After delivering a crowd pleaser with one of her latest characters, Ego Nwodim was just as shocked as the FCC likely was by the audience’s response.
The Saturday Night Live star recalled the on-air reaction to her Miss Eggy character “did throw me for a loop” after a call-and-response bit inadvertently caused the crowd to yell “s—” during a Season 50 episode that aired in April.
“We did not think they were going to say anything because, if we did think so, and if we thought what they were going to say was going to be a curse word, it would have been flagged and it would have been taken out of the sketch,” she explained to Collider. “Even if I would have loved for it to stay, and I would have no control over it. So the second time we did Miss Eggy, we couldn’t do ‘because these men ain’t what?’ again. We might have even tried to, or we talked about it, and standards and practices was like, ‘No, you can’t do that, because we know what the audience is going to do.’”
Nwodim added, “It is wild that it didn’t occur to any of us. But I was sincerely stunned. And it was really cool. Honestly, it tickled me that they did that. Then I got to do a thing that I love so much, which is improvised in character. That was an amazing experience to get to do that, and so rewarding and so fun and rewarding and possibly costly.”
During the bit, Nwodim prompted the crowd with, “’cause these men ain’t what?” before receiving the profane response.
Whether the NBC sketch comedy show was fined by the FCC, Nwodim said, “I don’t know. I don’t know if we got fined. I don’t think so. But anyway, fun time. It was like a little dance with the audience. We were dancing. We were grooving.”
The FCC’s own guidelines may have provided SNL with a reprieve, outlining that “indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6am and 10pm, when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience,” whereas the show begins airing at 11:30pm ET.
Aided by a slight delay, the West Coast and Mountain SNL broadcasts’ cleansing of the “s—” would appear to have handled any FCC backlash for the show, which airs in primetime in those regions.
