SNL Sketch Predicts Kanye West Interrupting Taylor Swift’s VMAs

Rapper Kanye West made a huge splash in pop culture history when he took the stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to interrupt pop star Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video. In the infamous moment, West spoke into the microphone while Swift was still on stage next to him: “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’m gonna let you finish, but Beyoncé made one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” It sparked outrage and memes, and it’s not even the most ridiculous or gross thing West has done in his career. However, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised, since “Saturday Night Live” saw this coming nearly two years before the incident.

On an episode of “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast,” Andy Samberg, Akiva Shaffer, Jorma Taccone and Seth Meyers looked back on West’s appearance on the September 2007 premiere of “SNL.” While the podcast primarily focuses on the various SNL digital shorts created by The Lonely Island during their tenure on the sketch show, it occasionally veers into more general “SNL” territory, which is why its hosts found themselves discussing the topic. While West wasn’t the show’s host, as that honor went to NBA superstar LeBron James, the rapper starred in his own sketch, in addition to appearing as a member of the musical group. And it’s amazing how prescient the sketch turned out to be.

Shaffer takes the time to acknowledge that they’re going to talk about West in the context of his appearance without acknowledging the much more controversial behavior he’s displayed in recent years. But even in 2007, West wasn’t without a reputation, especially when it came to his behavior at awards shows. Indeed, West had been caught on camera feeling upset about losing awards, and he’d even gotten on stage to make some statements. This prompted Shaffer to write a sketch in which Kanye West interrupts a variety of awards shows, from the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards to a local pumpkin-carving contest. Again, this was almost two years before the VMAs were set to take place in June 2009!

In the above sketch, Kanye West appears on BET’s music video series “106 & Park” to specifically address his questionable behavior at various awards shows, which then leads the hosts (played by Kenan Thompson and Maya Rudolph) to show a series of clips of West interrupting increasingly stupid awards shows that he shouldn’t have even appeared at in the first place. How did this idea come about? Shaffer explained on the podcast:

“The timeline of this is crazy because it’s really hard to remember why we came up with this idea, but maybe it had to do with Britney Spears? I don’t remember, but he was kind of famous for his bad behavior at awards shows, for either being a sore loser or speaking up for others. But the famous Taylor Swift moment that you think I’m talking about hasn’t happened yet. It’ll happen in a year, but it was already known enough that he had bad behavior at awards shows that we brought it up to him.

I think it was partly his idea. He said, “I should make fun of awards shows,” and I said, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because we knew that world (of awards shows), Lorne (Michaels) asked me to call him, and Seth, the head writer, said, “I’ll do it.” So, he and Kanye were on the phone, and he kind of pitched the idea, and then we wrote a big thing about awards shows together.

The prescient “SNL” sketch was so remarkably similar to what West would do during Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs that Shaffer actually thought it was a comedy sketch when the incident happened. Shaffer recalls, “I remember thinking during the VMAs live, ‘Oh, this is so funny, but he kind of copied us. I wish he would call us to help him work on this.’” After going through the entire process of why it was okay for West to do the sketch himself, Shaffer realized it wasn’t a joke, and the rest is pop culture history.

By the way, another fun fact about Kanye West and “SNL”: Meyers explained what he believes was the reason West kept including lyrics in his song “Power” that read, “F**k ‘SNL’ and the whole cast. Tell them Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass. More specifically, they can kiss my a**hole.” Meyers suspects it’s because they allowed Taylor Lautner to karate chop a cardboard cutout of Kanye West on stage while he was hosting “SNL,” shortly after the Swift VMAs incident. Meyers couldn’t come up with any other reason why West would suddenly turn on them, and honestly, that’s just petty enough to do the trick. The more you know!