There was a lot of news to cover on this weekend’s Kieran Culkin-hosted SNL, and they tried their damndest. They managed to bang out Aaron Rodgers being anti-vaxx, Glenn Youngkin nabbing Virginia, and a bold new Trump impersonator in the cold open alone. Later they dunked on Ice Cube for also not getting vaccinated. And oh right, there’s also that draconian abortion law that was recently enacted in Texas. It’s not the funniest subject, but Cecily Strong made a valiant attempt to find the humor in the grim topic.
Strong swung by Weekend Update dressed as “Goober the Clown,” whose bona fides are that she had an abortion when she was 23. She refuses to let that nor the unpleasant subject matter get her down. Indeed, she stays in clown mode for the duration of her monologue.
“I really don’t [want to talk about this],” Strong’s Goober said. “But people keep bringing it up, so I gotta talk about freaking abortion… I wish I didn’t have to do this, because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business.”
Throughout, Goober struggles to make the subject of states infringing on women’s rights fun and funny. “It’s a rough subject,” she said, “so we’re gonna do fun clown stuff to make it more palatable. Who wants a balloon animal?”
She also kept referring to it exclusively as “clown abortion,” to co-anchor Colin Jost’s bafflement. “Did you know that one in three clowns will have an abortion in her lifetime?” Strong asked. “You don’t, because they don’t tell you. They don’t even know how to talk to other clowns about it, because when they do talk about it, if you were a clown who wasn’t the victim of something sad like clown-cest, they think your clown abortion wasn’t a ‘righteous clown abortion.’ I mean, what the d*ck is that?!”
Eventually she told the story of the abortion she had when she was young, but only after inhaling some funny voice-making helium. If Goober didn’t succeed in mining laughs from the a-word, then at least Strong did.
You can watch the sketch in the video above.