Harry Shearer Was Outraged Synchronized Swimmers Got Same Medals As ‘Real Athletes’

The U.S. synchronized swimming Olympics team created online buzz today by moonwalking underwater to the strains of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” 

Annie, are you okay? Hell yeah!

The moves are incredibly difficult to pull off, but synchronized swimming has always had its critics. Is the sport any more difficult than what Esther Williams used to do in old movie musicals? 

Or for that matter, what Austin Powers pulled off in the open to The Spy Who Shagged Me?

At least one comedian wasn’t a fan. Harry Shearer, the two-time Saturday Night Live cast member, turned his disdain into one of the show’s Top 10 sketches of all time (at least according to one Entertainment Weekly fan vote). “I watched the synchronized swimming on television in August (1984),” Shearer remembered in SNL oral history Live From New York. “I was just fulminating about the outrage of these people, you know, getting the same medals as real athletes.”

Shearer channeled his fury into comedy with the help of new cast members Martin Short and Christopher Guest. Producer Dick Ebersol cautioned against the idea, concerned that “by the time we go on the air in mid-September, nobody will remember the Olympics.”

Shearer’s response: “We’ll make ‘em remember.”

@mike11749

Shearer and Short hit the pool every day for a week, rehearsing the less-than-intricate choreography that two brothers would learn in their quest for the gold. That’s ambitious, considering that brother Lawrence doesn’t know how to swim. The moves were based on actual synchronized swimming competitions featured in videotapes Shearer brought to New York. “Oh, we can do those. Oh, we can do that, we can do that,” he said as the comics studied the video.

Guest appeared as the duo’s choreographer, a clear forerunner to Waiting for Guffman’s Corky St. Clair. Heck, if Guest’s sketch character wasn’t fitted with a bald cap, he might as well have been Corky St. Clair. 

“Synchronized Swimming” saved the season opener of SNL’s Season 10, the only year in which Short and Guest appeared. The bit was filmed for the second episode, but when the season premiere’s dress rehearsal tanked, “Synchronized Swimming” was shuttled in to save the day, Short said on the Fly on the Wall podcast. 

It became a classic. Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer cites “Synchronized Swimming” as one of the group’s biggest influences. “I had watched those things over and over again,” he said.

But Short explained he and Shearer had no idea they were onto something. “We shot ‘Synchronized Swimming’ somewhere in New Jersey, and we’re going back on the bus,” Short recalled. The sketch hadn’t aired, and Short asked Shearer how he thought they were doing in their first few weeks of SNL preparation. “All I know is that in five weeks in L.A., I would have had a meeting or two about three ideas that weren’t developed and nothing would happen,” Shearer told him. “So at least we’re creating product.”

The sketch was hilarious, but Time blames it for reinforcing stereotypes about the sport as unmasculine. Despite Short and Shearer’s goal to win the gold in 1988 and a rewrite of Olympics gender rule restrictions, there still have been no male competitors in the event now known as artistic swimming.