If you grew up watching MTV as an angst-riddled teenager in the 90s, news of Irish singer and activist Sinéad O’Connor’s death early this morning may have come as an unexpected punch in the gut. And while some of us continue to mourn that very specific time in our life that O’Connor helped freeze into a song, comedy fans are also reminding each other today that nothing compares 2 her Saturday Night Live stunt in 1992—in which she went off-script and ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II to protest the Catholic Church, imploring to anyone watching “fight the real enemy”.

She’d always done things that at the time felt sure to jeopardise her career—shaving off her hair when a record exec suggested she appear more feminine, boycotting the Grammy Awards for only respecting the commercial and material gains of the art, talking openly about the sexual abuse she’d survived as a child and taking up for mental health issues decades before TikTok was an insufferable watering hole for therapy enthusiasts. But taking this stand on SNL against child sex abuse in the Catholic church is what’s widely considered The Actual Final Thing that ruined O’Connor’s career.

In an interview several years later with the BBC, she says, “I’m an intelligent woman, I knew there would be an aftermath; I didn’t expect that I was going to be carried around on a chair and have champagne poured all over me or anything.” She goes on to insist that she understood why people found it an abhorrent idea at the time. “What we knew in Ireland was 10 years before anyone in America and Canada knew, so I understand that at the time I made that gesture, it was an abhorrent idea in America to suggest that a priest could be sexually molesting a child. So I don’t have any bad feelings or anything.” Or any regrets, as the protest singer has said several times in interviews as well as in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, where she clarifies: “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career. And my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”

SNL stunt aside, if there’s a legacy O’Connor has left behind as an artist, it is—in her own words—“to force a conversation where there was a need for one.” Sound like something comedy workers would do well to remember? We think so. May she rest in peace.