In its 50 year run, Saturday Night Live has had its creative ups and downs: musical guests that don’t stick to script, less than stellar opening monologues, skits that go off the rails somehow, and skits that perhaps shouldn’t have made it out of the writers’ room. Last Saturday’s “Birthday at Friendly’s” solidly lands in the latter category.

For those that haven’t seen it (YouTube clip here, screenshot above), the premise of Birthday — which features Heidi Gardner, Mikey Day, Bowen Yang, Andrew Dismukes, Lady Gaga, Kenan Thompson, Ego Nwodim, and Sarah Sherman — is what would happen if someone lies about it being their birthday to the iconic East Coast restaurant chain in order to get feted by restaurant staff. 

In the skit, after falsely swearing that it is her birthday to a group of Friendly’s waiters, the scene turns demonic — complete with “tribal” drumming, mwahaha voices, blood coming from a waiter’s mouth, and pastiched pagan deities tormenting the guest for her deception.

To this point the skit is a bit cringey in parts, a bit funny in others, with the timing feeling oddly slow, with too much space between some of the lines. But Birthday then veers into reviving one of the iconic-for-all-the-wrong-reasons movie scenes that has tormented Hindus since it first hit the silver screen in the early 1980s.

Enter Mola Ram, from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, complete with his torture cage. Yes, really.

Mola Ram is accompanied by a group of devotees, inexplicably to anyone who knows anything about Hinduism, who are badly chanting the mantra “Om namah shivaya”. A prop heart pops up, which is served to the diners as part of a sort of ice cream sundae. Mola Ram praises Ma Kali. Awkward laughs ensure. The scene ends.

It’s a questionable creative choice to refer back to a movie villain from four decades ago that many viewers, particularly younger ones, may not remember and Hindus old enough to remember would like to forget.

It’s doubly questionable when this movie villain comes from a film that horribly sensationalized and fictionalized Hindu religious practices — that in the original film Mola Ram was presented as leading an aberrational cult that tormented other Hindus doesn’t much matter — and which was actively used for some time in the decades after its release to falsely paint Hindus as demon-worshippers. 

And it’s particularly, egregiously, tone deaf to the cultural zeitgeist of the past several months, where anti-Indian and anti-Hindu sentiment is swelling. 

Anyone paying even partial attention recently will have seen the attacks on Usha Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and other prominent Hindu Americans — not for any policy stance they or their spouse might take, which is all fair game for commentary, but simply because they are Hindu. Every racist, xenophobic, religiously bigoted stereotype in the book has resurfaced and been hurled at them, right up to questioning whether Vance would prefer using the White House Rose Garden as a toilet. Since, of course Indians prefer to use the streets for such relief rather than indoor toilets, goes the stupidity of the racist logic.  

I don’t know if there would be a time when this skit would be anything other than offensive to Hindu Americans. But I know for sure that today it’s a poor reading of the room for SNL. 

Until I know for a fact otherwise, I will blame ignorance rather than actual anti-Hindu or anti-Indian malice for the skit. 

It is inexplicable to me, though, how no one in the writers room, none of the actors involved, nor anyone at NBC standards, didn’t know the history of how this character has been perceived by Hindus, how Temple of Doom has been used to bully Hindu kids in America, and raised a questioning hand to wonder, “Maybe we should rework this part of the skit; it doesn’t really feel like a good time for this one.” 

So now, ball’s in your court SNL. You now know that Birthday is offensive to Hindu Americans today, that Temple of Doom has been used to bully Hindus for decades, and that high profile Hindus are being targeted by racists and religious bigots coming out of the culture swamp. Will you now apologize for abetting this? Will you now pull the clip from YouTube and not re-broadcast the segment? 

What about you Lady Gaga? You have an even bigger platform than SNL and perhaps even more cultural power. How about a mea culpa for the misstep on this one? 

Friendly’s? How about living up the restaurant name and distancing yourself?

One final creative comment on Birthday: The headscratcher for me is that you could have written this piece, keeping the style of the first part of it going throughout and it would still be moderately funny. You didn’t need to bring in Mola Ram, along with the all baggage and offensiveness of that, for the premise to work. You could have maybe brought in references from any number of other demon-horror films that would still get a laugh, be cultural touchpoints, without them being offensive to a community that is getting hit from multiple directions right now. So why include it?