One of the things I loved most when I was performing on Saturday Night Live was creating controlled chaos. When I was doing my Jeanine Pirro impression, I wanted to be spilling drinks or throwing up; when I did the Fainting Couch sketch with Benedict Cumberbatch, I loved crashing into the furniture and breaking everything on set. It’s fun for the audience to watch chaos somehow be corralled on live television, and I think that my appearance on “Weekend Update” as Goober the Clown was its own version of that.
A month after Texas’ six-week abortion ban went into effect in 2021, I texted an idea for a sketch to my friend Erin Doyle, who is also a producer at SNL: “I come on ‘Update’ as a woman who had an abortion when she was 23, and I’m in a clown suit with the nose and everything, and I make jokes and talk in a funny voice but I’m just Cecily and I had an abortion when I was 23.”
I wondered if it was a bad idea, but I had spent the few weeks before that riddled with anxiety over the fact that reproductive rights were up for grabs in this country, and I hoped that trying to say something—anything—about my own real-life experience with abortion on the show would help me sleep at night. Because, yes, SNL is a fart-joke-funny place, but it’s also a huge platform.
Erin replied that she thought the idea “might be genius,” so we brought in writers Kent Sublette and Anna Drezen to help shape the sketch into what eventually aired that Saturday: me, dressed as a clown named Goober, talking about clown abortions while my big clown bow tie spun in circles and I tried to make Colin Jost a balloon animal—which I obviously couldn’t do.
Sharing something so personal in such a silly way felt like controlled chaos to me. I was nervous and terrified because I knew the kind of violence that this sketch could provoke in people, but I knew that I had the support of the whole cast behind me. Mostly, I felt really powerful. Women are so used to being told that we can only feel shame around the decisions that we make about our bodies, so it felt good to say on live television that getting an abortion doesn’t make you a terrible person.
To this day, after having spent over a decade on the show, Goober the Clown is the thing I’m proudest of. I think comedy is funnier when there’s humanity involved, and I think SNL is at its best when cast members are able to show that they’re human. It was cathartic to take control of the narrative like that in front of the world, and I still tear up when I think about the kind and vulnerable messages I received from other women after the sketch aired. I hope it was cathartic for them too.—As told to Erin McMullen
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