White Woman Scarlett Johansson Joins Three Other White Women In SNL’s 5 Timers Club
Joining them are countless other white men. And that is it.
This past Saturday, Scarlett Johansson, white-washer, hosted Saturday Night Live for the fifth time, meaning that she finally gets a pass into SNL’s prestigious Five Timers Club. She is only the fourth woman to do it, following in the footsteps of Drew Barrymore, Candice Bergen, and Tina Fey. You’ll notice that all four of those women are white. In fact, every member of the Five Timers Club is white, as you can see in the list below:
- Alec Baldwin (16 as host, 20 as special guest)
- Steve Martin (15 as host, 11 as special guest)
- John Goodman (12 as host, 9 as special guest)
- Buck Henry (10 as host, 5 as special guest)
- Danny DeVito (9 as host/special guest)
- Chevy Chase (8 as host, 14 as special guest)
- Tom Hanks (9 as host, 7 as special guest)
- Christopher Walken (7 as host)
- Drew Barrymore (6 as host, 3 as special guest)
- Elliott Gould (6 as host, 1 as special guest)
- Justin Timberlake (5 as host, 1 as musical guest (with ‘N Sync), 8 as special guest)
- Sting (6 as host/musical guest)
- Bill Murray (5 as host, 2 as special guest)
- Ben Affleck (5 as host, 2 as special guest)
- Candice Bergen (5 as host, 1 as special guest)
- Tina Fey (5 as host, 2 as special guest)
- Scarlett Johansson (5 as host)
I got this off a fan site so I’m not quite sure what they mean by “special guest.” I assume they just mean an uncredited appearance (although Tina Fey has done that dozens of times as Sarah Palin so maybe not) but it doesn’t really matter.
The point is that they’re all white and mostly men.
Even when you start counting in musical guests, the only people of color would be Beyonce, Kanye, and Snoop Dogg.
SNL’s overt male whiteness is nothing new. They’ve gotten by for years with just one person of color, typically a black guy, while the rest of the cast was lily white. And until Tina Fey came along and changed things for women there, there was usually no more than three women in the cast at a single time.
Plus, who can forget the time where they had no black women, instead casting white guy after white guy, something they at least had the balls to make fun of when Kerry Washington hosted.
Before that (they went on to cast Sasheer Zamata after that episode), instead of casting more people of color they would typically just use black-face (seriously) and when that started to become uncool they just moved on to brown-face.
Even though their cast today features several people of color, several women, and three people who are both (Leslie Jones, Sasheer Zamata, and Melissa Villasenor), they still have yet to truly become as diverse as the rest of the country. Melissa Villasenor, a hispanic women, had to play an Asian moderator in a debate sketch. Again, SNL addressed it at the beginning of the sketch, but that doesn’t make it any better.
All I really have left to say is this: SNL, stop treating your POC hosts and cast members as tokens and start letting them have the same status and representation as white people have been getting for the past 42 years. Let your women writers and cast members be given the same opportunity as men. If you really want to be the tough, cutting show you used to be then both are an absolute must; otherwise you will fail to be taken seriously in an era that’s tired of white men making jokes about cowbells. If you want to come out from under the Donald Trump-sized shadow that you created for yourself last year I recommend starting with casting people who don’t look like Donald Trump.
