A few weeks ago, there was an hilarious, unscripted moment during SNL’s Weekend Update segment. Ego Nwodim was pretending to be a comedian named Miss Eggy at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Her bit was to make some jokes, then ask the audience to fill in the blank as she gave a prompt and held the mic out. Things went off the rails when she made a joke about filibusters, saying that she’d “had my fill of bustas,” then asked the audience, “Cause these men ain’t what?” The live audience unanimously responded, “Sh-t!”
Because it happened after 10:00 p.m. on the live broadcast and was taken out for the subsequent feeds, SNL avoided getting fined. While obscene content is prohibited 24 hours a day, the law involving profanity becomes a little more lax between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., when children are most likely to be asleep. Bowen Yang has some thoughts about profanity on late night TV. He thinks that as one of the last bastions of network comedy, SNL should be given a pass where they get an allotted amount of F- and S-words they can say per season.
Bowen Yang thinks the Federal Communications Commission ain’t what?
The Saturday Night Live star made a case for the NBC sketch comedy show to be allotted a certain amount of curse words a year, following a recent call-and-response bit from co-star Ego Nwodim that resulted in audience members yelling “s—” live on air.
“I don’t think so honey, Standards and Practices, we should be able to say at least five ‘s—’s and five ‘f—’s on SNL per season,” he said on the closing segment of his Las Culturistas podcast. “Because after this whole Ego Nwodim, Miss Eggy … moment—first of all, favorite moment been televised in history, ever. Second of all, we are so hampered in our comedy at SNL by not being able to say ‘s—’ and ‘f—.’ … Let us say ‘s—’ and ‘f—.’ It’s us, it’s Abbott, it’s Ghosts. We’re the last network comedies. Can you give SNL an exception, an exemption?”
Yang continued, “If we’re dismantling the FCC because of Trump … can one silver lining be that we at least get to say ‘s—’ and ‘f—’?”
The 4x Emmy nominee reasoned that his “allotment” of five “s—”s and five “f—”s per season “would bring a sketch to the next level. It would make it so you’d be able to know this is the real world, not heightened sketch reality. ‘S—’ and ‘f—’ are so comedically powerful as words. I really think it would help us.”
After SNL appeared to avoid FCC fines over Nwodim’s bit, Yang noted, “I don’t think anything came down, which I love. And Ego was like, ‘No, I didn’t hear anything.’”
His podcast guest Amy Poehler, who was part of the cast from 2001 to 2008, suggested NBC “monetize this” with viewers voting via text who gets to say the curse word, while Yang said the network should just have a “fundraiser for our FCC fines.” Poehler also suggested they “treat it like vacation days,” where if you don’t use them, they roll over to the next year.
Yang’s co-host Matt Rogers suggested that “whenever he decides to stop, Kenan [Thompson] on his last episode, the whole 90 minutes should just be him saying whatever the f— he wants.”
Poehler added in a counterpoint, “I do think there’s something fun about not being able to say it that causes comedic tension that’s fun. So, the air may be let out of that balloon when you do, and you might not get the juice. You want it because you can’t have it.”
I appreciate what Bowen is saying here, but I agree with Amy’s counterpoint. I’m a native NY-er. I use a lot of profanity and am not offended or scandalized by hearing it. That said, why does SNL need to drop F-bombs in order to be “next-level” funny? Innuendo is perfectly fine and oftentimes funnier and more clever! He mentioned Abbott Elementary; they’re killing it each week without using cuss words. And Ghosts has plenty of dirty jokes that they throw in without crossing a line (the whole “getting sucked off,” er, gag, for example). And while the audience’s surprise response was pretty great, that was only part of it. It wasn’t what they said that went viral but rather the hilariously shocked reactions from Ego, Michael Che, and Colin Jost as they tried to joke it off. That’s comedy right there.
Photos credit: MediaPunch/Backgrid, Getty and via YouTube/SNL
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·