Dana Carvey apologizes to Sharon Stone for making her strip on ‘SNL’

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Dana Carvey has apologized to Sharon Stone for a 1992 Saturday Night Live sketch which aimed to get laughs by having the actress remove her clothes.

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In the comedic skit, titled Airport Security Check, Carvey played an Indian security guard who instructed Stone to take off pieces of clothing after she continually beeped going through a full-body scanner. 

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“Maybe you have a machine gun,” Carvey’s character said, as she was forced to remove her jacket. “How do we know?”

As she continued to beep, and undress further, the crowd laughed as Carvey hammed it up for the camera and said, “Thank you Lord!”

At one point, during the middle of the six-minute scene, Carvey’s character got delirious when he asked her what colour her underwear is and she responds that it is black.

The late Phil Hartman appeared as the plane’s pilot and encouraged Stone to “take off her shirt.”

During her appearance on the Fly on the Wall With Dana Carvey and David Spade podcast, Carvey called Stone “such a good sport” for going along with the bit and said if they tried to air the routine today, “We would be literally arrested now.”

“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,” he said. “It’s so 1992, you know, it’s from another era.”

Stone, who was starting to see her star rise thanks to roles in Total Recall and Basic Instinct, acknowledged that audiences were more receptive to comedy that pushed boundaries 30 years ago, saying the act was “funny to me.”

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“I know the difference between a misdemeanour and a felony,” she said. “And I think that we were all committing misdemeanours because we didn’t think there was something wrong (back) then. We didn’t have this sense. I had much bigger problems than that, you know what I mean? That was funny to me, I didn’t care. I was fine being the butt of the joke,” the 66-year-old actress replied.

As the scene drew to its conclusion, the security team left Stone hanging after an announcer comes over the PA and announced that supermodel Cindy Crawford was at a nearby gate check. Carvey praised Stone for helping him and his SNL co-stars get laughs from the live studio audience.

“When I was doing the Indian character … there was no malice in it,” Carvey said, recalling his impersonation. “It was really me rhythmically trying to get laughs. So I just want to say that watching it — comedy needs a straight person and you were perfect in it. You were completely sincere and you made us funny.”

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Stone brushed off the gag, saying today’s comedy audience is too politically correct.

“Now we’re in such a weird and precious time,” Stone said. “People have spent too much time alone. People don’t know how to be funny and intimate and any of these things with each other. Everyone is so afraid and are putting up such barriers around everything that people can’t be normal with each other anymore. It’s lost all sense of reason.”

Elsewhere during her appearance on Fly on the Wall, Stone revealed that SNL creator Lorne Michaels “personally saved my life” after protestors stormed the stage during her monologue.

“I came out to do the monologue live, which is super scary, and a bunch of people started storming the stage saying they were going to kill me during the opening monologue,” Stone recalled. “The security that was in there froze because they never had seen anything like that happen … Lorne started beating them up and pulling them back from the stage.”

The protestors were upset with the Oscar nominee over her involvement with an AIDS research foundation, she said.

“It was the beginning of my work as an AIDS activist. No one understood at the time what was happening and they didn’t know if amfAR could be trusted or if we were against gay people. Instead of waiting for an intelligent, informative conversation, they thought, ‘Oh let’s just kill her.’”

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