When the late Hulk Hogan and his world-famous wrestling colleague Mr. T co-hosted Saturday Night Live in Season 10, they weren’t afraid to use their wrestling skills on the rowdy audience.
The duo hosted on March 30, 1985, the night before the inaugural WrestleMania event at Madison Square Garden. They explained that they were there to get hyped up for their event in a way that only SNL could do.
“We came to Saturday Night Live for one reason and one reason, brother,” Hogan said. “We haven’t been eating any food all week. We’ve been drinking grapefruit juice and eating skinny little chickens, and tonight, my main man T told me if we came to Saturday Night Live, we’d get a laugh, because this is the best darn show in the whole wide world.”
My man T promised me that we’d laugh tonight,” he continued. “Because if we don’t laugh tonight, he’s gonna beat up everyone in the cast and everybody in the audience.”
“That’s right man, you know I never lied to you,” said Mr. T. “I said we’ve been working hard, we’ve been training hard. We need a little laughter.”
Hulk Hogan and Mr. T demonstrated a “sleeper hold” to promote Wrestlemania
That’s when the monologue was interrupted by a heckler in the audience telling Mr. T that he’s “a joke.” This heckler sounded *an awful lot* like the audience member who had yelled similar things two days prior, when T was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman. Mr. T had only threatened to hurt the guy on Late Night (“You wanna play games, you better get some toys”). But the heckler wasn’t going to get off so lucky this time, despite Hulk’s attempts to calm his co-host down.
Mr. T pulled the guy to the stage and used the infamous “sleeper hold” to knock him out, and to be fair, he did get his laughter.
The rest of the episode featured multiple promos for the next day’s big event, including a trash talk segment from wrestling opponents Rowdy Roddy Piper and Bob Orton, and a segment from Billy Crystal’s famous talk show host character Fernando. In an installment of “Fernando’s Hideaway,” he interviewed the wrestlers and caused them to break character and burst into laughter with his observations of Hogan’s bouncing pecs.
Hogan passed away on July 24, 2025 at the age of 71.
Watch “Mr. T and Hulk Hogan’s Monologue” from Season 10, Episode 15 above, and stream every season of Saturday Night Live on Peacock anytime.
