Chicago Sun-Times

Sinead's Slap: Thanks, Television Needed That

Richard Roeper


   A toast to Sinead O'Connor!

   This weekend, the Irish singer with the strong voice and the even stronger
attitude accomplished the near-impossible when she shocked a studio audience
(and this viewer) into absolute, drop-jawed silence with the most provocative
piece of performance art in the 18-year history of "Saturday Night Live." It was
a moment of truly great television.

   If you didn't catch the show, here's what happened. At approximately 11:40
p.m. CST, host Tim Robbins introduced O'Connor, who appeared on a candlelit
stage barefoot, clad in a white robe, with a Star of David glittering around her
neck. Looking like some sort of whacked-out Joan of Arc, O'Connor launched into
an emotional, a cappella rendering of a Gregorian-influenced dirge about the
horrors of this world - child abuse, racial injustice, hateful governments. As
long as such evils endure, O'Connor sang, then war is necessary and war is
right: "Until the day the color of a man's skin is no more significant than the
color of his eyes, I say, 'War.' "

   When she reached the final note, O'Connor whipped out a large color
photograph of Pope John Paul II, held it in front of her face and said, "Fight
the real enemy." She then tore the picture to shreds and calmly blew out the
candles around her, while the normally raucous "Saturday Night Live" studio
audience fell as silent as a church during a funeral.

   Fade to commercial.

   At this point I found myself literally on the edge of my seat. Whoa! What was
THAT? Within 30 seconds I received two phone calls from friends asking the very
same thing.

   Excepting those instances when breaking news - usually a tragedy - rivets me
to my television, I can't remember the last time something I saw on the small
screen reached out and grabbed me with such force. I don't even know what I
thought; I just know I was surprised.

   That was the beauty of it. Sure, you can say this was just another in a
series of controversies manufactured by Sinead O'Connor. Even though she's a
fine singer, she's more well known for her sometimes naive and sanctimonious
stunts, such as boycotting the Grammys, bowing out of a previous "SNL"
appearance rather than appear with hateful comic Andrew Dice Clay and refusing
to allow ''The Star-Spangled Banner" to be played before her concerts. But no
one saw this coming. It was a moment of rare, raw television.

   "We want to go on record as saying this was a spontaneous gesture and was not
in any way authorized by NBC," a nervous-sounding network spokesman told me
Sunday. "She didn't do that during rehearsal."

   A source who works on the show confirms this.

   "When we did the dry run, she held up a picture of a child at the end of the
number," said the source. "So when she did the thing with the pope's picture, it
caught everyone by surprise. I've been with this show for a long time, but I've
never seen an audience stunned into silence like that."

   As of Sunday afternoon, NBC had received more than 500 calls about the
incident, nearly all of them negative.

   Wonderful. Whether you think the pope is the saintliest person in the world
or the embodiment of evil, you have to acknowledge O'Connor's success as an
artist; she pushed a red-hot button, and not without cause. Sacrilegious as this
may sound to some, the pope and his church are not above criticism. What's more
troubling, a pop song or the Vatican's views on women's rights? What's more
offensive, O'Connor's actions or the killing that goes on in her native Ireland
between Catholics and Protestants, ostensibly in the name of God?

   I tuned in MTV this weekend to see Madonna's "controversial" new video, and I
yawned at her increasingly tiresome efforts to use sex as a marketing tool. I
tuned in "Saturday Night Live" to catch some comedy and music and was jolted out
of my normal TV-watching haze by a bald Irish woman tearing up a picture of the
pope. Live from New York, it was television at its finest.