When eternal Fleabag goddess Phoebe Waller-Bridge took her post-Emmys glow to SNL last month, she taunted Love Island, hid a bunch of used tampons, and preached about uncomfortable human truths (ugh, genitals!) in her opening monologue. She did not, however, wind up incorporating “much harder jokes about America†into that monologue as originally planned — cutting them at the last minute due to believing they were too inappropriate for the show. (And this is coming from a woman who wrote a restaurant-bathroom miscarriage scene.)
So what did she leave behind? “Just about the abortion laws, the kind of stuff you can’t get your head around,†Waller-Bridge explained to Vogue. “The fact that the world has gone backward in this way, and actually in some frightening sense, in so many ways, women have a louder voice, are more empowered these days, and then in these other really insidious ways, blatant ways, we’re being marginalized again. How do you fight that? Because if you rant and rave, if you try and make a noise, you’ll be labeled noisy. You have to be careful of that. You have to find ways to protest.â€
Waller-Bridge added that, despite cutting those jokes from SNL, she’d still like to “write something†dealing with similar themes. “I don’t know what it is yet,†she said. “Sometimes you feel it’s braver to say something outrageous, and it’s not always. Sometimes it’s braver to say the vulnerable thing.†Good thing Amazon gave her a lot of money to do just that.