On Saturday Night Live last week, the unthinkable happened. No, it wasn’t that the storied comedy show reached its 1970s zenith of funniness. Rather, it ventured into territory that had been marked off limits to mainstream comedy for the past decade: transgender identity.

In “New Parents”, a skit starring guest host Jon Hamm and series regular Bowen Yang as gay partners, two heterosexual couples demand to know how they, overnight, became parents to a newborn baby. “Where did it come from?” they keep asking. After all, two men can’t make a baby, especially in the time between when they went out to a rave called “Bulge Dungeon” and showed up at brunch the next morning.

Hamm and Yang feign indignation at being asked such invasive questions. When questioned about who the mother of the child is, they debate whether Yang — an emotional lover of shopping — or Hamm — a long-haired alcoholic — is the real mum, then decide they both are. They get more offended with each passing question, including a benign one about how many foreign languages Yang speaks — a question he dismisses as “transphobic.” The baby, Yang says, goes by “she/they—until he tells us otherwise.”

Not long ago, poking fun at gender ideology fuelled a backlash — or at least a walkout by Netflix employees, who were furious at what they insisted were the transphobic rantings of Dave Chapelle. Netflix, undeterred, released more transphobic rantings, this time from Ricky Gervais, who dismissed “old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs” as dinosaurs, and embraced “the new women…the ones with beards and cocks”.

But SNL’s gentle mocking of babies with neo-pronouns and the labelling of anything and everything as “transphobic” marks the mainstream foray into this forbidden territory. They’ve been out of that business for years, since many adult trans people complained that the show’s popular early-90s skit, “It’s Pat,” ruthlessly portrayed a character whose sex no one could determine. Such a portrayal caused “harm” in the overly-sensitive early twenty-first century.

The last thing I expected from the Trump 2.0 era was that comedy would discard its sacred cows, too pure and vulnerable to mock. But perhaps the cultural pendulum is finally swinging back — not toward cruelty or mockery for mockery’s sake, but toward something more free. A space where comedians can point out absurdities without being crucified for it, where laughter is allowed to coexist with nuance. In a climate where a misstep can mean cancellation, daring to joke about anything “off-limits” feels almost radical. It’s not about punching down; it’s about refusing to tiptoe forever.

Either way, there’s one slogan many Americans can agree on: make comedy funny again. This was, at least, a start.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

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