Saturday Night Live Season 50’s Tom McCarthy Tribute, Explained

NBC’s long-running late-night sketch comedy show “Saturday Night Live” returned over the weekend for its season 50 premiere, hosted by “Hacks” star Jean Smart. But as the show greeted a new season, it also said farewell with a memorial tribute to Tom McCarthy at the end of the episode.

The name and face might not be familiar to general audiences, but McCarthy was a familiar face at 30 Rockefeller Center, the home of “SNL” and its parent studio NBC. McCarthy, who died over the summer at the age of 62, was a former United States Secret Service agent who spent the last 11 years of his career working as NBCUniversal’s Senior Vice President and Global Chief Security Officer.

It was the latter role that formed his most direct connection to “SNL.” McCarthy acted as an intermediary when the Secret Service opened a file on comedian John Mulaney, a former writer for the show who has returned to 30 Rock on numerous occasions to host the show (and also, once, because he wanted a haircut). On one such occasion, Mulaney made the following joke in his opening monologue:

“Another thing that happened under Julius Caesar was he was such a powerful maniac that all the senators grabbed knives and they stabbed him to death. That’d be an interesting thing if we brought that back now.”

Mulaney added that he’d gotten the all clear from his lawyer — and his lawyer’s lawyer — to make that joke on live TV. However, the Secret Service wasn’t so amused. 

A copy of the Secret Service file on John Mulaney, obtained by AP News, notes that McCarthy was contacted a couple of days after the episode aired “to express the agency’s desire to discuss the joke with the comedian’s attorneys” (and, presumably, his attorneys’ attorneys). The file on Mulaney included an article from Breitbart with a headline claiming “John Mulaney Jokes that Senators Should Stab Trump Like Julius Caesar,” even though former “Saturday Night Live” guest host Donald Trump was never actually mentioned. Really, the Secret Service should get some better news sources.

Mulaney was ultimately never interviewed by the Secret Service, and it seems likely that McCarthy helped to smooth over the situation. Revealing the incident in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Mulaney recalled, “The person vetting me was very understanding that the joke had nothing to do with Donald Trump, because it was an elliptical reference to him. I didn’t say anything about him.”

McCarthy’s obituary states that he spent 27 years working for the Secret Service, and therefore he  was well qualified to tell the difference between a threat to national security and a comedian making a joke. The file on Mulaney was closed a few days after the Kimmel interview.