Saturday Night Live! It’s a mediocre show that sometimes has a few bangers and has launched the careers of some truly funny people when it hasn’t chewed them up and spit them out.
It is also not infrequently a casually biphobic enterprise that puts out sketches that drive me crazy and clog up my Google alerts with notifications about how SNL did a BISEXUAL.
A little over a year ago, there was the Grimace sketch with Miles Teller, whose primary joke seemed to be “wouldn’t it be funny if a bunch of McDonaldland characters stood around saying ‘I’m bisexual, I like both.’”
(Answer: It would not.)
Then this past weekend, Ayo Edebiri got roped into doing the School Hypnotist sketch, which gives us a very churchy boy who uses the arrival of a hypnotist to feign being forced to come out as bi under duress.
The hypnotist sketch feels a little more salvageable than the Grimace one — the setup of someone who insists they do not want to be hypnotized only to use hypnosis as an excuse to do things they clearly want to do has legs, even if it’s unoriginal, and I always want to root for Edebiri — but it still falls for the same temptation as the Grimace sketch, which is to say that it treats the phrase “I’m bisexual” as inherently funny all on its own. There’s nothing that develops as a result of any character’s bisexuality; it is simply a placeholder “funny revelation” that never goes beyond that.
Indeed you could put virtually anything wacky in there and the sketch would be the same, and I find it telling that the writers went for the specificity of bisexual rather than, say, gay or queer, especially since SNL has had some prominent gay writers on staff. Is there now an awareness that having a character shout “I’m gay” as a laugh line just doesn’t quite work? And if so, why is “I’m bisexual” still deemed acceptable as a gag?
And I’m trying not to judge Edebiri too hard, but as one of the stars of Bottoms, the absolutely unhinged “high school lesbians start a fight club to try to get laid” movie that came out last year — and, if cursory google searches are to be believed, a queer woman herself — I just feel like she should know better than to participate in a sketch that’s going to reinforce for it’s largely straight audience that it’s just so hilarious to yell “I’m bisexual!”
But what do I know. Them thought the sketch was “hilariously queer.” Maybe I am just a bitter, humorless bisexual.
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