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Dana Carvey is reevaluating his role in an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch that featured guest host Sharon Stone taking off some of her clothes.
The comedian and former “SNL” star apologized to Stone for the 1992 skit during Wednesday’s episode of “Fly on the Wall,” his podcast with David Spade.
“I want to apologize publicly for the security check sketch where I played an Indian man and we’re convincing Sharon, her character whatever, to take her clothes off to go through the security thing,” Carvey said. “It’s so 1992. It’s from another era.”
In the sketch “Airport Security Check,” Carvey, Kevin Nealon and Rob Schneider play airport security officers who essentially sexually harass Stone, who plays a random passenger, by pressuring her to take off her clothes under the guise of doing their job to prevent terrorist attacks and other security threats.
At one point in the skit, Stone removes her shirt and walks through the metal detector in just a bra, mini skirt and heels. Elsewhere in the clip, Carvey’s character coerces Stone to reveal the color of her underwear.
But on Wednesday, Stone didn’t appeared too bothered by the decades-old sketch.
She told Carvey that she knows “the difference between a misdemeanor and felony.”
“I think that we were all committing misdemeanors because we didn’t think that there was something wrong then,” she said. “We didn’t have this sense. I had much bigger problems than that.”
“That was funny to me. I didn’t care. I was fine being the butt of the joke,” she continued. “But I feel like now we’re in such a weird and precious time because people have spent too much time alone. People don’t know how to be funny and intimate or any of these things with each other.”
She added, “Everybody’s so afraid that they’re putting up such barriers around everything that people can’t be normal with each other anymore.”
The “Basic Instinct” star then explained that she believes there needs to be more clarity surrounding what conduct is illegal versus what’s considered simply offensive.
“We need to know, and the fact that we don’t know, has a lot of people who shouldn’t be making up things, making them up,” she said.
During the podcast episode, Carvey, who is white, also addressed the fact that he spoke with an accent and portrayed an Indian character in that sketch and in other instances where he performed comedy.
He said that there was “no malice” in his portrayals.
White actors portraying characters of color on screen — and especially those who perform in brownface and blackface — have, over the years, been increasingly called out for portraying racist, offensive and dehumanizing characters.
Carvey has addressed his past roles portraying people of color before.
In a 2016 interview with the Daily Beast, he discussed what it was like doing comedy in a “politically correct culture.”
There are “lines you’re not supposed to cross,” he said.
He also acknowledged that one of his old “SNL” characters, in which he played a Chinese man, was “insensitive.”
Carvey referenced that same character in an episode of “Fly on the Wall” last year, saying he was called out for the inappropriate skit.
He later explained that he did the skit in the ’80s due to “naïveté” and that he didn’t “understand that being offensive in 1986-87.”
“And neither did anyone in the show,” he said. “Nobody. Nobody flagged it or talked about it.”
Carvey briefly reenacted the Chinese character’s accent minutes before in the podcast episode, at the request of then-guest Shane Gillis, a controversial comedian.
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