Who Is Funnier Than the Women of SNL?

When Saturday Night Live first premiered on October 11, 1975, American women were just beginning to effect real change through resistance. Two years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that we had a constitutional right to abortion. Congress had just outlawed housing and credit discrimination based on sex. However, the scales of power remained grossly imbalanced and women still faced overt and covert acts of discrimination every day. We could still be fired for being pregnant and often made nowhere near the same amount of money as men (and we still don’t). We demonstrated, advocated, and protested, but widespread oppression remained.

Any progress toward equality, both on set at SNL and in life, came slowly and painfully. Though women held seats in the writers’ room since the beginning, it reportedly could be challenging to get a female-centered sketch on the air and was described by OG cast member Jane Curtin as sexist. After the departure of the 1970s Gilda Radner-Jane Curtin-Laraine Newman cast trifecta, it wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that women did longer stints on the cast than a year or two, their sketches spoofing myriad issues women faced daily. The late ’90s/early aughts addition of Tina Fey both onscreen and as head writer (who also helmed the “Weekend Update” news desk with Amy Poehler), amped up the female political POV, doubling down on calling out the sheer audacity of female oppression as ridiculous. Subsequent cast additions of Black women like Ego Nwodim, Leslie Jones (at the previously unheard of age of 47), and Punkie Johnson and Sasheer Zamata (who are also queer), and queer female cast members like Kate McKinnon and Molly Kearney have amped up the show’s representation and topical breadth.

It’s both astounding and infuriating to consider all of this through the current war against women: Roe v. Wade was overturned, the execution of Project 2025 is removing women from positions of power from the halls of all federal agencies, our civil rights, even our right to vote and dominion over own bodies and lives are actively under attack. We had to fight hard and long for any modicum of progress to be made during those 50 years and, though this nightmare is endlessly frustrating, we can’t forget, as those old Virginia Slims ads used to say, “We’ve come a long way, baby.” And in reflecting that, SNL—with its most diverse cast ever—continues to crank up female and LGBTQI+ voices with no sign of letting up.

So, to celebrate SNL50 a la DAME, we present a brief retrospective of sketches, shorts, and moments that send up the many audacities of the female experience through sketch comedy. To paraphrase the late great Helen Reddy, “I am woman, hear me laugh in your face.”

1. Household Hints, 1976

This sketch, starring Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin, mocks the Madonna/whore stereotypes still prevalent in the 1970s straight male psyche. Radner plays a dutiful housewife overwhelmed by domesticity who hires a “cleaning freak with very strict English discipline” in the form of Mrs. Zimmerman (Jane Curtin) from a Village Voice ad to “make her a good housewife.” That is, until Mrs. Zimmerman’s coat comes off, the chains are visible, and the whip comes out. Curtin’s Zimmerman teaches Radner that “all forms of S&M” are a far cry from scrubbing and mopping.

2. Biological Watch, 1983

In the early 1980s, the FDA reported that 10.7 million American women were on the Pill, but the Pope famously spoke out against it. After all, birth control is directly linked to a woman’s ability to work. To help women keep track of their biological clocks so they don’t “forget to have children,” Mary Gross, Robin Duke, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (with a cameo from her husband, fellow cast member Brad Hall) “say goodbye to monthly madness” and promote the virtues of Ronco’s Biological Watch. At puberty, the alarm plays, “I Am Woman,” at your sexual peak, “Looking for Love (In All the Wrong Places), and in the magical moment of menopause, cue Carly Simon’s “It’s Too Late, Baby.” What could go wrong?

3. Shakespeare in the Slums, 1986

Second City alum Danitra Vance was SNL’s  first primary Black female cast member and the show’s first lesbian (though she was not out at the time). Reportedly, she often pushed back against Black female stereotypes, refusing to do sketches in what Marina Franklin referred to in a Vulture interview as “a Black voice.” To illustrate the contrast, she does this sketch as actress Flotilda Williams, performing a monologue from “Romeo & Juliet” and interpreting it for the neighborhood while hanging laundry on the fire escape.

4. Church Chat with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, 1987

No one turned a blind eye to male audacity as much as Tammy Faye Bakker. In this sketch, the dutiful Christian evangelist wife (the late, great Jan Hooks) stands by her shamed husband Jim (the late, great Phil Hartman) when grilled by Dana Carvey’s beloved Church Lady, who calls them out as “greedy media sluts.” It’s a star turn for the deft impressionist Hooks, who never breaks as she describes her husband’s tawdry flings and hallucinating on pills, yet stands by her man to beg for blackmail money through tears, only for the Church Lady to bitterly chide: “Isn’t that extra special?”

5. Sweeney Sisters’ Prison Songs Medley (with Melanie Griffith), 1988

Mistaken for sex workers, a dated lounge act in the form of the Sweeney sisters (Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks) are tossed in the hoosgau with host Melanie Griffith, who plays Doreen, a sex worker in a cell full of them. “You two look like a couple of high priced girls” says Griffith, which they take as a huge compliment. When their piano player, Skip, bails them out, Candy and Liz stay behind to charm Doreen and the other ladies with a medley of their favorite prison songs.

6. Sinead O’Connor’s Performance of War, 1992

You could hear a pin drop when Sinead O’Connor took the stage to perform the second song of the night, “War,” a cappella. She stares dead into the camera without flinching while taking on racism, child abuse, and the patriarchy, singing: “Until the ignoble and unhappy regime which holds all of us through child abuse, yeah. Subhuman bondage has been toppled. Everywhere is war.” At the end of the song, she rips up a picture of Pope John Paul II and says, “Fight the real enemy.” It came out later that O’Connor, like so many, did it as a statement because she was abused by a member of the Catholic church “in the name of God and for money.”

