Schmitt's Gay Beer is a Saturday Night Live skit from the year 1991, starring Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, and parodying beer commercials of the time.

In the skit's commercial, the two men are house sitting, which the Farley character thinks will be boring. Sandler explains that there is a pool, which at first is dry and dusty, but is filled with blue sparkling water at the touch of a button. Then, five handsome, well-built men come out of the pool, which causes the two men to get giddy with lust. There is then a montage of the two men interacting with the many male men in bikinis that are soon swarming around the pool, in ways that are much less subtle than innuendo. All of this is accompanied by the sounds of Van Halen's pop-rock hit Beautiful Girls.

The skit is notable for several reasons. One is that it is quite funny, which is something that is not always the case with Saturday Night Live, at certain times more than others. I also was surprised that I thought Sandler & Farley were funny, because I mostly remembered both of them as essentially playing themselves, that Adam Sandler's entire comic repertoire was based on him being Adam Sandler. However, in their first year on the show, they seemed to be able to actually act as the skit demanded, rather than have skits built around themselves.

But the most notable thing about the skit is how it shows changing attitudes towards homosexuality. Although I can't remember the exact campaign, the premise of the advertisement--- that beer could bring vibrant color and sexuality to a dull setting --- was done specifically by at least one beer company. The entire joke of this skit was based on the (then) ludicrous idea that a major ad campaign could be built around appealing to homosexual objectification, instead of the very common heterosexual objectification. This skit first aired 20 years ago, and watching it makes the changing social attitudes apparent. While it is doubtful that any company would make something quite so crass as this advertisement, companies do advertise and market to the homosexual community. Therefore, it might not be apparent to a viewer of today that the joke of the ad is not in its crassness, not in the idea of portly and unattractive (respectively) Farley & Sandler doing a conga with stereotypically muscular gay men, but in the idea that an advertising campaign would be directed towards gay men. Of course, now that is quite a normal thing, so the actual concept behind the ad is not funny to modern audiences, although the execution is still so.

A transcript of the skit can be found here: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/91/91aschmitts.phtml, and a clip of it can probably be found many places on the internet.

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