Actor Will Ferrell said dressing up as a woman on Saturday Night Live (SNL) for laughs is “something I wouldn’t choose to do now,” adding, “I’m going to blame the writers.”
“That’s something I wouldn’t choose to do now,” Ferrell told the New York Times after being asked about his “Janet Reno’s Fantasies” sketch from Saturday Night Live, which featured the actor in drag as the eponymous attorney general.
Ferrell’s longtime friend and former SNL head writer Harper Steele also chimed in — appearing to acknowledge comedy is operating withing more narrow parameters in today’s ever-increasingly irascible society — by insisting that he believes dressing in drag for laughs is “absolutely not funny.”
“This kind of bums me out,” Steele said. “I understand the laugh is a drag laugh. It’s, ‘Hey, look at this guy in a dress, and that’s funny.’ It’s absolutely not funny. It’s absolutely a way that we should be able to live in the world.”
Steele went on to say that he now wonders whether “queer people” enjoy the 1996 film, The Birdcage, or whether they find late actor Robin Williams’s “swishy gay” characters “funny or hurtful.”
“This is an interesting question to me,” he said. “Do queer people like The Birdcage, or do they not? Robin Williams, at least as far as we know, was not a gay man, and yet he spent about half of his comedy career doing a swishy gay guy on camera. Do people think that’s funny, or is it just hurtful?”
“I’ve heard from gay men that it was funny, and I’ve heard from gay men that it was hurtful,” Steele added. “I am purple-haired woke, but I wonder if sometimes we take away the joy of playing when we take away some of the range that performers, especially comedy performers, can do.”
After being asked if there is anything he or Ferrell “wrote or were in that makes you think, I wouldn’t have handled that subject like that today,” Steele replied, “A good third of my comedy.”
“There were a few times even while seeing the sketch mounted, I would go, ugh,” Steele added. “I think that is a fear-based thing where you feel like you’ve got to please an audience or you’re losing your job.”
“I probably felt a lot of fear, impostor syndrome. I might have overstepped bounds,” Steele, who began identifying as a woman in 2022 at the age of 61, said.
Ferrell added, “I’d have to go back and review shows, but I’m sure there’d be a fair amount where you’d lament the choice.”
“I mean, in a way, the cast — you’re kind of given this assignment, so I’m going to blame the writers,” the Anchorman star added.
Steele concurred, stating, “Yeah, he’s not culpable at all. I wrote Monica Lewinsky stuff I wasn’t proud of. I wrote some good Britney Spears stuff and some stuff that I’m not as proud of. I wrote some Clinton things I wasn’t proud of.”
“I’m just moving on,” Steele added. “I have to.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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