Saturday Night Live | Madonna/Simple Minds (1985)

No cold opening. In her monologue, the host Madonna talks about her and Sean Penn’s recent secretive wedding and shows mockumentary clips from it. Hell beer commercial carries a warning for the soul. The Reagans spend a quiet evening with Prince Charles and Lady Di at the White House but tongues get loose after a few drinks and Nancy gets frisky. The musical guest Simple Minds perform their song Alive and Kicking. Twitchy street fences Jones & Jones offer the best cheapest goods in town. Dennis Miller makes his first appearance as the anchorperson on the Weekend Update. He comments on the USSR’s paranoid reaction to Halley’s Comet, the US and USSR’s peace talks, Georgia’s ironic anti-gay law, Ferdinand Marcos hold over the Philippines elections, the passing of Orson Welles, the new way to throw away the garbage, Libya, the Palestinian PLO and Jehovah’s Witnesses clash, clinical death record, the Beatrice Company expansion, Louis Farrakhan’s similarities to Pee-wee Herman, the ironic dilemma of illegal immigrant and US lottery winner Jose Caballero, the controversial policy of the World News Agency and Jordan King Hussein’s arms deal with the Philadelphia police department. Finally, Dennis makes the wish of SNL’s viewer Bobby to take on major league baseball pitcher Goose Gossage come true but hubris intervenes. Madonna performs a funny version of A-ha’s Take On Me on a Spanish variety show La Cucaracha Motel. Penn bets the audience that he’ll pull off a magic trick with cards before his partner Teller drowns in a tightly locked tank filled with water but things don’t go as he planned. National Inquirer Theater’s questionable reenactment of the violent death of Marylin Monroe involves the Kennedy brothers and a mentalist. Simple Minds perform their song Sanctify Yourself. The host of the Twilight Zone-esque Limits of the Imagination intervenes during the story. An awkward movie shoot with an ironic twist portrays a gay actor’s fear of “Pinklisting“, a new scare in Hollywood caused by the AIDS outbreak. An African American teenage mother promotes her educational “I Don’t Want a Baby“ coloring book.