7. Sally O’Malley’s Rockette Open Audition, 1999

Molly Shannon flexes her physical comedy genius as Sally O’Malley, an audacious would-be Rockette with a formidable bouffant “who likes to shimmy, kick, stretch, and kick” and remind the room she’s 50 years old at every turn. Mocking ageism (as Sally is depicted as a delusional, out-of-touch elder), Sally’s chutzpah and endless pant-yanking will not be denied—even if that age prevents her from getting the gig as she clearly states: “Nobody ever says never to Sally O’Malley, you got that?” Looking back, it’s clear that Sally kicked so we could walk.

8. Mom Jeans, 2003

Spoofing the notion that mothers are asexual beings, this “Mom Jeans” short mocks lingering archaic depictions of motherhood. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Rachel Dratch comprise the cringingly outdated high-waisted doyennes while the voiceover says, “Give her something that says, ‘I’m not a woman anymore! I’m a mom!’”

9. Women’s News, 2008

Before Tina Fey and Amy Poehler teamed up to commandeer the “Weekend Update” desk as a team, Fey appeared to do a Women’s News segment that spoofed how great a time it was “to be a lady in America.” Her spicy diatribe took on a Lindsey Lohan photoshoot, women’s strokes, Jenny Craig, Scientology, and America’s resistance to a highly qualified female president, while proudly deftly coining the term, “Bitch is the new black.”

10. Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton Address the Nation, 2008

Another delightful pairing of Tina Fey (as Alaska Governor Sarah Palin) and Amy Poehler (as Senator Hillary Clinton) features the two coming together to address the “very ugly role that sexism” is playing in the campaign. As they call out the male and media-perpetuated stereotypes plaguing them while crisply illustrate the difference between one incredibly qualified politician and the other who could “see Russia from her house.” Finally, Hillary loses it: “I don’t want to hear you compare your road to the White House to my road to the White House. I scratched and clawed through mud and barbed wire and you just glided in on a dog sled wearing your pageant sash and your Tina Fey glasses!” Palin counters back, almost prophetically: “To think, two years ago, I was just a small town mayor of Alaska’s crystal meth capitol, and now I’m just a heartbeat away from being President of the United States. It just goes to show anyone can be President!” Yikes.

11. Women of SNL, Real Housewives Open, 2010

This packed cold open sends up the catty Real Housewives franchise with SNL’s most legendary ladies, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Nora Dunn, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Ana Gasteyer, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and SNL OG Lorraine Newman. In true Housewives fashion, products are hawked, and a couple of ladies resort to “wheave” pulling, but they all unite when Dratch reminds them all that they’re “fambily.”

12. (Do It On My) Twin Bed, 2013

The early ’10s are when SNL musical sketches hit their stride. In this Pussycat Dolls–esque number, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Noël Wells, Vanessa Bayer, Nasim Pedrad, and “Lil’ Baby Aidy” Bryant send up female sexuality within family dynamics while singing about the awkwardness of trying to get it on in your childhood bedroom when you’re home for the holidays. This earworm comes complete with the ensemble’s real 7th-grade class photos and a Jimmy Fallon rap sequence (about getting caught with a shirt and no pants “like Winnie the Pooh”).

13. Dyke and Fats, 2014

Kate McKinnon (as Officer Lez Dykawitz) and Aidy Bryant (as Officer Chubbina Fatzarelli) don feathered-back wigs to smash the typical stereotypes by putting their unabashedly lesbian and body positive spin on those hilarious seventies cop buddy caper shows with this short featuring the intro.

14. Welcome to Hell (featuring Saoirse Ronan), 2017

When Trump first got elected, Matt Lauer was ousted, and Kevin Spacey went to court, host Saoirse Ronan and cast members Aidy Bryant, Cecily Strong, Melissa Villaseñor, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones became ponytailed mini-skirted Lolitas on swings cooing honestly about how hard it’s always been for women to dodge the predatory habits of men. A lyric: ”This ain’t a girl group, we just travel in a pack for safety.”

15. Leslie Jones, Weekend Update 2018

When Alabama passed a near-total ban on abortion as (what was then) part of a larger plot to overturn Roe v. Wade., the incredible Leslie Jones took to Weekend Update in a Handmaid’s Tale red cape to read the room. While gesturing toward a photo of the 25 white male Alabama senators responsible for this oppressive nonsense, she tore them new orifices: “This looks like the casting call for a Lipitor Commercial. This looks like the mug shots of everyone arrested at a massage parlor. And if any of them had lips I’d tell them to kiss my entire ass. You can’t control women!”

16. Goober the Clown on Abortion, Weekend Update 2021

Cecily Strong as Goober the Clown took to joining Colin Jost to discuss the abortion she got the day before her 23rd birthday. “It’s a rough subject so we’re going to do clown stuff to make it more palatable,” she said, while making Colin a balloon worm while donning a red nose and a clown outfit. “I’m not Cecily, I’m Goober. And I wish I didn’t have to do this because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business. But that’s all some people in this country want to discuss, all the time. Even though Clown Abortion was legalized with Clown v. Wade in 1973. Did you know 1 in 3 Clowns have had abortions?” She ends it by saying she wouldn’t be a clown on TV today if it wasn’t for “We will not go back to the alley! The last thing anyone loves is a bunch of dead clowns in an alley!” You better disable comments after this one.