Live TV, folks. Members of Saturday Night Live‘s studio audience surprised Ego Nwodim—and NBC censors—when they blurted out a curse word as part of an audience call and response bit during tonight’s “Weekend Update.”
Reacting to Amber Ruffin being dropped as featured entertainer at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the bit saw Nwodim propose she be hired instead, giving the crowd a taste of her sassy standup persona, “Miss Eggy,” who proceded to complain about sex after fifty, adding “as if I didn’t give that man five kids.”
At one point, Nwodim’s character joked about Cory Booker‘s 25 hour fillibuster on the Senate floor this past week, saying “Shoot, I’ve had my fill of busters.” She went on to turn her mic to the crowd after asking them, “These men aint what?”
“Shit!” responded quite a few audience members, causing Colin Jost to raise his arms in protest, before both he and co-anchor Michael Che collapsed in laughter.
Nwodim ad-libbed “We’re gonna get fined for that!” telling the crowd “You’re gonna have to pay for that. Lorne’s gonna be mad at you all.”
Live TV, folks. Members of the SNL audience blurted out "Shit" in an Ego Nwodim call and response bit on Weekend Update. pic.twitter.com/ZL8IlBfUW3
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) April 6, 2025
Though SNL has aired live coast-to-coast for the better part of the last decade at 11:30pm ET and 8:30pm PT, it airs on a slight delay on the West Coast specifically for situations like this. So while East Coast viewers (and those watching on Peacock) heard the curse, it was censored on the West Coast and in versions of the bit that were later posted online.
Though Nwodim joked that the show would be fined, broadcast programming that airs after 10pm falls under the FCC’s safe harbor rules which allow for fleeting profanity.
As longtime viewers of SNL know, this was far from the first time profanity has slipped through on the show—in fact, the last occurrence was just a few months back, also on “Weekend Update,” during Colin Jost and Michael Che’s Christmas joke swap, when Scarlett Johansson (who was shown watching Jost deliver some off color jokes about her) could be heard saying “oh shit” twice. In that case, West Coast censors failed to catch one.
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