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Just after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Colin Jost, host of the fake news segment on “Saturday Night Live,” Weekend Update, buried a prescient joke near the end of his segment. “The dating app Tinder announced a new feature this week, which gives users 37 different gender identity options,” Jost deadpanned. “It’s called, ‘Why Democrats lost the election.’”
To anyone who watched the election and deduced Trump’s 2016 victory was, in fact, helped by the explosion in identity politics, the joke was a harmless jibe at the political left. But to some, it was an attack on transgenderism and put people in danger. The tweets attacking Jost began flooding in: “What the actual f—. What a f—in stretch to blame the existence of trans/nonbinary people,” wrote [ [link removed] ] one transgender tweeter. “Yeah f— that s—,” tweeted another user. “It’s not even trying to be a funny joke, just a s—y cheap shot. Ugh,” tweeted another.
Jost foolishly began arguing with people online, trying to satiate his critics with lines like [ [link removed] ], “I’m on your side a hundred percent. Only trying to learn from this defeat and get stronger.”
Of course, Jost’s attempts at solidarity just made things worse. Deadspin piled on [ [link removed] ] with a post titled “Colin Jost Is a Dumbass,” and a Medium writer argued [ [link removed] ] that SNL has long been “a flagship in normalizing transphobic violence.”
It had to be shocking for liberal SNL writers to realize that they, too, were not exempt from the aggressive language and joke policing that was surging in the latter half of the last decade. After all, they had spent four decades as “the cool people.” They were the ones that dictated taste, not random angry Twitter users.
Of course, people on the right have spent decades walking on eggshells while being lambasted for “insensitivity” by progressives. Certainly the Germans must have a word for “feeling joy when the most condescending people on the planet are canceled by their own extreme wing.”
But it had to be even more stunning given that SNL had gotten away with anti-politically correct comedy since 1975. The new brand of lefty looking to nuke their reputations was an entirely new creation. Suddenly, around 2015, it was as if the millennial Mogwais [ [link removed] ] were fed after midnight and began turning into [ [link removed] ]woke gremlins.
Many of the jokes dealing with now-verboten topics weren’t even seen as controversial when they aired. In May 2005, new cast member Jason Sudeikis’ first speaking role is in a sketch in which “Jackass” star Johnny Knoxville plays Sudeikis’ father, a trans woman. For Mother’s Day, Sudeikis and his brother, played by Seth Meyers, get Knoxville a card that says, “Dear father/mother: As you make this transition, one thing is true, no matter what’s in your panties, we’ll always love you.” (Needless to say, this sketch is not on the SNL YouTube feed.)
Just a season later, the show featured a segment in which confused talk show host Larry King, played by Fred Armisen, hosts a number of transgender people on his panel. All the big names take part in this one—cast members Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Will Forte and host Natalie Portman all play roles, unaware the world would look upon them unkindly two decades later. The humor in the sketch comes when, for instance, Armisen’s befuddled King asks Forte if he was a lesbian before he became a woman.
It was more than just transgender jokes that wouldn’t fly in the Oberlin faculty lounge. A few years ago, blackface became a major issue in America for a few weeks, and many examples being exhumed to cancel comedians were from SNL. There was Jimmy Fallon doing a Chris Rock impersonation. There was master impersonator Darrell Hammond darkening his skin to play Jesse Jackson. In the show’s 10th season, Billy Crystal all but bought a Sherwin-Williams store full of brown paint to play Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali and other famous black entertainers. (At the time, Crystal excused his rampant blackface by pointing out he had worn the makeup in a sketch with Jesse Jackson, who had no problem with it.)
Perhaps one of the most persistent jokes on the show, especially in the early 2000s, was to simply throw a gay character into a sketch. In the aforementioned 2005 Johnny Knoxville episode, there were no fewer than four sketches in which the single joke was “he’s gay!”
When former cast member Dana Carvey returned to host the show in 2000, he brought his famous “Church Lady” character with him and went on a rant comparing bisexuals to people who had sex with dogs. (When he was on the show, Carvey spent years doing a thickly accented Asian character named “Ching Change” who was eager to let America know that chickens make bad house pets.)
Again, these are not religious conservatives making these jokes. SNL’s writers and cast members are typically card-carrying members of New York City’s liberal elite. During the early 2000s, the show had gay writers and one male writer who famously transitioned [ [link removed] ] to womanhood. And yet they could see the absurdity in any and all situations related to race, gender and sexual identity.
And that goes for cast members of all political stripes. While hosting Weekend Update, comic mastermind Tina Fey often resorted to crude gay jokes, despite once telling journalist Eric Spitznagel that the fake news segment had a “liberal bias.”
Consider when Fey joked that Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, David Gest, had a vagina. Or when Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family suggested SpongeBob SquarePants was gay propaganda, and Fey wondered aloud why he gave a free pass to that “carpet muncher Dora the Explorer.”
On Weekend Update, Fey once joked that “In a recent interview, Colin Farrell said he used to smoke ‘280 fags per week.’ Just to clarify this statement, in parts of Europe, the word ‘fag’ is a slang term for ‘gay dude.’” And when a book came out suggesting Abraham Lincoln was gay, Fey said it makes sense Lincoln started the Gettysburg Address with an effeminate “Listen up, bitches.”
This isn’t all to suggest that the world would be better with more jokes about gay and transgender people or that blackface should be acceptable. It just means that everyone is guilty, and some people should lighten up. Social media has amplified the voices of grievance peddlers looking to boost their purity by calling for the cancelation of anyone who jokes about a sensitive topic, but we have been here before and it’s not so bad.
In fact, if anything, Colin Jost’s “37 genders” joke ended up being prescient again in 2024. It is now commonly accepted that Trump’s recent election was a backlash to cultural “wokeism.” In fact, his most effective campaign ad was one that included footage of Kamala Harris telling an interviewer she wanted taxpayers to pay for gender reassignment surgery for prisoners (which, even if you support trans rights, is a bit hard to defend).
As SNL celebrates its 50th season on the air this weekend, it is important to recognize all the prescient moments the show has had, whether through crude humor or otherwise. James Joyce coined the term in risu veritas—“in laughter, truth.” As SNL has shown, trying to shut down comedy leaves us with an incomplete view of the world.
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