Cecily Strong used comedy to “say the unsayable” about abortion.
There’s an idea, particularly popular with some comedians, that the very point of comedy is to say the unsayable; to push boundaries and envelopes by articulating uncomfortable truths. This has been embodied recently by Dave Chappelle in his controversial sixth Netflix comedy special, The Closer, in which he (once again) takes up the question of how we should treat trans people, and (once again) concludes that the answer is “none too carefully.”
Saying the presumably unsayable is often the milieu of male comics like Joe Rogan (whose 2016 Netflix special was called “Triggered”) or Bill Burr (whose last special was called “Paper Tiger”).
For the most part, comedy titan Saturday Night Live has sidestepped that tendency, sticking to its long-running habit of doing straightforward comedic imitations and letting the absurdist real-life politics speak for themselves under cover of parody — until this past weekend.
Cast member Cecily Strong’s recent “clown abortion” Weekend Update skit, in which she plays a “Goober the Clown,” a red-nose wearing ballon animal maker under pressure to discuss her own abortion thanks to Texas’s debilitating ban on abortions after six weeks, may well go down as one of the starkest political critiques in the show’s recent memory.
As becomes clear over the course of the bit, this may well be Strong’s own personal anecdote, and as it’s related between clown gags, it’s a reminder that there are some things that go unsaid in American life, but they might not be the ones we hear the usual suspects yelling about.
Throughout the skit, Strong ineffectually tries to clown — her spinning bowtie winds up tilting vertically, her attempt at making a balloon animal results in failure, her clown horn refuses to honk. This plays out alongside her visible agitation over being a “clown” who has to continually discuss abortion because of increasingly restrictive abortion legislation around the country.
The effect is twofold: As she proceeds through the sketch, the words “clown abortion” become increasingly discomfiting and absurd, arguably highlighting the absurdity of extreme anti-abortion rhetoric. The clown conceit itself becomes increasingly flimsy and hard to maintain. When she realizes her horn isn’t working, after riffing a few seconds, she apparently ad libs, “I’m not a clown,” before soldiering on. The admission, tossed out as an aside, lands like a small explosion, a sobering release of tension.
Rattling off her story in-between fun clown gags, Strong discusses the unnecessary gravitas that attaches to the whole subject, and the shame and stigmatizing effect that has on women. She points out that “1 in 3 clowns” will have a clown abortion in their lifetime, but that you don’t know that because most “won’t even talk to other clowns about it.”
When they’re able to — despite the barriers in place — there’s a real kind of relief and communion, and the retelling of her experience seems to be cathartic. The tone of the whole sketch shifts into a gentle reminder that the abortion debate impacts real people, human beings whose voices and stories are rarely heard as the war over their bodies rages on around them.
On one level, Strong’s sketch plays directly into the hands of people who think that modern comedy has lost its edge — that woke culture has changed comedy into humorless political lectures. But on another level, Strong arguably shows that comedy not only can withstand the political lectures, but can be made stronger by them if done well. There’s something about the phrase “clown abortion” that inevitably evokes laughter.
If anything, the contrast between Strong’s clown antics and the topic she’s discussing, along with her clear emotional investment in the narrative (and perhaps even some degree of personal discomfort), becomes a way of emphasizing how serious the stakes are for people who lack access to safe abortions.
Strong’s final joke — “the last thing anyone wants is a bunch of dead clowns in a dark alley!” — is barbed and hilarious. The whole segment, from the way Strong wrestles with her props to the actual jokes themselves, strikes an uncomfortably raucous note — we’re laughing, but the more we laugh, the more uncomfortable we are, which just drives home how raw the subject under discussion is.
The sketch illustrates, unforgettably, that we are sometimes pushed to treat abortion like a tragedy, a mark of permanent shame, or both, to be able to even talk about it. In an environment where a topic is so stigmatized that having reasoned debate around it becomes impossible, the addition of clown goggles and a spinny bowtie works to highlight how ludicrous the debate has become — all while making us laugh despite ourselves.
The sketch also doubles as a response to the Chappelle philosophy of comedy. He and many other comedians have argued passionately that the targets of the joke need to learn to laugh at themselves even when the joke is cruel and dehumanizing. But Strong frames the whole sketch around the concept of empathy and kindness, using something her — sorry, Goober’s — abortion doctor said to her.
It’s her “favorite joke,” she tells us — a warm-hearted zinger about how relatively early she was in her pregnancy (“Did you get pregnant on the way over?” the doctor asked.) It’s not “a funny ha ha” kind of humor, she clarifies, but a “funny, ‘you’re not an awful person and your life isn’t over’ kind of joke — the best kind.”
The best kind indeed. There’s nothing dehumanizing about Strong’s performance, even though she does it in a clown suit. It’s not “funny ha ha” humor, but humor that spotlights the vulnerability and humanity of the comedian and her audience. It’s something unsaid we could stand to say more often.
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