Amy Poehler on Inappropriate ‘SNL’ Characters: ‘We All Played People We Shouldn’t Have Played’
When the powers-that-be at NBC sent someone from Human Resources to talk to Saturday Night Live staffers about sexual harassment, Amy Poehler and Will Forte didn’t exactly take it seriously. “We were consensually and appropriately, just with each other, I believe, drawing pictures of penises and giving them back and forth to each other,” Poehler remembered this week on her Good Hang podcast.
The real-life incident played out like a comedy sketch when Poehler accidentally handed a phallus drawing to “the very nice man who had just done the entire seminar” instead of the sign-in sheet. It was an example, Poehler said, of crossing the line in the name of getting a laugh. “That’s the part about getting older and being in comedy,” she said. “You have to figure out, ‘Everything has an expiration date.’”
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As an example, she pointed to the In Memoriam segment of SNL50 — not a remembrance of cast members who had passed, but of comedy bits that failed to stand the test of time.
The Tom Hanks-hosted bit showed off “all the ways we got things wrong,” she said. “And they showed way inappropriate casting for people. You know, we all played people that we should not have played.”
“Oh my god,” said Forte. “Yes, yes.”
Does Poehler have regrets? Sort of. “I misappropriated. I appropriated. I didn’t know. I did know,” she confessed. “Like, it’s very real. And the best thing you can do is, make repair. Learn from your mistakes. Do better.”
While the In Memoriam segment didn’t prominently feature either Poehler or Forte, it does show Poehler entering a scene with Ben Affleck and Fred Armisen, accusing, “Oh my God, Ben Affleck just yelled at that mentally challenged guy!”
Entertainment Weekly helpfully dug through the SNL archives, noting that Poehler played Yoko Ono, Michael Jackson and Kim Jong-Il during her tenure, presumably with the help of questionable makeup, accents, and as Hanks called them, “ethnic wigs.”
The most interesting aspect of the Hanks segment is when he called out viewers for their role in inappropriate comedy. Even if some sketches and characters “were unquestionably in poor taste, you all laughed at them,” he said. “So if anyone should be canceled, shouldn’t it be you, the audience? Something to think about.”
Was Hanks blame-shifting or simply offering perspective? Like Poehler and Forte “consensually” sharing crude dick pics with one another, SNL and its audience often agreed that questionable comedy was funny — in the moment. Give Poehler credit for acknowledging the times she knew that she was crossing a line, a confession not every comedian wants to make.
