and all that” following O’Connor’s move.

The backlash to the stunt was enormous, with many placing the blame on SNL and Michaels. His position then was to point the finger back at O’Connor, and even seemed to take a shot at her music. “It’s not a hot album,” he told Spin, though he added he had “a real respect for her as an artist.”

“I know she has what she sees as very valid reasons for doing it, and I have to admire her for doing the exact same thing at the Dylan concert,” he said. “Tearing up a picture of the Pope comes under the heading of a Comedy Killer. It kind of breaks the spirit of the evening.”

He concluded, “All saints are selfish.” It seems that now, Michaels would rather focus on O’Connor’s “bravery.”