With “It’s Pride Again,” SNL Heralds an Authentically Queer Comedy Era

Arts

May 26

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In 2015, refusing to pay the exorbitant entrance fee to a lesbian party at Pensacola Pride – and drunk enough to think it was a good idea – my friend and I scaled a 20-foot beachfront wall to sneak into the party from the back. I made it up the wall, but tumbled onto the bar floor while climbing over the railing, and my shin bled in celebratory fashion for the rest of the night. I still have the scar to remind myself what a cheap little shit I was.

Is that my most embarrassing pride story? Not by a long shot. Any queer who’s been out for more than two cycles of pride is bound to have gotten entangled in some rainbow-themed nonsense, be it thanks to an excess of poppers, an excess of complimentary Smirnoff, or an excess of exes (my typical downfall). “Fresh pride!” my friends like to say whenever we attend pride in a new city – an opportunity to debase yourself thoroughly in front of a whole new audience.

Saturday Night Live’s digital musical sketch, “It’s Pride Again,” which aired this past Saturday, sends up the hot mess that is Pride in a rambunctious pastiche of Madonna’s Holiday and Charlie XCX’s Girls Night Out. It’s been well-received by the queer community (as expected, Twitter is aflutter with haters, though no one can seem to articulate what exactly is to hate). The song features a highly relatable drunk meltdown from Bowen Yang (“I don’t want to be funny, I want to be hot!”), Kate McKinnon and Anya Taylor-Joy as a lesbian couple who moved in way too fast, Punkie Johnson lamenting a plethora of lesbian-passing straights, and, of course, an iconic Lil Nas X exhorting us all to post hole, posthaste.

Of course, nothing is less funny than writing about why something is funny, so I won’t – the sketch is funny, and you should go watch it. What I found word-worthy about “It’s Pride Again” was not its content, but its audience. This sketch, more than any other sketch, and this SNL season, more than any other season, features queerness unfiltered through the lens of a straight audience. “It’s Pride Again” is for us.

That’s because it’s both written by us – writer Celeste Yim co-wrote it with writer-turned-actor-and-forever-gay Bowen Yang, along with straight-but-we-stan-her Sudi Green - and performed by us, with Yang joining the other two openly-gay cast members and Lil Nas X for a glittering queer alliance. (Taylor-Joy managed to turn chess into a heart-hammering competitive sport for a full season, so we accept her allyship.)

Pride is familiar enough that the sketch’s satirical tropes land universally. But its deeply specific references, and the authenticity of its queer performers, signal a shift in the way queer content gets portrayed on SNL. Watching “It’s Pride Again,” I was struck by the way being gay has gone from the essential joke, to becoming the essential lens through which the joke is the most hilarious. Simply put, “It’s Pride Again” is funny for everyone, but it’s most funny for us, and that is a pretty big deal.

SNL has come a long way from its early comedy-bro days, when simply seeing men in dresses was a legitimate basis for a sketch. The entire premise of “Lyle, The Effeminate Heterosexual,” trotted out twice by Dana Carvey, is that an obviously gay man is allegedly straight. In the long-running bit, “It’s Pat,” Julia Sweeney is a person of uncertain gender. That’s it! That’s the whole joke! (In her tender autobiographical series Work in Progress, Abby McEnany confronts Julia Sweeney about the toxic impact Pat had on her as a young masc-of-center woman).

These embarrassments have thankfully gone the way of the dodo; NBC no longer even displays them in their digital archives. As American culture evolved, SNL trundled along with it: gay representation on the show shifted to the sort of benevolent otherness that typified the post-“Yep, I’m Gay!” era. Sketches like “Jeffrey’s” – in which two withering gay men demean their sartorially-clueless customers – and the beloved recurring guest Stefon, who offers an endless stream of ever-more-ludicrous nightlife intel – manage to employ queer stereotype with warmth, not cruelty. It’s hard to miss, however, that these sketches are all written and performed by straight men. I’ve laughed myself into cramps at Stefon, but I never once felt that his antics were for me or my gay friends. The joke doesn’t float entirely on that fact that he’s gay, but it’s a pretty flimsy vessel without that signature sibilant lisp. I felt the same way about the lesbian who serves as a foil for Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady. Target Lady’s reaction to meeting her first lesbian is positive (“Stereotype busted!” she cheers at learning not all lesbians wear vests), but I guarantee you no young lesbian comic has ever lay awake at night, dreaming of the day she’ll pen a sketch where a straight woman meets her first real-life lesbian.

That’s what changed. Seeing Punkie Johnson – a bona fide, masc-of-center, Black lesbian, blessed be the gods – nod towards a queer-styled woman, balefully punctuating “she is also a straight” – it just hits different! Punkie knows! She knows we’ve been there! (Did I not, one time, bully my improv team into letting a cute cyclist chick audition for us, only to learn she had a boyfriend?) There is a thick stratum of queer tropes that are funny to everyone, but beneath that layer lies a quarry of insider knowledge that gleams with a particular kind of fun. That’s what we mean when we talk about representation; our stories are better when told by ourselves. Deeper, truer – but also funnier.

Johnson is only the sixth out SNL cast member; the fact that half of those queer actors are currently on the show (and Kate McKinnon its biggest star) is a testament to how much SNL has changed. The writer’s room has shifted alongside: arguably, no one signifies SNL’s cultural shift more than Julio Torres, who wrote for the show between 2016 and 2019. Torres – a young Latino comic the New Yorker described as a “twink-from-space” – brought an ethereal, fabulist style to his sketches that makes earlier gay male representation look like Talbot’s dress shirts. One of his viral digital sketches, “Wells for Boys,” advertises a plastic well from Fisher-Price where dreamy, sensitive boys can sit and whisper secrets. Torres and Yang overlapped on SNL as writers, and they co-wrote The Actress, which features Emma Stone as the one-liner scorned wife in a gay porn. While gay porn enjoys endless life as fodder for straight male comics, The Actress is a cleverer inversion, the creation of two gay writers for whom gay sex is not a sufficient premise for a joke. While Torres has moved on from SNL, Yang (who we interviewed for WUSSY Vol.09) joined the onstage cast in 2019, and arguably stole the 2020 season with his impersonation of the fey, aggrieved Titanic iceberg. Meanwhile, sketches like “Lesbian Period Drama” and “It Gets Better” lampooned dynamics of queer community that feel instantly relatable to those of us within it. This season was gay – a deeper, realer, funnier kind of gay.

Queer artists are driving cultural content forward on their own steam. It’s no longer enough to devise a character whose sexual orientation is the essential joke. Younger generations of queer people are creating new ideas and modes of being; these, in turn, ripen into fruit for satire. Did my girlfriend and I move in too quickly? You betcha! Does my twink friend read theory? Probably not! Watching “It’s Pride Again” felt like being ragged on by my friends. This family is a big old hot mess – but it’s ours.

So I’ll see you at Pride, fam – sunburned, mad, and ready to debase myself thoroughly in front of an audience of my exes.

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Rachel Garbus is a writer, satirist, and oral history podcast-maker based in Atlanta, GA. To keep up with the lesbian Joneses, she co-parents an anxious dog with her girlfriend and goes too far out of her way to recycle glass. Follow her on Twitter @rachel_garbus.

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