In the latest episode of Saturday Night Live alums Dana Carvey and David Spade’s podcast Fly On The Wall, Sharon Stone stopped by the show and addressed how she felt while hosting the show in 1992, including that now infamous “Airport Security Check” sketch.
In the segment, Stone plays a woman at the airport who security asks to remove one item of clothing at a time, the joke being that they don’t think she’s hiding a weapon—they just want her to take her clothes off.
Carvey took the opportunity to address the implicit sexism of the scene as well as his portrayal of an Indian man. “I want to apologize publicly for the security check sketch where I played an Indian man and we’re convincing Sharon, her character, or whatever—to take her clothes off to go through the security thing,” Carvey said as Spade chimed in, “So offensive.”
“It’s so 1992, you know, it’s from another era,” Carvey continued. Stone said she actually didn’t mind “being the butt of the joke.”
“I know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony,” she said, “And I think that we were all committing misdemeanors” back then “because we didn’t think there was something wrong then. We didn’t have this sense. That was funny to me, I didn’t care.”
The group also discussed another memorable from Stone’s episode was when protestors tried to rush the stage during her monologue, to protest Basic Instinct’s depiction of LGBTQ people in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.
“They’d never seen anything like that happen,” she said. “Lorne [Michaels] started beating people up and pulling these people back from the stage,” she continued, adding, “He personally saved my life.”
The actual monologue was replaced with one from her rehearsal in the YouTube version, and the real monologue never aired again on television. Six people were later arrested for the incident, which Stone said left her “terrified” throughout the show.
“As you remember, the audience wasn’t up like it is now,” she continued, referring to the stage position in 30 Rock’s Studio 8H. “Every time we were making a change you’re really physically changing your clothes while you’re running through the audience. I honestly blacked out for half of the show.”
Asked if she remembers the “offensive” airport sketch, Stone joked, “I usually wake up when people start asking me to take my clothes off.”
