Most longtime Saturday Night Live writers and cast members can point to a sketch that got away. When asked in interviews, they talk about something they always wanted to get on the air that showrunner Lorne Michaels never picked. Tina Fey recently flipped the question on its head, however, and talked about a sketch she wishes didn’t get on the air.
The former Weekend Update host and head writer appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show and said she sometimes watches old SNL sketches that will air at random with her kids on Peacock. She said it’s made her realize that, in retrospect, there are sketches she wishes never got on the air. When pushed for an example, she cited Pregnant In The Butt.
Yes, Tina Fey wrote a sketch about a woman that gets pregnant in her butt and then goes to the baby shower and has to tell her entire family she’s having a butt baby. Here’s a portion of her quote…
I had a sketch with the great JB Smoove. He was on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He’s so funny, and he was a writer on the show for a while. He was always so hilarious at pitch, and he would often pitch a sketch, he’d go ‘I want to do a sketch about a woman who gets pregnant in the butt.’ But he would never write it. So, one week I was like, ‘JB, let’s do it. I’ll write it with you. Let’s do pregnant in the butt.
Now, the thing to know about JB Smoove is numerous cast members have called him the greatest pitch man in the history of the show. He would apparently absolutely kill with ideas every single week during the Monday pitch meeting, but then often times his sketches wouldn’t actually make the show because they would be considered too weird or complicated. Former cast members still talk about his bangers though, like a family of helicopter pilots that duck down really low and shout at each other or a detective that solves cases by drinking people’s urine samples and getting clues from how they taste.
Unfortunately, the butt baby sketch didn’t go as well as planned. Despite containing outrageous lines like we wanted to do a water birth but we couldn’t find a pool that would let us, the audience was mostly silent during the entire sketch. In fact, some reruns of the episode don’t even include the sketch on account of how hard it bombed. Fortunately, it’s floating around on social media. It stars Amy Poehler as the lucky mother, and Jason Lee as her husband who can’t figure out how it happened.
Many of the best SNL sketches live right there on that line between, as Spinal Tap would say, stupid and clever. A bit about a song needing more cowbell can go down as an all-time classic, and another about getting pregnant in the butt can be a regret for everyone involved. You just don’t entirely know whether the magic will be there until it airs.
Fortunately for Fey, she’s widely considered one of the greatest SNL writers in the history of the show and had plenty of sketches that went very, very well. So, she might remember Pregnant In The Butt, but fans remember all-time classics like Mom Jeans.
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