Bowen Yang is campaigning for swearing to be a part of “SNL.” The “Saturday Night Live” star told former “SNL” cast member Amy Poehler during his “Las Culturistas” podcast, from EW, that the live sketch series should be allowed to include certain curse words.
“[It’s] Standards and Practices, we should be able to say at least five shits and five fucks on ‘SNL’ per season,” Yang jokingly said. “We are so hampered in our comedy at ‘SNL’ by not being able to say shit and fuck. Let us say shit and fuck.”
Yang continued, “It’s us, it’s ‘Abbott [Elementary]’, it’s ‘Ghosts.’ We’re the last network comedies. Can you give ‘SNL’ an exception? […] Shit and fuck are so comedically powerful as words. I really think it would help us.”
“The Wedding Banquet” actor added that swearing would “bring a sketch to the next level” on “Saturday Night Live” and “make it so you’d be able to know this is the real world, not sketch reality.”
Poehler, who left the series in 2008, said that perhaps the lack of swearing adds to the comedy instead. “I do think there’s something fun about not being able to say it that causes comedic tension that’s fun,” she said. “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.”
This isn’t Yang’s first criticism of “SNL”: He recently told Extra that the viral “White POTUS” sketch did take it too far with Sarah Sherman as a caricature of Aimee Lou Wood.
“[Her reaction] to that sketch is completely valid,” Yang said of Wood’s admission of being offended by the April 12 sketch. “With parody, you kind of forget the sort of human, emotional cost that it sort of extols on someone. […] We just think that she should be so proud of the work that she put into the season, it was just water cooler television again that we desperately have a craving for. So I feel like it’s this thing that we tend to forget sometimes and this is a reminder and it seems like she has spoken to people at the show about it and hopefully there’s room to sort of move on from it. But yeah, you need those reminders every now and then that parody can go too far sometimes and that we, as comedians, can take account for that instead of banging our foot and saying that we should be able to say whatever we want. That’s just culture, it’s not PC or woke culture, it’s just culture.”
