Tina Fey pulled off a shocker when she told Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan why an American was hosting the SNL UK premiere: “The way it was explained to me was that, for this first episode, anyway—how do I put this politely—none of you fuckers would do it.”
The shockwaves were immediate. Anxious celebrity plant Michael Cera raised his hand to question Fey’s language.
“We’re allowed to swear in this version of the show,” Fey assured him.
It’s easy to understand Cera’s concern, given the American SNL’s own history with on-air slips. After Charles Rocket accidentally uttered, “I’d like to know who the fuck did it,” in a on-air button to a “Who Shot J.R.?” sketch in 1981, director Dave Wilson threw down his script. “Well, that’s the end of live television,” he said, according to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live.
Live television survived, but that F-bomb cost both Rocket and (indirectly) producer Jean Doumanian their jobs. Others have had their own on-air slips through the years, including Paul Shaffer, Sam Rockwell, Kristen Stewart, Jenny Slate, Norm Macdonald, and—perhaps most brazenly earlier this season—Sabrina Carpenter, but each of those offenders escaped punishment.
Forty-five years after Rocket’s expletive, broadcast standards have loosened—but not nearly as much as some SNL performers would like. Fey’s UK monologue raises a bigger question: Would loosening profanity rules actually makethe U.S. Saturday Night Live funnier—or just lazier?
Recently departed cast member Bowen Yang thinks the show could benefit. “We should be able to say at least five shits and five fucks on SNL per season,” he told Amy Poehler in an episode of his Las Culturistas podcast last year. “We are so hampered in our comedy at SNL by not being able to say ‘shit’ and ‘fuck.’”
Most stand-up comics would likely agree—use of the F-word onstage is so ubiquitous that it’s notable when a comedian like Nate Bargatze forgoes it entirely.
“’Shit’ and ‘fuck’ are so comedically powerful as words,” Yang argued. Cursing on SNL would “bring a sketch to the next level” and “make it so you’d be able to know this is the real world, not sketch reality.”
Leaving FCC regulations aside (Saturday Night Live‘s East Coast airing falls during broadcast TV’s“safe harbor” hours, where indecent but not obscene material is allowed, but the show’s live West Coast airing begins at 8:30 p.m.), it’s fair to ask whether SNL would actually be funnier if it gave more effs.
Fey’s line on SNL UK got laughs, but Cera’s own embarrassed attempt at profanity—“Shitbird!”—got a bigger response. Sometimes what’s left unsaid is funnier.
Case in point: one of SNL’s most iconic pre-tapes—Natalie Portman’s 2006 “nasty rap”—owes much of its punch to what viewers don’t hear. Chris Parnell can’t believe that the Harvard grad and Star Wars princess is a filthy-mouthed thug, despite her rhymes about drinking, fighting, and (bleep)ing all night. The censored video blew up on YouTube.
The Lonely Island later released an unedited version on their Incredibad album, but it’s simply not as funny without the original’s bleeps and no-no graphics.
Jorma Taccone knows why. “We would often realize with our censored versions of songs that bleeps were sometimes the best,” Taccone said on a recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, “because they are the most jarring, implying real horrible cursing.”
The U.S. version of Saturday Night Live is often at its funniest when it maneuvers around network standards. Winking innuendo in sketches like “Cork Soakers” and “Schweddy Balls” gets huge laughs—not for profanity, but for the clever way SNL’s writers sidestep the rules.
Amy Poehler warned Yang to be careful what he wished for when it comes to SNL swearing. “I do think there’s something fun about not being able to say it that causes comedic tension,” she argued. “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.”
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