Given that it’s one of the most infamous pressure cookers in entertainment history—a ready-made crucible designed to cook new performers under the most high-intensity spotlight imaginable—it’s no surprise that Saturday Night Live has produced a lot of odd stories about how incoming cast members have coped with its demands. Still, we’re not sure we’ve ever heard one quite as intense as one that’s being currently passed along by former series star Punkie Johnson, who says she defied Lorne Michaels in a surprisingly, uh, public way over initial worries that she was selling out her queer identity by signing on for the series.
This is per Entertainment Weekly, reporting on revelations that Johnson—who starred on four seasons of SNL before departing the series in 2024—has been making during recent stand-up sets. To wit: That she spent much of her tenure on sketches on the series wearing a strap-on penis under her dresses, as a way of pushing back against the idea that she had, well, “got soft” by performing on the NBC series. “Motherfuckers got me in these dresses. I ain’t never seen myself like this before,” Johnson has said in her stand-up sets. “To maintain my dyke-ism,” said Johnson, a lesbian, “I had to come up with a plan.”
Admittedly, this is being said in the context of a comedy set, so some measure of skepticism might be required. But Johnson claims that the evidence is there for those who have eyes to see. “I put my dick on all through 8H, bitch. Yeah, I fucking did it. I don’t know if y’all paid attention to SNL, but if you go back and look at the reruns, you’ll see it poking on the dresses I was wearing.” She says that this act of self-representation did not go unnoticed by the show’s powers-that-be. “Lorne would get mad. He’d be like, ‘Punkie, you can’t wear your dick on NBC.’ I don’t give a fuck, Lorne. I’m keeping my dick on!”
That being said, Johnson—who’s currently set to star in the new Barbershop TV series—has said in the past that she has no, ahem, hard feelings toward Michaels, previously saying, “There are only four men in this business who believed in me and made a way for me, and Lorne is one of them” shortly after her exit from the series became public.
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