Everyone’s a winner, according to the theme song of “Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad.” Everyone, that is, except fans searching for that once wildly popular Saturday Night Live quiz-show parody from 1985.
You won’t find it on SNL’s social channels or on Peacock’s streaming version of the Christopher Reeve–hosted episode during which the sketch originally aired. Fan-posted YouTube versions get taken down nearly as quickly as they’re uploaded.
The unhinged sketch once got some of the biggest laughs of the show’s tenth season, a ten-minute tour de force that ended up on the show’s best-of-the-season compilation that year, and even received a spotlight during Saturday Night Live’s 25th-anniversary special.
“Chris (Guest) and Billy (Crystal) were on fire in this one,” Martin Short gushed in his 2014 memoir “I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend.” “Everyone in the sketch was at the top of their game.”
The problem today lies in the makeup choices of three of its stars.
While the sketch was “truly hilarious,” Crystal told the Television Academy Foundation in 2018, “that was a time that was different, you know. You were able to play people of color. You can’t do that anymore.”
While Saturday Night Live has featured its share of white comics in makeup playing characters of color over the years—Jimmy Fallon has spent years apologizing—“Jackpot Wad” hit the trifecta.
First and foremost was Crystal, hamming it up in mocha makeup as Sammy Davis Jr., a popular recurring character during his lone SNL season.
Then Christopher Guest went for broke as clueless contestant Rajeev Vindaloo, an Indian character achieved through bronzer and a lilting accent. Guest played into another archaic stereotype with Rajeev’s effeminate lisp, hammering it home when Sammy offered a clue for the word “asparagus.”
SAMMY: This is a long shaft kind of thing with a tip on the end?
RAJEEV: (Locks eyes with Sammy and makes a kissy-face)
With the brown faces of Crystal and Guest drawing focus, it’s easy to overlook Jackie Rogers Jr., a character one Redditor aptly described as “albino face.” Imported from SCTV with an alabaster wig and invisible eyebrows, Short, in his book, describes Rogers as “a cross-eyed albino” with facial tics modeled on a “palsied, cockeyed Sammy Davis Jr.” … Not great either.
The same elements that helped fuel the laughs in 1985 are also what make the sketch difficult to revisit through a modern lens. Given changing attitudes toward white performers portraying characters of color, it’s no mystery why the sketch is absent from SNL’s current platforms.
Even when the show acknowledged some of its more problematic material during its 50th anniversary special last year, the sketch remained conspicuously absent—even amid a rapid-fire montage of sketches featuring what the show labeled “questionable makeup.”
In the room back in 1985, however, the sketch killed.
Season 10 writer Kevin Kelton was in Studio 8H when the audience went nuts for “Jackpot Wad.”
“You’ve got three comedy luminaries who wrote the sketch: Marty, Chris, and Billy. And they’re writing for their own characters that they know so well,” he says. “Everybody loved it.”
In the SNL writers’ room that season, those characters didn’t raise an eyebrow.
“There was literally no conversation back then about blackface,” Kelton told LateNighter. “It wasn’t even discussed whether it was in good taste or bad taste. It was just a different time.”
When Crystal wasn’t goofing on Sammy during Season 10, he altered his pigmentation to play Prince (twice), Muhammad Ali (twice), and, along with Guest, Negro League baseball players Leonard “The Rooster” Willoughby and “King Carl” Johnson. Crystal played a Black character in at least eight of the season’s 17 episodes. And that’s not counting his recurring Latin character, Fernando.
Peter Montagna, the SNL makeup artist responsible for transforming Crystal into Davis, defended the impression on an episode of the Ian Talks Comedy podcast in 2024, insisting that Crystal’s Sammy character “wasn’t done as blackface or anything like that.”
Montagna also maintained that Crystal never received flak over the impression, even as host Ian Fermaglich reminded him about the major blowback Crystal received for appearing in full Davis makeup at the 2012 Academy Awards.
Crystal imitating Davis was no different than Joe Piscopo doing Frank Sinatra, argued Montagna. “It just so happens that Sammy was Black,” he said. Crystal was “not afraid to put makeup on and make it work and do something with it, and be funny. It’s like wearing a funny hat. The same thing.”
Of course, many viewers today would see the comparison differently. If “Jackpot Wad” featured Guest and Crystal wearing funny hats, it would likely still be celebrated as one of the show’s greatest hits. The timing between Guest and Crystal crackles with comic precision, and the bonkers ending—Rajeev is strapped to a giant, bedazzled wheel, then spun to determine his prize—delivers the explosively funny conclusion that many sketches lack.
Even Davis’s family endorsed the character. Tracey Davis, Sammy’s daughter, told The Hollywood Reporter that Saturday Night Live sketches like “Jackpot Wad” gave Davis “legendary status.”
Yet Kelton understands why the sketch’s racial characterizations rankle today.
“I think we learn from it,” he says. “I’m not saying that people who are offended are wrong. I’m saying, we learn from these things. And it’s these things that got us to where we are now, where we’re more sensitive to it.”
What once played as a riotous crowd-pleaser now reads very differently—a reminder of how much comedy and audiences have changed since 1985.
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