Cecily Strong Bailed on SNL's Congressional Hearings Sketch at the Last Minute Because She Realized What Hot Garbage it Was

Rich Fury. Getty Images.

It's only one man's opinion and your results may vary, but to me, Cecily Strong has been one of the few bright spots on Saturday Night Live during the longest drought in the show's history. I'd put her behind only the eternally solid Keenan Thompson on the power rankings of SNL's cast members over the last decade or so. Which have been among the weakest the show has ever had. Like Thompson, Strong has carried enough sketches and come up with a enough recurring characters you don't want to smother with a pillow the third time they get trotted out to distinguish herself during SNL's worst seasons. She's like a Calvin Thompson or a Joe Thomas, a very good player on a shit team who deserves better. 

And this week she distinguished herself even more, with something she didn't do. By noping out of the disastrous sketch about the Congressional Anti-Semitism hearings Chris Castellani posted about:

When they took this:

And satirized it with this:

Look, I don't know anything about this Elise Stefanik beyond the fact she asked the right questions and exposed these feckless academics as the weak-minded, timid appeasers that they are. If you want to make fun of her, by all means. Have at her. As long as you make it funny. But this was anti-comedy. So awful it drew negative laughs. It subtracted laughs from everyone's lifetime allotment. Everyone of us who watched it will sometime in the future come across something that is objectively hilarious, but we won't laugh because this skit stole it from us.

The mere fact that the show writers watched this hearing and decided the real comedy to be gleaned from it is to make Stefanik into a shrill, shrieking buffoon while the three college presidents are sane and rational proves once and for all the show is no longer interested interested in doing satire. They're only trying to promote some fringe agenda in a way that isn't the least bit entertaining. Not even accidentally. 

Which brings us to Strong, who had the good sense to swim for the lifeboats rather than go down with this ship:

Source - Former “Saturday Night Live” star Cecily Strong backed out of playing Rep. Elise Stefanik on the show this past weekend because she was “uncomfortable” with the heavily criticized cold-open sketch, sources confirm to The Post.

Strong, 39, appeared as a guest in the dress rehearsal ahead of the live show, then changed her mind “last minute” about playing Stefanik in the sketch, which mocked last week’s congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses. Newcomer Chloe Troast replaced Strong on air. …

Strong’s guest appearance would have been her first time back since leaving in December 2022, after 11 seasons on the NBC show.

A TV source told The Post: “Cecily was uncomfortable with the sketch.” 

Another insider added: “There were a variety of reasons, and last minute Cecily pulled out of the cold open.” 

So it's not clear whether it was her comedic instincts or because she knew better than to associate herself with a skit she knew most of America would hate. Either way it's fair to assume that after 11 seasons and taking a year off, it wasn't worth it to come out of retirement for such a hacky, amateurish shit show like this. 

And it's no small thing to have dipped out of this at the last minute. If you listen to enough podcasts from SNL alum like Conan O'Brien or David Spade and Dana Carvey, you quickly get a sense of how the whole process works. Early in the week the writers work all night trying to come up with sketches. Later they do a table read for Lorne Michaels trying to get their material on the air. There's a full dress rehearsal on Saturday where the audience reaction determines what makes the final cut and what doesn't. It's stressful, high-pressure, barely controlled chaos. 

To have someone flake just as they're putting together the cold open can't be easy on anyone. But by doing so, Cecily Strong comes off as the grown up in the room. The one with the common sense to know when to bail out before the plane crashes. And saved her reputation in the process.

Meanwhile SNL just does further damage to its reputation, week after pathetic week. Taking what was for decades THE go-to program for satire, mercilessly skewering everyone from across the social and political spectrum, and turning into a below average improv class run by theater majors with no life experience and zero clue about what's funny to a wide audience. They're only interested in generating clapter by pandering to a niche crowd occupying the same ideological bubble as them. And in doing so, they've damaged the brand beyond repair. They turned this show into a joke. Which is the only joke they've pulled off in the last 10 years. It can't go off the air fast enough.