Usually, all Saturday Night Live’s crew has to worry about during a live taping is the cast getting a bad case of the giggles, or perhaps a wig slipping off of Kenan Thompson’s head mid-sketch. But this week’s show brings a whole new set of problems—problems, one could argue, that the show has brought upon itself by indulging in cynical ratings bait at the expense of its own dwindling relevance. In other words, this week’s guest is Donald Trump, a move that has been criticized by Hispanic groups and other political types—including John Leguizamo, who says he “won’t watch SNL anymore” and urges others to do the same—who would like to remind Lorne Michaels and company of the time Trump called Mexican immigrants criminals, as well as the time NBC cut ties with him for it.
To jog NBC’s memory, Los Angeles-based activist Luke Montgomery, founder of the group Deport Racism 2016, is offering $5,000 to anyone in the SNL studio audience who manages to yell out the words “deport racism” or “Trump is a racist” on the air. How Montgomery will verify these claims is unclear, but The Hollywood Reporter says that the SNL crew is on “heckling high alert” and anticipates interruptions during the broadcast from Montgomery’s group and others. (Trump‘s presumed solution: Build a wall around the studio audience.)
There is one downside to any impromptu protests, though: They might—emphasis on “might”—interrupt an opening monologue written by Bob Odenkirk. Odenkirk, a former SNL writer, says he submitted a monologue script for Trump and hopes that the show will use it on Saturday; the script “condemns the media and the GOP candidate in relatively equal measure,” according to The Daily Beast. The chances of SNL actually using Odenkirk’s monologue aren’t great, though, considering Trump—who doesn’t take criticism well in general—reportedly vetoed several proposed skits because he thought they wouldn’t play well in Iowa, where he is currently in first place in the Republican polls. “They have 100 writers. I walk into the room, there are 100–and they’re all about 17 years old, okay? They’re all young and all up in your face. But they come up with many, many skits and you pick the ones you think you like,” Trump tells Bill O’Reilly. So they’re really raking him over the proverbial coals, then.