I just knew that there would be some part of last week’s “Saturday Night Live” 50th Anniversary special that sparked a controversy, and there was. As promised here, I didn’t watch the thing and, I am proud to say, know few people who did, at least not all the way through. Still, I was directed to watch two clips: Paul McCartney (with his band) performing the last part of the “Abbey Road” musical collage from “Once There Was a Way” through to “The End” (When the general reaction to an iconic singer’s performance is “He sounds pretty good for 82!,” it’s time to retire…), and the reprise of an old “Jeopardy!” skit, in which Tom Hanks, as a Southern contestant wearing a MAGA cap, jumped away from the black MC offering his hand as if it was a rattlesnake. Nice.

Hanks was clobbered on social media and elsewhere for the bit. Among the annoyed critics were red-pilled ex-“Rolling Stone” Axis writer Matt Taibbi, Fox News exile Megyn Kelly and others. On “America This Week,” Walter Kirn said, “I didn’t know that Tom Hanks would stoop to this kind of thing. It is terrible writing, it was a terrible skit, and he was the big loser. I see people all over social media going, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be watching him again anytime soon.'”

I was surprised that the writers and producers of “Saturday Night Live” would be so lazy and dim as to stoop to parroting the apparently official excuse being offered by Democrats to explain Kamala Harris’s loss in November: Trump voters are racists (and sexists, but they won’t avoid shaking hands with a woman, just voting for her). As someone who deals in satire professionally from time to time, I would think that excuse would be the target of an effective comedy skit, since it is, after all, moronic.

However, from a show business perspective, is it fair to hold Hanks responsible for the lines he reads and the characters he portrays? Hanks has been a frequent host and guest on the show over the years, and SNL has been, in the words of a memorably politically incorrect character from the show’s Golden Age, “berry berry good” to him. He knows how an episode is always assembled in a mad rush over a hectic and exhausting week, and that particular show last week, with all the celebrity cameos and guests, had to be particularly chaotic. Hanks is by all accounts a great guy to work with and a thorough professional. It is easy for me to imagine him accepting his role in the skit, giving the lines, and doing his best to make it work without challenging the writers or expressing “artistic differences.” That’s the last thing any show needs in its final rehearsals. (I once fired an actor in a tense, late night dress rehearsal for interrupting me while I was critiquing a musical number.)

Audiences tend to think actors are responsible for what their characters say and how they act, but of course they aren’t. The King’s Pass definitely reigns in the performing arts, so a big star can get away with refusing to say particular lines or rejecting a director’s instructions, and many do. That does not mean that any actor has an obligation not to say the lines he or she is given just because the actor wouldn’t have written them the way they turned out.

As a veteran professional, Tom Hanks may have simply taken the position that the SNL crew knew its business as well as he knows his, and that his job was to perform the material he was given. The realities of the art form suggest to me that Hanks deserves the benefit of the doubt in this case, as would any performer. It was a bad, unfunny skit that insulted half the the country and the new President, but Tom Hanks didn’t write it, and it is unfair to blame him for it.

[Oh yeah, AI is really reliable now. Explain this one: the WP bot told me to tag this piece, “Robert Zemeckis.”]