Thanks to states like Texas and Ohio, as well as the challenge to Roe v. Wade looming on the Supreme Court docket, abortion has been in the news constantly over the past few months. To the degree that Saturday Night Live has now weighed in, sending in Goober the Clown (who had an abortion at 23) — Cecily Strong in a big red nose — to share her personal experience with the procedure on “Weekend Update.”
“People keep bringing it up, so I gotta talk about freakin’ abortion,” Strong says. “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 wanna discuss all the time, even though clown abortion was legalized in Clown v. Wade in 1973.” Strong went on to touch on lingering stigma that makes it hard to talk about her abortion — “If you were a clown who wasn’t a victim of something sad like clowncest, they think your clown abortion wasn’t a righteous clown abortion. I mean, what the dick is that?” — and the doctor who told her a joke during her appointment and the dinner party where she discovered “like eight other clowns at the table” had abortions, too, “and then everyone’s excited and relieved to be talking about it and then it’s like, Wow, we kept this secret for so long despite being so grateful it happened, honka honka honka.” Points for creative horn use.
Is it funny? That is a question for you to answer subjectively; personally I prefer this approach to a Handmaid’s Tale costume, for example, which is how SNL has framed abortion in the past. In comparison, this feels unexpected if not necessarily hilarious, though I am not sure hilarity was the point. It’s just Strong, sounding frustrated and a little tired as she shares what is ostensibly her own story. It’s couched under a thin comedy veil in an effort to “make it more palatable” for touchy viewers and to normalize something that is at once already very normal but also rarefied by lawmakers who know nothing about it. Apparently the show has had some luck helping to torpedo restrictive legislative bullshit in the past, so … never thought I’d say this, but hell yeah, clown.